A, B, C

by Samuel R. Delany

chapter six

  “What’s going to happen to him, do you think? They’re gonna kill him?”

  Uk said, “Executed at dawn—that’s the prince’s order.”

  There was a grunt in the darkness. “Pretty rough on the lieutenant.”

  Uk said, “About as rough as it gets.” He chuckled. It was a dry, dreary, unfeeling chuckle—one he’d started coming out with to make himself seem less feeling than he was. Now, he noted, he did not indeed feel much.

  “He was a good officer, Lieutenant Kire,” another voice said from the dark on the other side. (No one else had laughed.) “He was always fair.”

  And another: “He was the best.”

  “He was a damned good officer,” Uk said. “It’s too bad—but I guess I understand it. I don’t like it. But I understand it.”

  “Sabotage? Incompetence, treason? You think the charges are fair?”

  “I don’t know,” Uk said. “I don’t know if anything in this war is fair or unfair. But I was standing right out there with the prince when the lieutenant was in there talking to her. He’s in there telling her how he’s been disobeying orders, trying to make things easier on the villagers, making a flogging of ten lashes into two, things like that. She’s supposed to be a prisoner, and he told her right out she could leave if she wanted. I heard him.”

  “Well, he was good to us too—and he tried to be good to them, where it wouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t sit right with me, executing a man ’cause he’s fair-minded.”

  “Naw,” Uk said, “it don’t work like that.”

  “How is it supposed to work, then? What do you mean, it don’t work that way?”

  “That’s how I thought it worked too, when I first got here,” Uk said. “We’d come into one of these places, hacking up the locals—and I’d think, just like you: it’s like swatting at flies with a swatter. Everyone you hit goes down—dead! This isn’t fair. So one time I started pulling my sword swings, aiming for the arms and legs, rather than the neck or the gut. But then I saw what it looked like later—the ones who didn’t die right off. And that was awful—the time it took and the pain it took for them to die anyway. I was walking around, looking at all these people, not dead—but half dead. Half dead’s a lot worse than dead, when you know you’re gonna die in another three, six days no matter what anyone does. No, if the lieutenant wanted this war business over, the way to end it is to go in there, fight as best you can, as hard as you can, and get it over as fast as you can. That’s how it works. Holding things back, holding things up, slowing things down—that doesn’t do any good for anyone. Not for the villagers—and certainly not for you and me. He was just making it longer and harder for us, and the longer and harder it is for you and me, the more chance you and me got of getting killed. No, I liked the lieutenant. He never did anything to me personally; I’m sorry it worked out this way for him. But if I can understand it, he should’ve been able to figure it out too. He’s an officer.”

  “Now that’s common sense speaking there, Uk,” a soldier said from the dark.

  “Sometimes I think Uk is the only one in this outfit with any common sense at all,” another said.

  “That means I’m talking too much,” Uk said. “Go to sleep now. We have to get up early.”

  “You mean we got to go see it, like that other time? Aw—good night!”

  “The lieutenant’s really going to be executed?” asked still another, younger, troubled voice.

  “That was the order, boy.” Grunts and shushings came as a soldier slid farther down into his bag. “Now go to sleep.”

  —

  Rahm sat in the corner, looking over the dark figures who slept, crowded together on the council-cellar floor. A dozen feet away, Gargula was breathing loudly and irregularly; he’d worked on this foundation with Rahm. Old Brumer leaned his shoulders against the wall, head nestled down in his near bushel of a beard: he’d been their foreman. Now all of us, Rahm thought, are prisoners here. At the tiny window, just beneath the ceiling, gray had nudged away a corner of black, enough to silhouette the stems outside. Small leaves shook with a breeze.

  Then the door creaked.

  Someone looked up. Two turned over without looking. Between two black-caped officers, with a regular soldier behind them, a bearded man stepped in. One officer carried a light box that now he flipped on. A harsh filament glowed white. A fan of light put harsh blacks on the far side of the two dozen sleepers about the floor.

  “Well, we have some men in here,” said the bearded Myetran. He wore one brown leather gauntlet. His other hand was bare. From some time that seemed at once impossibly immediate yet long ago, Rahm recognized the man who had ridden his horse on the common, who’d spoken into the silver rod—who had burned down Kern. “For a moment, I thought this was the women’s holding cell. Lord, it stinks in here!” (A depression in the far corner was full of urine and feces; but it had long since overflowed, to wet almost half the floor.) The man took a few steps over some sleeping figures. “I have a job for one of you. For a good and lively dog. A strong dog. You perhaps, or you?

  “A bunch of dogs, you are?” The man ran a hand down his beard, to pull it back from morning wildness. “Dogs are vicious; they fight one another, tear at one another over the leavings. What I see here is a bunch of simpering monkeys, crawling maggots without the strength to get up off their bellies. Is there someone here that can do a job that needs a man?” He reached aside for the light box hanging around the black-cloaked officer’s neck to turn its beam toward the floor. “Have you ever killed?”

  Eyes squinted; a hand rose to block the glare.

  “Why did I waste the question on such a child!” The beam moved on. “Have you, old man, ever taken another’s life?”

  The old man, coughing twice, seemed bewildered.

  “What about you—you look like a strapping fellow. Have you ever killed?”

  In the beam, Rahm did not even lower his eyes.

  “Come—give us a yes or a no.”

  Rahm breathed out—dropped his head and raised it.

  “Well, have you, now? I wouldn’t have thought so, from your eyes. Or then perhaps I would…Get up! Come with me.”

  Rahm’s hips ached; Rahm’s knees hurt; his back was stiff—he pushed himself up, one palm behind him on the rough rock—from sitting the night long, almost without movement.

  “Come, this way. To the door.”

  Rahm came slowly, lumbering really, feet seeking bits of bare stone between the bodies. Once he stepped on the hand of someone who woke, grunted, and jerked away. Toward the ground, Rahm mouthed syllables without sound that, had they had it, would have been an apology.

  “That’s right, Çironian. Over here.”

  When they were outside in the basement hall, Rahm realized how strong the stench was within, as the door closed behind him. Fresher air struck, hard enough to make him, for a moment, reel.

  “I am Prince Nactor. I do not want to know your name, at least not until you have done what it is I need you for. Then when it is time to reward you for doing your work well—I trust you will do it well—then I’ll ask you. And we can celebrate who you are.” Tucking his beard back under his chin, the prince turned to the steps. Starting up, he glanced over his shoulder. “You understand, if you do not do it well, you will be killed. And there will be no need for anyone to know your name ever again. Tell me, Çironian, can you handle an ax?”

  Surrounded by soldiers, Rahm followed. “I can swing a quarryman’s pick.”

  The prince glanced back again. “Likely that will do.”

  In the building’s ground-floor hall, again holding his beard back, the prince stopped to lean close to Rahm. “Aren’t you curious about what this work will be?”

  “Thou wilt tell me in thy time.”

  Nactor chuckled. “And the time is now.” Faint orange lay along the windowsill, left of the door. “I need an executioner. I wish to show a treasonous man—and I wish to make it the last thing I show him, the last th
ing that he will ever see—just how gentle and peace-loving you Çironians are.”

  Against the far wall sat two women prisoners, one of whom, Rahm realized with a quiet start, was the woman with whom he’d first pursued his earliest, happiest, most single-minded sexual explorations. The other was a woman who, during that same summer, had hated him roundly, loudly, adamantly; for she kept a small set of beautifully tended fruit trees beside her house, which he had taken to pillaging, more for the pleasure of her stuttering outrage than for the fruit. (That, he’d simply handed out among his friends.) It had been only Ienbar’s threat of a switching that had finally moved him on to other mischief. Indeed, for a while he’d wondered why his relation to either of the women—one was asleep now; one looked dully across the room and did not seem to see him—had not netted him more, the start of a family in one case or, in the other, the reputation as a troublemaker that, had it gone far enough and the elders’ council in these very halls received enough complaints, could have gotten him, after a short public trial, turned out of town—at least that was the rumor. In his own memory, he’d never known it to happen….

  Of the two soldiers standing near the women—guarding them apparently—one was shaking his head and grinning over something the other had just said.

  On the other side of the hall, in a black cloak that in knife-edged folds hung to the flagstones, an officer crossed quickly toward the door and, with the heavy plank complaining behind, left.

  “I also want to show you something,” the prince was saying. “I want you to see—and to tell all around you, once you’ve seen it—how strict we are with our own. Thus, you’ll likely maintain a more realistic picture of how little in the line of mercy you can expect for yourselves. Come this way now.”

  A soldier reached over to tug open the door for them—creaking, as Rahm had heard it creak a hundred fifty, five hundred fifty times, three years ago, coming in and out as a workman. Now the sound was alien. Rahm stepped out and looked up among the few branches, where, near summer’s end, brown leaf-clutches were scattered through the darker green.

  Here and there, set irregularly toward the common’s corners, stood some five of the spidery structures that were the Myetrans’ movable light towers: a great illuminated lamp on one, as Rahm looked at it, went dark, like the rest.

  Above it in the sky’s lavender-layered gray, something moved.

  Rahm frowned.

  Four, six, ten of the Winged Ones passed above in a pattern that dissolved and re-formed farther away and dissolved again—a pattern that was no pattern.

  “Bring the block and the ax!” the prince called. Then his voice returned to conversational level. “You are going to cut off a man’s head. That shouldn’t be too hard for you—and since he’s one of ours, who knows: you might enjoy it.”

  Still squinting from his sweep of the sky, Rahm looked at the bearded prince beside him. Rahm’s nod was not intended to mean agreement, only to register he had heard. But from the smart move the man gave—signaling to someone halfway across the grass—Rahm realized, without particularly marking it, agreement was how the prince had taken it.

  Across the common, soldiers stood—at attention, in three rows.

  “You can bring the prisoner out,” the prince said to one of the several soldiers accompanying them, who turned and hurried across the common. The grass, with the few trees here and there on it, seemed to Rahm as oddly unfamiliar as the creaking door to the council house.

  They started down the ten stone steps and across the gravel toward where grass took up again. The common at evening was a familiar place. But the common at dawn—when was the last time he’d been here at this hour? Certainly it was more than three years ago. Maybe four or five. If only because all the shadows were pointing in the wrong direction, it might have been a public square in a wholly alien town.

  In the back row, two or three soldiers glanced at the sky, then brought their eyes back to the field.

  More than a dozen of the Winged Ones turned and turned, infinitely high, infinitely small, infinitely distant.

  By two poles, four soldiers carried a large block onto the grass. It looked black and old, at least down to its base; there it was a little lighter. Another man was coming toward Rahm and the prince, carrying an ax by its handle, the double blade hanging before his knees; his small steps, high chin, and pursed lips attested to its considerable weight.

  Rahm took it in one hand.

  The soldier who’d carried it did not take a heaving breath; but when Nactor dismissed him, he threw up his fist, turned, and walked heavily back across the field.

  The ax was heavy. Rahm brought it slowly before him, lowered the blade to the ground, and put his second hand on the haft.

  The four soldiers had lowered the block.

  “Bring out the prisoner,” Nactor said.

  Beside them one of the soldiers halloed across the common: “Bring out the prisoner!”

  A beat later, some of the Winged Ones swooped, swooped, and swooped again—without, as a group, getting any lower. Then they went back to their lazy flight.

  “You will have no trouble with this ax, Çironian. That I can see. At my command, you will cut off the prisoner’s head. Do it cleanly, with a single cut. We do not need unnecessary mess, cruelty, or pain. I am very fond of this man. But since he has to die, I want him to die swiftly. You understand me?”

  Rahm nodded. He did not see which of the houses on the common the prisoner was led from, for at that moment, with the prince’s signal, another soldier stepped up beside him. The world blinked out, then reappeared through eye slits in the black cloth hood dropped over his head.

  Rahm looked about.

  The cloth tickled his collarbone.

  The prince touched Rahm’s shoulder, nodded ahead.

  Six soldiers walked now with the tall man among them toward the block. Rahm blinked to realize the man—who wore black—was not bound. Only a black cloth was tied around his eyes, though this one was without eye slits.

  Rahm leaned to ask the prince softly: “Why is he not tied?”

  “When we execute common soldiers, we bind them,” Nactor said as softly to Rahm as Rahm had spoken to him. “It’s Myetran custom to let our officers die like men. Come.”

  Across the prisoner’s chest, two puma claws were fastened one atop the other, from the pelt he wore around his back.

  Inside the hood, Rahm frowned and hefted up the ax. With the prince and the several others, he started across the grass toward the block. Even without his officer’s hood, Rahm recognized him. Rahm’s stomach went cold and heavy with that recognition—as if all at once he’d eaten to bloatedness.

  When the prisoner raised his hand to adjust his blindfold or scratch his chin or whatever, a guard struck Kire’s hand down viciously; and three more guards seized both his arms, even as no one in the group broke step.

  Rahm’s hand tightened on the haft. Inside the cloth, his breath whispered.

  As they reached the block, a soldier near Kire suddenly kicked him behind his knees, so that he went down. Immediately two others grabbed him, kneeling beside him on one knee so that they could hold him. Two others held his legs. Still two others steadied his shoulders. Kire’s head, mouth, and jaw, cut off from bronze-colored hair by the black blindfold, lay left cheek down on the scarred block.

  Beside Rahm, the prince sighed.

  Rahm looked down at the puma’s pelt across Kire’s back. The beast’s skull had been pulled aside, as if in some scuffle, so that it hung askew.

  Inside his hood, without sound, Rahm mouthed, “Friend Kire,” lips brushing cloth.

  Beside Rahm, the prince said: “Lieutenant, you will now see just how gentle and peace-loving your Çironians are.” He bent down, reached down, thrust a finger beneath the blindfold, and pulled—not gently. With the tug, Kire’s head slid inches across stained wood. As the cloth slipped free, the lieutenant grunted. “Look here, now, a nice, gentle Çironian is going to cut your head off.�
� The prince stood up.

  From the block, the lieutenant glanced up, green eyes gone near gray with dawn and fear.

  There was no recognition in them. But why would there be? Rahm thought, inside his hood.

  The prince turned to Rahm. “Kill him now, Çironian.”

  Rahm took a step to the side, spread his legs, slid one hand forward on the haft, and hefted the blade over his head. A breeze flattened the cloth to his face, so that any of the guards, looking up, might have seen, under the black, the form of his lips, strained apart with effort.

  On the block, Kire pulled his shoulders in. His own lips parted while his eyes squeezed tight, as if by not seeing it he might delay the stroke. His bronze hair was stringy.

  The breeze moved it.

  Then Kire blinked rapidly three or four times, as if eager for a sight of the morning, the grass, the men around him, even the stained wood obscuring the vision in his lower eye.

  The breeze ran in puma fur, parting the hairs to show their lighter roots.

  And Rahm brought the ax—not down, but in a diagonal that became even more acute with a twist of his body.

  Prince Nactor did not scream but rather looked down and staggered at the ax blade sunk inches into his chest. Rahm yanked the handle now one way, now the other, as his hands, his shoulders, and the cloth on his face wet with what spurted. As the prince fell, Rahm jerked the ax loose and swung it back around, the blade’s side crashing against two of the heads of the guards holding Kire. The swing took it all the way so that it struck another man and sent him sprawling. Then up, then down: honed metal cut into and severed the arm of the officer standing with them, who alone had had the presence to reach down and unsnap his powergun sling—the first man to scream!

  Rahm turned again with the ax; one of the soldiers was going backward on his knees, lots of blood on him that wasn’t his. Rahm’s next chop took off most of a hand—not Kire’s—on the block edge. There were shouts now. Rahm dropped one hand long enough to rip off the hood and fling it from him over the grass: “Hey, friend Kire, do you know me now? Do we show them now?”