Liberator

by Richard Harland

They stayed in the cage for over an hour. Col didn’t understand, and called up to the red armbands sitting above. ‘Why are we waiting?’

  He received several simultaneous answers, of which one at least was informative.

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘That’s our orders!’

  ‘Until she comes back!’

  The rifles angling down through the hatch continued to follow their every move. Col, Riff and Dunga discussed plans of escape, but they could do nothing as long as the red armbands remained alert. After a while, there was nothing left to discuss except their own gloomy fears.

  Col turned his attention to another conversation – or half-conversation, since it only involved one voice. Mr Gibber was communicating with his pet.

  ‘Oh Murgy,’ he murmured. ‘Please don’t look at me like that.’

  And then, a few seconds later, ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘Now you’re making me feel bad.’

  Mr Gibber might have been answering the thoughts in Murgatrude’s head. To Col, it sounded like the first prickings of conscience.

  ‘I admit I’m not perfect, Murgy.’

  ‘She was so beautiful, like a goddess.’

  ‘I didn’t know, did I?’

  Mr Gibber was now stroking Murgatrude with smooth, pacifying strokes all the way from ears to tail. There were long silences when the conversation lapsed – or perhaps Murgatrude had some very drawn-out thoughts to communicate.

  ‘All right, all right, don’t make my life a misery.’

  ‘You pushed me to the extreme, Murgy.’

  ‘We’re both a couple of old has-beens, aren’t we?’

  Finally, Lye reappeared. There was a stir and bustle around the hatch, and she climbed down the ladder into the viewing bay. Three red armbands descended after her, all unarmed. Half a dozen rifles continued to point down from above.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ she told the prisoners. ‘This doesn’t concern the rest of you. Only her.’

  She crossed the cage and stood before Riff, looking down. The red armbands came up on either side, forming a screen around the two of them. They kicked Col and Dunga out of the way, but Col crept back and peered in around their legs.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you without Shiv,’ Lye said.

  Riff raised an ironic eyebrow. ‘Behind his back, you mean?’

  Lye ignored the question. ‘So, is this what you wanted?’ she asked.

  ‘Seems it’s what you want.’

  ‘No. No.’ There was a sudden fervour to Lye’s tone. Col couldn’t see her eyes, but he could tell she’d cast aside her mask of cool composure. ‘I never wanted this. You should have been so much more.’

  ‘According to your version of me.’

  ‘You’ve been my guiding light. You know you have. You made me believe in something bigger than myself. How can I ever forget? You were so absolute for justice.’

  Riff shrugged. ‘So why are you here, really?’

  ‘To give you one last chance. The revolution needs you. I need you. The world needs you.’

  ‘What about Shiv?’

  ‘Shiv doesn’t matter, not compared to you. I believe in you. You can be what you were again. You still have the will and the power and the spirit. You can overcome the weakness.’

  ‘What weakness?’

  ‘Emotional weakness.’

  Riff nodded towards Col, who had been gradually edging further forward. ‘You mean him.’

  Lye looked at Col, and her eyes flashed with hatred. She made no move to strike him, however, nor did she order the red armbands to do it for her.

  ‘Yes, him. Your liking for that – that boy – that Swank – has corrupted you. He’s dragged you down.’

  ‘Because he’s a boy? Or because he’s a Swank?’

  ‘It’s just a dumb itch, that’s all. You find him physically attractive – so what? Pathetic boy-and-girl feelings. You ought to be above all of that.’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘A revolutionary leader must be strong and pure. You’re always being distracted by thoughts of him. You don’t see clearly any more. You let your heart overrule your head.’

  Riff affected a yawn. ‘You’ve said all of this before, you know.’

  ‘Yes, but now you have to listen. Being attracted to him is an irrelevance.’ Lye ground her fist into the palm of her hand. ‘Crush it out of yourself.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  Lye glared at Riff, and continued the crushing gesture. There was a long silence.

  When Riff finally spoke, she jumped to a different topic. ‘What about Dunga?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘You say the revolution needs me. Doesn’t it need her too?’

  ‘She’s not . . .’ Lye began, then changed her mind. ‘Okay, we can arrange it somehow.’

  Col could see the look of triumph on Lye’s face. She thought she was winning. He thought so too.

  ‘You’ll be a leader again,’ she urged. ‘We’ll lead this assault on the Russian juggernaut side by side. Surprise and defeat the Russian Imperialists. Then the Austrian Imperialists. Then all Imperialists everywhere.’

  ‘So long as we get rid of him?’

  ‘Yes! Say you will. Say you haven’t changed.’

  ‘I haven’t changed,’ said Riff.

  Lye laughed. ‘Now we can achieve anything! You and me together. We can make the impossible happen!’

  ‘I haven’t changed because I was never the person you thought I was.’

  Lye’s expression seemed to sag and slip. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, you made that person up.’

  ‘You won’t . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s your choice?’

  ‘You can’t blackmail me.’

  Lye took a moment to recover. Her body was very stiff and very straight. On her mouth was the old down-drawn, pained expression.

  When she finally spoke, her tone was cold as ice. ‘I’ll have to be the person you should have been, then.’

  She turned away and addressed the three red armbands in the cage. ‘You can start lowering now. Those two first.’ She meant Riff and Col.

  One of the red armbands spoke to her. ‘Do we take off their leg-irons?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘They won’t be able to inspect much in their leg-irons.’

  ‘There’s nothing to inspect. The engines are unrepairable.’

  Mr Gibber spoke up, or started to speak. ‘I thought—’

  ‘They’re going Below to stay Below,’ said Lye. ‘They can all rot down there.’

  Col gaped. It was a death sentence, then. He had no doubt that Lye would happily get rid of him and his family – but Riff? After all the friendship and devotion and hero-worship . . . could it switch across to hatred as instantly as that?

  Lye avoided looking at Riff. ‘You can come with me now,’ she told Mr Gibber. ‘I have to get back to the Grand Assembly Hall.’

  The three red armbands went across to the lowering tackle and untied the ropes at the side of the cage. Lye mounted the ladder. Mr Gibber still sat with Murgatrude in his lap.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he muttered.

  It might have been in answer to Lye, but it wasn’t. Mr Gibber was talking to his pet. Murgatrude broke into a sudden loud purr.

  ‘Hurry up, my little spy,’ Lye called back down through the hatch.

  Mr Gibber rose with Murgatrude in his arms and headed towards the ladder. His tin remained on the floor of the cage – the tin that contained his collection of Lye’s precious strands of hair.

  ‘You’ve left your . . .’ Col began auto
matically, then stopped short as he felt something fall into his lap.

  Detouring on his way to the ladder, Mr Gibber had dropped a small shiny object in Col’s lap. It was the key he had used to unlock his leg-irons!

  Col stared. Because the key worked for Mr Gibber’s leg-irons didn’t mean it would work for anyone else’s. But if Mr Gibber thought it might . . .

  Before he could gather it up, Riff’s hand flashed across and grabbed it first.

  ‘Let me try,’ she hissed.

  She bent forward and inserted the key into the cuff on her right ankle – it went in. She rotated it – and there was the faintest click as the cuff came unlocked.

  Meanwhile, the red armbands were still readying the tackle. A ratchet made a clacking sound as they hauled on the pulley system. One vertical rope moved up and the other down, bringing into sight a series of dangling loops.

  Riff unlocked both her cuffs but didn’t pull them open. She completed the operation just as the red armbands completed theirs. One of them swung round and came across to Col and Riff.

  ‘Me first,’ said Riff.

  She rose to her feet, half-turning to Col.

  ‘Bye,’ she said, and gave him a farewell handshake. Under her breath she added, ‘Wait till I give the word, then start fighting.’

  It wasn’t only a handshake. Col felt the cold metal of the key pressed into his palm, and closed his fingers around it.

  The red armband gripped Riff by the shoulder and escorted her to the open door at the side of the viewing bay. She moved in tiny steps with her ankles close together, so the cuffs wouldn’t fall off by accident. Her escort pushed her towards the vertical ropes.

  ‘Feet in the loop.’

  ‘I know what to do.’

  Col waited until all three red armbands were focused on getting Riff’s feet into the loop. Then he inserted the key into the keyhole of his left cuff. One twist and a click. He did as Riff had done, leaving the cuff unlocked but closed.

  As the red armbands paid out rope through the pulley, Riff descended six inches at a time. Clack-clack-clack-clack! went the ratchet.

  Col unlocked the cuff on his right ankle.

  Then the ratchet stopped. Riff had disappeared below the level of the viewing bay’s wire floor. Another loop in the rope awaited, dangling just outside the open door.

  One of the red armbands came across to him. ‘You next.’

  Col copied Riff’s tiny steps. He would have passed the key to Dunga or Gillabeth if he’d had time – but his father was closest. He flipped the key to Orris out of the back of his hand.

  There was no clatter, so the key must have landed in his father’s lap. But would Orris work out what to do with it?

  ‘Feet in the loop,’ said a voice.

  Col stood on the sill of the open door. Looking down past the loop, he could see Riff on the rope below. She was a mere vague shape in the obscuring steam.

  ‘Feet in the loop!’

  A thump on his shoulders propelled him out through the door, so that he had no choice but to grab onto the rope with both hands. He swung his feet forward, ankles together, and slipped them into the loop.

  When would Riff give the word? How much longer? What was the plan?

  ‘Lower away!’

  With the first clack of the ratchet, Col dropped six inches, then jolted to a halt. Then another clack, another drop, another jolt.

  Clack-clack-clack-clack!

  The red armbands went past in front of his eyes: waist-level, knee-level, ankle-level.

  ‘Now!’ shouted Riff.

  He let go of the rope and leaned forward just in time to get his elbows in over the floor of the cage. He seized hold of the nearest ankle of the nearest red armband.

  Instant uproar! The red armband tried to pull away, but Col hung on ferociously. All three of them were shouting, all trying to kick at his hands.

  In one corner of his mind, he registered that the rope below his feet had started to swing back and forth.

  Someone changed from kicking at his hands to kicking at his head. A blow to the cheek rocked him back and almost dislocated his neck. Then someone’s heel ground down on his wrists. He lost his grip and started to slide.

  He was almost out of the cage when he managed to catch onto the sill.

  The swinging rope below twisted him this way and that, making it even harder to hang on. He threaded his fingers in through the wire. But now someone was kicking at the wire from the other side.

  One moment, his fingers were on fire with the pain, the next moment, they were numb and dead. He could no longer feel to hang on . . .

  He lost his grip on the cage and missed catching hold of the rope – any rope. He fell backwards in the void, cartwheeling through a hundred and eighty degrees.

  Only the loop saved him. Upright, he had been standing on the soles of his feet, but as he fell backwards, his feet slipped in through the loop. When he reached the bottom of his arc, the loop tightened around his ankles and jerked him to a stop, upside down.

  It felt as though his joints were being wrenched apart. The blood rushed like an explosion to his head, and for a moment everything blanked out.

  He came back to the world with his head hanging down in the steam. Riff should have been below him, but so far as he could see, she wasn’t. Just the rope, swinging loosely from side to side.

  The ratchet clacked, then clacked again. He descended headfirst, six inches at a time. The sounds from the viewing bay seemed strangely far away: voices of the red armbands yelling orders.

  He twisted his neck to look up, and gasped. He was now about ten feet below the floor of the viewing bay – and there was Riff clinging with fingers and toes to the underside of the wire! Riff the acrobat! While he had been fighting and distracting the red armbands, she must have swung through the air and flung herself across from rope to cage.

  She glanced down and saw him looking up. She detached one hand from the wire and pointed to the open door at the side of the cage. Then, like a spider on a ceiling, she began making her way towards it. She was going to take the red armbands by surprise.

  Col wished he could be part of the plan, instead of dropping further away with every clack of the ratchet. The steam rose around him until he could no longer see Riff or the underside of the cage. He released his aching neck muscles and let his head dangle.

  From above, he heard a sudden outburst of shrilling and screeching. Surely that was his mother? What was happening?

  The feeling had returned to his fingers, enough to take a grip on the rope. Hand over hand, he began hauling himself right way up. The leg-irons had slipped from his ankles in the violence of the fighting.

  ‘Aaagh!’ Another scream from above – a male voice this time.

  He sensed rather than saw the flailing body as it fell and struck him a glancing blow on the way down. He lost his grip and dropped headfirst, until his feet in the loop jerked him to a halt once again. The body continued to fall, vanishing into the steam with a despairing wail.

  Was it one of the red armbands? Riff’s doing? He had no time to think about it, because suddenly the ratchet went crazy.

  Clacker-clacker-clacker-clacker-clacker-clacker-clacker-clacker- clacker-clacker . . .

  No one was holding on to the control rope! Col plummeted faster and faster, down, down, down.

  He plunged through dank clouds of steam. The counterweight flew up on the other vertical rope and missed him by inches. He wrapped his arms over his head, but at the speed he was dropping it wouldn’t make much difference.

  He glimpsed great shapes of machinery rushing up all around. When he hit the bottom, when he smashed headfirst into—

  But he didn’t. Instead, he came to a sudden stop. For the second time, the deceleration almost wrenched his joints
apart.

  He must have fallen a hundred feet or more. Upside-down on the rope, he hung suspended and slowly rotating. Nothing else happened.

  His legs ached, his fingers throbbed, his whole body was a mass of many pains. On one side, he saw the vast cylindrical shadow of what might have been a boiler; on the other side, what looked like a series of ascending ladders. Unfortunately, the ladders were out of reach.

  The machinery down here was motionless and silent, but a new sound had started up above. Col heard it faintly yet distinctly: the crack of rifle fire. There were half a dozen shots in rapid succession, followed by a lull, then more shots and another lull.

  What did it mean? He could only hope and pray.

  After a while, the shooting stopped altogether. Col remained dangling and rotating for several minutes. Then he felt a tug on his legs. At last! A tug and a pause. A tug and a pause. Someone was pulling the rope back up!

  The ascent seemed to take ages. By the time he approached the viewing bay, Col had managed to haul himself right way up, standing with his feet on rather than through the loop. Inside the cage, three figures were working the ropes. Gillabeth was doing most of the pulling, with help from Quinnea and Sephaltina.

  The only other people in the cage were stretched out on the floor – five red armbands. Three were bound hand and foot, the other two appeared to be either dead or unconscious.

  Col clambered in over the sill of the open door.

  ‘My husband!’ cried Sephaltina, and sprang forward with outspread arms. She reached up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.

  Col was astonished – and perhaps Sephaltina was a little surprised at herself. ‘I thought you might be dead down there,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’re alive.’

  She spoke shyly, but in a more natural tone than Col had ever heard before. For once, her sweetness didn’t set his teeth on edge. But there was no time to think about it now.

  ‘Where are Riff and the rest?’ he asked.

  It was Gillabeth who replied. ‘Up on Bottom Deck, unshackling the other prisoners.’

  ‘We won?’

  ‘You should’ve seen us!’ Quinnea jumped in, a flush of excitement on her normally bloodless cheeks. ‘The red armbands tried to lower me after you, but I wouldn’t go. I had a panic attack.’