by Adam Roberts
He limped over to a wall and sat down. It was all equally irrelevant. What did any of it matter?
One of the others hobbled over towards him. ‘What were you?’ he asked in fluent Imperial. ‘Sapper? Potboy?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tighe. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Forgotten, eh?’
‘And the only thing’, said Tighe, looking at the floor, ‘is why they all had to die. All of them and not me?’ He looked up and caught the other’s eye. ‘Does that make sense to you?’
‘Me?’ said the other, a startled-looking, pale-faced man. ‘I was a regular soldier. Not one of your riflemen me.’
‘And as for Ati,’ said Tighe, reaching out with his free hand, ‘he endured so much. Had he not earned his life?’
The pale-faced man looked suspiciously at Tighe’s outstretched hand. ‘As I say,’ he said, backing away a little, ‘I’ll admit to surprise that they captured me rather than just throwing me straight from the wall. It’s slaves they’ll sell us for. That’s our future: we’re to be commodities, do you see. And grown men like me don’t reach a good price as slaves, as commodities. But here I am, anyway.’
‘He fell twice,’ explained Tighe. ‘The first time he fell further and was all right; the second time he fell not so far and it was his death. Is that fair, do you think?’
‘Nice young one like you,’ said the man uncertainly, retreating against the far wall, ‘you’ll get a better price. Strange-coloured skin like yours, that’s rarity value. But I suppose I should be grateful that they kept me alive at all.’
He fell silent, and for a while there was no sound in the enclosed space except Tighe weeping discreetly. He lay on the floor curled tight up on himself and wept. The light faded from between the slats of the door and the dusk gale began. After it died down Tighe slept; but vivid dreams of Ati, up and walking around although with his head at an impossible angle, disturbed his sleep.
In the morning the Otre opened the door and pushed through some stalkgrass and a crude clay bowl of water. Tighe lay motionless, watching as the other prisoners bickered around this insignificant treat.
Another day passed. A second batch of stalkgrass was pushed through the door in the afternoon. Once again the other inhabitants of the cell bickered amongst themselves over the meagre provision. Tighe lay motionless and watched them. His belly was hurting with the hunger, but he welcomed that sensation. It was right that he should be hurting. It was appropriate. He valued this physical manifestation of his pain.
After all the food had been eaten, the prisoners settled themselves back into their usual positions. One of them, a dolorous-looking woman, stared at Tighe.
‘All sorts in this army,’ she said eventually. ‘I’ve seen all sorts. But I never saw somebody as dark as you.’
Tighe didn’t reply. He stared at her.
‘You’re a freak, with that skin,’ she said, passionlessly. ‘That’ll fetch a good price I guess.’
That night Tighe slept deeply. He woke with a start in the darkness, with somebody hunched over him. Hands were rummaging through his clothing. With a yell he kicked out and pushed up with his hand. The individual fell away, whimpering. It was the same pale-faced man who had spoken to him when he had first been brought in.
‘What are you doing?’ Tighe cried.
‘Just checking to see if you had anything valuable about you,’ said the man, with a catch in his voice. ‘I’m sorry, I really am.’
Tighe sat himself up and tried to watch for movement, but it was too absolutely black to see anything. Eventually he nodded off, and woke after dawn with a pain in the bones of his neck.
This time when the jailers pushed food through the door Tighe struggled with everybody else and grabbed himself some food. He chewed his two fistfuls of grass and licked the dampness off the walls.
‘What’s your name?’ asked the pale-faced man, hunching down next to Tighe. It was as if his attempted robbery the night before had established some bond between them.
Tighe looked at him. ‘My friends died,’ he said, eventually.
‘Sure,’ said the man. ‘I know. I know. We all lost friends. I lost friends.’ There was a pause. ‘It’s hard,’ he added.
‘Hard,’ nodded Tighe. ‘Close friends.’ He didn’t seem to feel any tears coming. He thought of the inside of his head, which ought to be stuffed with grief. It felt empty, as if the claw-caterpil had excavated it as efficiently as it had feeding on Ravielre.
‘I’m called Trose,’ said the pale-faced man, nodding at Tighe.
‘I feel nothing,’ said Tighe, as if testing the phrase out to see how it sounded in his mouth.
‘Really?’ said Trose. ‘I was a regular soldier. I did speak to my commander, you know, about training for rifle duty. But that’s a hard billet to get into. Mostly, it was pike-work with me.’
Tighe looked at Trose, at the energy and positivity of his manner. His life was finished, and he didn’t seem to mind. He had fallen off the world, but it didn’t bother him. There was a sublime power about so banal a philosophy. What happens when the world ends? Well, perhaps you just carry on.
‘How long you been here?’ Tighe asked.
‘Oh, some days, some days,’ said Trose, scratching his face. ‘My beard’s starting through. The Popes tell us – shave. That’s God’s will. I look on it like this: the worldwall, see, is the face of God. That’s where we live. Where things grow out of it, like that Meshwood, that’s where evil lives. So we need to shave, really, to keep our faces clean. Pure. That’s how I look on it.’
The mention of the Meshwood brought no reaction in Tighe. It already seemed an age away.
‘Which part of worldwall you come?’ Tighe asked. He felt weary, unable to work out a more correct form of words.
Trose laughed briefly, amiably. ‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ he said, ‘your Imperial’s pretty ropy. You’re no native, are you?’
‘No,’ said Tighe.
‘I can always tell,’ said Trose, leaning back expansively. ‘I tend to think –’
But at that moment there came the rasp of the door being drawn back and an Otre soldier came stooping into the space. He stood up to his full height.
‘You!’ he said, pointing at Tighe, ‘come with me.’
Tighe was led out of the space and hobbled his way along behind the Otre officer. He was led along the shelf, up the stairs and through the brief tunnel that opened a vista out on to the former battlefield. There were no fires, but much of the wall was scorched. Tighe caught a glimpse of hundreds of Otre uniforms before his guard pushed him, urging him down and along.
Ten minutes later Tighe and the Otre officer were making their way up a newly constructed stairway and on to the upper ledges. As he hobbled along, Tighe could see the forts that had been the fruitless object of Imperial military ambition.
Soon enough, Tighe passed under a gateway, wooden but pinned with sheets of plastic. The wood of the building was holed and dotted with bullet marks, and Tighe caught a glimpse of a long blackened patch, like an enormous mural of black hair, where the fort had burned briefly. Then he was inside.
*
The corridors and stairways inside the fort were many and all were crowded with the comings and goings of grey-suited Otre military staff. Tighe’s escort grabbed him by his free arm and hauled him through the complex; along, down, up a steep flight, round a dog-leg and then further along. Abruptly he turned off and passed through a low doorway into a room set in the wall.
Inside was a perfectly square room. An Otre officer sat cross-legged on a board that was suspended from the ceiling by chains. He peered down at Tighe from this elevated posture.
Tighe peered up, but his guard kicked his legs away and he sprawled on the dust of the floor.
The man on the board above began speaking without preliminary.
‘You’re an unusually coloured one,’ he said. Tighe could tell that his Imperial was fluent and unaccented; but he spoke with a lazy dr
awling tone.
There was a pause. Tighe wasn’t sure how to respond.
The guard who had brought him kicked him sharply in the small of his back.
‘Yes, Master!’ Tighe barked at once.
‘You’re not from Imperial City?’
‘No, Master!’
‘Don’t draw this out, I request you. It makes it tedious for me and will be awkward for you. You’re not from Imperial City is one way of asking you where you are from?’
Tighe started gabbling. ‘From a small village upwall, Master, I was a Prince there you know, but my parents were murdered and then I was chased off the wall – I fell, you know, Master, but I survived and so …’
The guard kicked him again. There was a squelchy burst of pain at the base of Tighe’s spine. He shut up.
‘What did you do in the Imperial army?’ asked the man from above.
‘Kite-pilot, Master.’
‘How interesting,’ drawled the man, although he didn’t sound very interested. ‘Did you fly many sorties?’
‘Many what, Master?’
‘Did you fly often?’
‘Yes, Master. No, Master. I’m not sure, Master.’
‘I watched a number of aerial attacks,’ the man said, as if talking to himself. ‘There were some pretty gymnastics out there in the sky, but their military use was slim. Boy! Do you know why you’re here?’
Tighe’s terror was starting to paralyse him. ‘No, Master! I was captured, Master.’
‘Of course you were captured. You’re not very bright, are you? Either that, or you are indeed senior staff pretending to be idiotic. Could you be that, I wonder?’
Tighe didn’t really know what the Otre man was talking about. ‘No, Master!’ he called out. ‘Yes, Master!’
‘I might think so,’ slurred the man above, ‘if you weren’t so young. I certainly have the sense that you are overdoing your imbecility.’
‘I’m sorry, Master,’ said Tighe. He was crying now, snivelling. Dust from the floor had gone up his nose and tickled his sinus uncomfortably. His spine burned with pain where he had been kicked. He felt miserable.
‘Are you crying?’
‘Yes, Master.’
‘What manner of warrior are you?’
‘I’m scared, Master,’ said Tighe. ‘I have heard stories.’
‘Stories?’ For the first time in the interrogation, the man above sounded vaguely interested.
‘I have heard that the Otre – do bad things to their prisoners.’
There was a heartbeat’s silence and then a babble of laughter. The man above sounded genuinely amused by this. Tentatively, his heart still pumping with fear, Tighe tried lifting his head a little to look upwards. The guard’s foot made contact – gently enough – with Tighe’s forehead and pressed his head back down against the dirt.
The man above had finished laughing. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘we heard those same stories about the Imperial army. “Don’t be captured by them!” we were told. “They do such terrible things to their prisoners,”’ He laughed again, more briefly. ‘That is the way in war, I suppose. We try to discourage our troops from wanting to surrender. Fight to the death, that’s a better strategic philosophy.’
There was a pause. Tighe could make out the creaking of the chains that supported the board on which the man sat.
‘Anyway, I haven’t all day. You’ve been brought to me because somebody somewhere along the chain of command wondered if you might be significant to the Imperial army. Do you know why?’
‘No,’ said Tighe miserably. At this moment he felt utterly insignificant.
‘Well, to be honest, neither do I. I assume it’s because your skin is so darkly coloured, but that doesn’t signify to me. Somebody must have thought that your dark skin marked you out as perhaps special in the army. I don’t think so. You come from some village on the outskirts of the Empire. You’re a kite-boy. You’re nothing. It is time to conclude our little talk; goodbye. I hope you fetch a good price.’
Tighe’s arm was grabbed and he was hauled upright. ‘Price?’ he repeated, dazed.
‘Well, yes,’ said the man above, meditatively. ‘The market is depressed at the moment. A lot of goods come to market all at once in war, so we can’t earn as much as we would like. But that’s the nature of things.’
8
Tighe, bewildered and disoriented, was led back through a warren of wooden corridors. The insane proliferation of wooden structures and devices, the extraordinary wealth seemingly squandered, was even starting to lose its power to shock him. Everything in the world seemed to have fallen away.
He was half marched, half dragged along more corridors and locked in a room. There was another individual in that space, but he – or she, Tighe couldn’t be certain – was puffed and bruised with beatings and lay motionless and quiet. The light from between the slats of the door died and it was dark. Tighe nursed his stomach. The fear and agitation had wound up his hunger to a stabbing, acute level.
Just when he thought that he would not see food until the next day, if then, the door opened and a parcel wrapped in leaves was tossed through.
It was grass-bread; it even had insect bodies worked into the dough. Tighe bolted several large mouthfuls and then stopped as his stomach spasmed with the unexpected bulk. He nibbled more cautiously. The other person lay on his, or her, side without making a sound.
‘It’s food,’ Tighe said, eventually. ‘You want some? Like some?’
The other person didn’t respond.
This presented Tighe with something of an ethical dilemma. He could hear the hissy breathing of the person, so he knew they were still alive. But Tighe was so hungry he could have easily eaten the piece of grass-bread three times over. An inner voice told him that he had offered the food and if this person had wanted any they could have said so and Tighe would have shared the ration. But since they said nothing, it was perfectly right for him to eat it all himself. But, still, there was the hissy breathing. Tighe tried again.
‘Are you all right? Did they beat you? Are you hungry, I think.’
Nothing.
‘I can give you the food to eat later perhaps? To keep and eat later?’
Nothing.
‘Is it that your voice is hurt?’ That idiom didn’t sound right to Tighe, but he couldn’t think of another way of expressing it. ‘Is it that you cannot speak? Make a noise, any noise, if you are hungry.’
Nothing.
Tighe gave up and devoured the rest of the grass-bread, and then lay on the floor until the pains in his stomach passed away. Then he fell asleep.
He didn’t know how late it was when he finally awoke, but there were lines of light coming through the boards of the door and the wooden walls around. The other person was in exactly the same position they had been in the day before; curled on their side, their blackened, puffed eyes peering at Tighe through slits.
‘Good morning,’ said Tighe, carefully, sitting and rubbing his stiff limbs. ‘Are you good?’
After a little while this individual’s silence became part of the rhythm of the conversation between them. Tighe would say anything and then pause, leaving space for a reply that never came. He started telling his own story, from the time with the platon at the battle through their adventures in the Meshwood. He found he could relate the story of everybody’s death except Ati. When he came to that part, his throat contracted, a warning of grief to come. So he cut the story short and stared in silence for a while at the wall. So much wood.
After several hours the door was hauled open. Tighe expected food, but instead a single Otre soldier came through. He said nothing, but he leaned down to grasp the ankle of the other person in the room. Tighe watched in silence as his cell mate was dragged out through the door along the floor. The rhythm of their breathing changed, but otherwise they seemed trapped in the same stasis they had been in the whole time.
The door shut and Tighe was left alone.
There was more bread that
evening and then Tighe spent another night by himself. In the morning the door opened and Tighe was called out.
Still tethered wrist to ankle, Tighe made his way out of the room and followed his latest Otre guard along the wooden corridor. They passed down some stairs and into a broad atrium of some kind, with sunlight shining through the planks of the floor. Here he was made to wait with half a dozen listless others, all shackled with tethers in the same fashion as Tighe.
Tighe, tired by his strange exercise, tried to sit down against the wooden wall, but a guard snapped loudly at him in Otre language and he stood up.
There were seven in all and they stood silent, sullen, for many hours. People passed and repassed, came and went. Most were dressed as Otre soldiers, but there were others in leather coats and cheaper fabrics. One tall individual was wearing nothing but a headdress, a great bolt of cloth that curled up from his head and then draped down in four broad strips to cover his body, the strips being fastened to his two ankles. He paused in front of the seven Imperial prisoners, and peered closely at them. He seemed especially interested in Tighe.
‘You!’ he asked in grotesquely accented Imperial. ‘Speak Otre?’
Tighe shook his head.
‘Speak Tanaha?’
Tighe shook his head again.
‘You only speak Imperial?’ screeched this figure, waving his hands in disgust. ‘What use that?’
‘I also speak my native tongue, the language of my village,’ said Tighe levelly, in his own tongue. The stranger shook his head and went on.
Another hour or more and two soldiers arrived, armed with sharpened metal pokers which they waved over their heads to intimidate the prisoners. ‘You all march now,’ they said. Their Imperial was not very good either.
The shorter of these two tied tethers to tethers, linking each of the seven into a chain of people. Then, one at the front and one at the back, they led the captured Imperials out of the fort and east along the ledge.