Then she said, “You know, I am sure, that I have not. But I do not know your husband.”
“Levec of the Sûreté,” said Polyphème. “He follows you, as he is ordered, and each night he returns more deeply involved, until he is unable to see me any longer. Even his son cannot gain his attention.”
Lalique sank onto the edge of the bed, sick with shock. “The Sûreté—they have me under surveillance?” Never had she dreamed of such a thing, although the deaths of three of her former lovers had shaken even her.
“They believe you blackmail them and they kill themselves rather than pay you or risk having their secrets revealed,” said Polyphème, knowing she was betraying Olivier’s confidences. “I think, seeing you, that they are wrong. You care nothing for them, do you? Or for yourself. You are not alive. Why do I dread a dead woman?” She turned and left the room, leaving the other two stunned and silent behind her.
Lalique gazed blindly at Fleurette, who was wringing her hands. Could she bear being arrested, tried, even sentenced? She could hardly tolerate the sounds on the street or steps on the stair. Noise and dirt would kill her.
Filled with more purpose than ever before, she rose and said, “You may go to bed, Fleurette. This distressing incident is over.” But she knew she had learned the truth that had determined her life, and she could not live with it. She had not been alive for years.
When the woman had gone, she turned to her armoire and opened a drawer at the bottom. A leather box lay there, and she took from it a vial of clear liquid, which she tilted into her mouth. One gulp of the fiery stuff made her cough, then gag.
With a sigh she sank to her knees. Then she slipped onto her side and lay like a puddle of moonlight on the carpet, at peace for the first time since she was a child.
THIS IS THE NIGHT!
Several decades ago, at a science fiction convention, I met a man who lived this story and told the tale to me. I have great respect for him and his abilities, though I have altered the structure of the tale to suit my needs.
He lay staring up into the dimness of the thatch, listening to the boots of his captors, as they paced the compound. The agony in his abused hands had died away to a throb that timed itself with his heartbeat, and the pain in his kidneys was something he pushed out of his consciousness.
The night was raucous with shrieks of birds and beasts. He listened to those, too, for their intensity told him nobody was moving through the jungle tonight. No patrol was coming in or leaving, and that was good.
Nobody in his condition could possibly escape. If he did happen to get into the jungle outside the compound, any escapee would die. That was the wisdom of Captain Quang, and it had been proven valid for three years, in different areas of the Viet combat.
Sergeant William Redknife grimaced. Quang had not held an Apache before this. He thought all Americans were like the ones he had mishandled here over the years. It was obvious that the Cong officer knew nothing whatever about any kind of American Indian, and he would not have believed it if Redknife had told him. Prejudgments were always hazardous, when you let them dictate your policies.
The sergeant flexed his right knee, then his left. He clenched his fists, though the nail-less fingers were torture, and the damaged tendons did not tighten as they had before. The hands were usable, though minimally by his standards. Redknife was certain he could stand and walk on his battered feet, when the time came.
Tonight had to be the night. If he waited longer, even his tough body would be incapable of doing what must be done. When the officer came to check the prisoners, it would be Muong. It had to be Muong—he had watched closely for the weeks he had been in the camp, and the rotation was rigid. Muong was the only officer tall enough.
He tensed, hearing the decisive clip of boot heels on the veranda of the officers’ hut across the compound. The one who made the last inspection of the evening no longer took guards with him. The men here had become too weak to be dangerous, after the weeks of starvation and torture. That was an error he couldn’t blame them for making, for he had pretended to be as helpless as the rest. He’d made the most of his bloodstains, his “useless” hands, his warped and “broken” feet.
Now Muong was in the third cell down his side of the compound. The heels thudded on the damp soil, clacked on the boards: next cell, now. And then the officer was bending to enter the low doorway. Redknife lay still, not breathing.
Alarmed, the Cong officer bent over his still body. The hands shot up with blinding speed, and the sergeant broke the thin neck instantly. Muong died without so much as a gasp, and only the stink of feces betrayed his death.
Rolling away from the body, William let it fall onto the bamboo shelf. With all the quickness he could muster, he stripped the body, laid his own filthy rags over it, and donned the uniform, which was now less than immaculate. Muong’s stench almost sickened him, though he knew that he himself smelled as if he’d been dead for days.
The entire action had taken perhaps a minute. He straightened, drew a deep breath, though that agonized the cracked ribs, and stepped briskly out into the night. Without a break in the usual routine, ignoring the firelight and the pacing guards, he inspected the motionless men in the rest of the cells. Then he strode back to Muong’s quarters and went in.
There was a bowl and beside it a pitcher of water, both sitting on the floor. In the corner beside the cot was a hook, from which hung another uniform. Thank God! He’d have hated to tackle the jungle, stinking to high heaven of Muong’s shit.
He stripped quietly, pausing to listen from time to time. The rhythm of bird squawks and howls and chirps and squeaks from the jungle did not change, and the pacing of the guards continued. In about another hour—he gauged the passing of time by his own heartbeats—the guard would change. He would go near the end of this watch, before fresh men came on duty.
The clean uniform (that was, he found, only a comparative term) was a bit too short, but he had lost so much weight that the looseness at chest and waist allowed it to hang, concealing that pretty well. He used Muong’s spare shirt to make bandages for his hands, for the raw ends of the stripped fingers had to be protected.
The boots were hopeless; Muong’s feet were much narrower than his own. But there were sandals with bamboo soles and a thong between the toes that would protect his feet. His years in the White Man’s Army, with obligatory boot-wearing, had made his soles less tough than they had been when he was a boy on the reservation.
Almost time. He moved to the back of the hut and pushed a strip of the bamboo wall outward. It moved with a rustle, but there was not enough noise to travel far. He slid sideways through the gap and pushed the wickerwork back into place. The light from the fire centering the compound penetrated the darkness behind the huts only in random flickers, making it harder, rather than easier, to see clearly.
The palisade had been in place for months, and the bamboo had softened and split. Again, he managed to part segments in order to slide through. He noted with satisfaction that his old skills had asserted themselves; his passing was silent. The uproar from the jungle covered only familiar sounds—strange ones would have stood out from the cacophony and caught the alert ears of the guards.
The hem of the forest had thickened along the clearing edging the compound. He moved along in the shelter of the wall, searching for a way to pass through without disturbing the birds or changing any note of the jungle’s voice.
The main path into the place was on the west side of the compound, and he was now on the southeast of it. Any path he found should be a game trail or one used by locals as they came to the compound with food or traveled to other areas.
He had moved around to the southwest before he found a spot thin enough to accommodate his passing. His adrenals were now at full flow, and the pain of moving, of using his hands, of walking on his battered feet was forgotten as he made his way, inch by inch, into the thick
growth. He was hidden, at last, from the staring stars and the watchers who should be in the flimsy tower overlooking the camp.
This was country entirely alien to his kind. The lush, damp growth contrasted strangely, even after so many months, with the starkness of his native high desert and mountains. But he could sense the presence of many lives, large and small, amid the trees and vines and huge ferns surrounding him. If he had been one of his comrades in arms, urban in experience, frightened of wild things, those creatures would have known it at once. Fear roused predators to fury, which was probably why every escapee from Compound Forty-Three had been found dead not five miles from the palisade, in all the time Quang commanded there.
That was something William had been told, of course, by the few survivors who had heard it from their predecessors. Deep in the night, when pain kept them awake and the guards watched the area outside the camp, the imprisoned men whispered through the flimsy walls or tapped in code, conveying messages from end to end of each side of the quadrangle of cells.
They had not only kept the history of the compound alive, handing it down from generation to generation of captives, they also told stories and exchanged scraps of memorized poetry. The long nights held madness for anyone left totally alone, unconnected to the human race, during the black hours of misery.
In the interminable weeks Redknife had spent there, he had known of the deaths of fifteen men, out of the capacity of thirty that the camp could hold. Those had been the ones who had been there the longest. When he left, the men interned just before his capture had begun to die. Even a couple caught after him had already breathed their last, after long sessions in Hell, which was what the prisoners called the torture cell connected with Quang’s quarters.
Being who and what he was, he knew that he would not have been lucky enough to die quickly. His tenacity would have held him inside his body long after he longed for death.
Even as it was, he had been hard put to keep his stoicism, as he underwent the attentions of Quang.
He found himself standing still, listening again for any sound from behind him. But the camp was quiet, and the creatures around him, finding this moving body giving off no aura of panic, were ignoring him. Their noise went on, keeping time, it seemed, with the throbbing of his injuries.
Now it was time to move. He must cover ground, between this moment and the beginning of the search. That should start with the dawn prisoner-check, and he must get entirely out of range of those who would surely follow.
He moved along the dim track, avoiding the clumps of fern or the outspread bastion roots of towering trees. The path came and went, but beneath the canopy the ground was not as cluttered with growth as he had thought jungle should be, when first he came to this hellish peninsula.
His nerves settled again, and the constant pain returned to remind him at every motion that he should be in a hospital, not speeding through the jungle. He ignored that, of course, as he had been trained to do all through his boyhood.
He did not stagger, and he did not stumble. His feet moved along, the sandaled toes feeling out the ground before putting his weight down, his hands sliding past overarching growth. He realized, after a time, that he was moving on automatic, allowing his reflexes to carry him along while his mind rested. He knew that one less sure of his directions would be running in circles by now, but something inside him was certain which way was southwest, where he must go.
When he could see the sky as a paleness beyond the distant tangle of treetops and vines, he knew it was time to stop. Even his determination could not hold out forever without rest.
He moved up a slight rise to a tremendous tree, whose bole was fluted enough to allow easy climbing. He wanted to get off the forest floor, and he had to sleep. He doubted that the search would come so far; if it did, he felt certain the searchers would not believe him capable of climbing.
When it came down to it, he found that he almost wasn’t. The painful progress up that tree trunk was among the most terrible things he had ever done. His hands almost failed him, time after time, and his bare, raw feet, the sandals lost long since, shrank from contact with the roughness of the bark. But he persisted, and at last he reached the first layer of branches.
He went up still, though now it was easier, as he could stand on the lower ones to reach the higher. He passed a long dark serpent, lying flat along a tree-sized branch, but he did not pay attention to it, nor it to him. At that point, he would have welcomed a relatively quick death from snakebite.
At last he found a wide branch, satisfactorily far from the ground, where he would be completely invisible from below. He used the last of his energy to survey it for anything poisonous; finding nothing worse than a huge chameleon, he settled down, leaning against the trunk with his legs stretched along the limb.
He slept for hours. When his eyes opened, he was totally awake. Voices spoke softly below his perch, and he eased to the edge and risked one eye over the concealing branch. He couldn’t see the ground at all, for a thick layer of leafy branches intervened.
He listened intently, and at last he sighed. These were peasants, not soldiers. He had learned, in his months of captivity, the ways in which the Cong communicated, and this lazy and careless conversation was not any of those. He leaned back again, as the group moved away down the slope and their voices died away in the distance.
When he woke again, the sun was far down. His hands and feet, arms and legs, ribs and back had stiffened, and it took him some time to bring himself back to mobility. Then he climbed again, going as far up the tree as he could manage. From that vantage point, he could see a great distance, for this ridge loomed, on the south, over a wide sweep of lowland.
He could see no activity there, though the cloaking jungle would hide it, of course. But there, to the southwest, lay the firebase. He must get back with the last words of Colonel Justiss complete in his memory. Some hundred and fifty miles of jungle lay between, but he knew that he would make it, and he dismissed the difficulty from his mind.
The thing troubling him, as he descended from the tree, was the memory that he had suppressed all the while he had been in the hands of Quang. It was, of course, the thing Quang had been determined to wring from him, but he had never admitted that he had found Justiss and his crashed chopper. That would have brought Quang’s full attention down on him, which might have been fatal to others besides himself.
Now he had information to carry back to his superiors. But along with that, he also carried another memory, both bitter and strangely sweet.
As he held the pistol to the Colonel’s head, freeing that shattered body from its pain, the man had smiled. In all the time he had spent in this god-forsaken country, that was the only comforting thing that had ever happened to William Redknife.
He sighed, stretched despite the pain, and moved down the small knoll. It was time to cover those terrible miles. It was time to deliver the information the Colonel had entrusted to him. He was, after all, Apache. He would succeed.
STONE CIRCLES
Being a born loner, I spent much of my childhood roaming the woods of my East Texas home. There I found spots that held…something. Some were simply alien, but a few held fear as well. I never knew what those meant, but in time I came to suspect there was more to those odd feelings than I knew at the time.
I was a solitary child, forever playing alone in Arizona’s high desert country, where my Apache mother had grown up. From her I gained my love and understanding of the countryside, and from my father I got my hard head and grim determination. She told me, when I was old enough to roam on my own, of the stone circle, rough-hewn and seemingly natural, that stood some hour’s walk from our isolated home. In many ways, that circle changed my destiny.
The day I was six years old, Mama called me to her and pointed off toward the northwest. “Now you are old enough to visit the Stones,” she told me. “I grew up here, inventing
my own games and amusements, and I know that you will soon become bored and restless. If you go there, I think it will give you...other things to think about.”
Her gaze was rather wistful as she stared at the distant shapes against the sky. But she said little more except, “Miranda, watch out for rattlesnakes.”
She packed sandwiches, told me to be home before sundown, and loosed me into a world of mystery and fascination and infinite potential. I followed her directions, though my short legs tired and I began to wonder what I might find at the end of this first lone journey. Then I began to see the goal she had set me.
A spire of rock rose ahead. It was a blazing hot day, with a vulture circling almost out of sight, as I crossed a low ridge and stood in a cup of rock. In the middle of the circle of stones stood the perfect playhouse, its doorway one of those wind-carved stone arches so often found in that part of the country. That led into a pebbly floor surrounded at intervals by sculpted teeth of red rock, spaced so regularly that the place almost seemed to be man-made.
I felt Mama’s presence, even so long ago, and I settled in at once. Little girls can make household furnishings from anything they find, from pebbles to bird feathers, and I soon had my house in order, the rag doll that rode in my backpack enthroned on a divan made of flat stone slabs.
The morning went quickly, and I ate my lunch in the shadow cast by the stone arch. Then, weary with my efforts, I dozed off with my head on my pack. I dreamed of music, the notes of a bone flute. Then I realized that faces gazed down at me from—no through—the curving stone shape above me, as if it were a window into some other sort of world.
In my dream (or did I wake?—I have never been clear about that) I stared up at those faces, which shone silver-gray, like light on water. Long and narrow, with shadowy features, they seemed as interested in me as I was in them. I rose and moved toward the brightest face in the arch, standing in that opening while some kind of energy or impulse moved from me to it.
The Second Ardath Mayhar Page 19