by Adam Roberts
That day was spent prancing up and down the parade ground to the barking commands of the superior. We might have been troops training for Alexander’s army, or Patton’s, or al-Hattim’s, so timeless and basic was this process. This elemental process, teaching the body the useless clockwork yoga of marching and standing, is the most ancient portion of military training, as ancient as farming, or religion. It is beneath thought, and as such it is almost soothing. To begin with my mind fell into the rhythms of this regimentation, and coordinating my limbs occupied all my thoughts. Slowly, as my body learned the routine, my thoughts poked their head out from the shell into which the truncheon had driven them, I began to think again of Siuzan.
At first this produced merely a sapping sensation of despair, such that I stumbled and nearly fell; and had I fallen I would surely have lain on the dirt and cried. But my will was strong enough, just, to keep my feet moving.
Then the thoughts returned in less debilitating form, although as painfully as before. I cursed myself for allowing a pure woman, so beautiful in body and spirit, to come to this terrible and shameful end.
But as I thought this I marched. I stood. I raised my arms and lowered my arms, in unison with the entire block of headless troops, as the superior ordered.
Soon a new sensation, of bodily fatigue, began to overblot my repetitively self-lacerating round of thoughts. We marched, we wheeled and marched back under the impassively spectacular scenery. The mountains, like an impossibly vast curtain of rock petrified in the middle of billowing, withdrew from us. Our suffering had nothing to do with them.
After half an hour my stomach was cramping with hunger. After an hour these gripes went away. I marched on.
We could see other soldiers, headed men, coming and going. Cars, shiny and finned like fish, drove round the perimeter of the camp on the stone road, coming and going on obscure military business. A headed troop jogged out through the main gate, and several hours later jogged back in.
Steelhand fell to the floor. ‘Up!’ screeched the superior, running over.
‘Superior, I can’t,’ he pleaded. ‘Exhaustion, it is . . .’ But the superior’s hand was on his truncheon, his thumb fidgeting on the button, and with a yelp like an animal, before the button could be pressed, Steelhand scrambled clumsily back to his feet.
We marched on.
Finally we were told to return to our barrack for lunch. Inside a bin of soup was waiting for us; and we clustered around it, too worn out even to talk.
This time we made sure that each of us took a ladleful and then poured away a little from the top, so that there would be enough for all.
‘This is the same soup as yesterday. Do they intend never to vary it?’ Bil grumbled, as he held his ladleful in front of his shoulder-mounted eye.
‘I’m surprised you can be sure it is the same,’ said Geza, taking the ladle after him, filling it from the bin and pouring a little back. ‘It is not as if we can taste it.’ He downed his share and passed the ladle to me. ‘I do not doubt that it contains all necessary nutrients and vitamins.’
I filled my ladle, poured a little of the sludge back into the bin, and tipped the remainder into my neck. It hit my stomach like molten lead - so much so, indeed, that I had to sit down after passing the ladle on. I felt the warmth, and felt nauseous, but held on to the contents of my stomach. After a while the sickness went away and I felt a little better. The muscles in my legs were achy, but not impossibly so. I felt strength coming back to me, and with it a slender hope, skinny as a sliver of new moon. Siuzan still possessed her head. In my own case justice had waited more than a week after conviction for my appeal to be heard, and a further day after the genetic materials test before my beheading. It was possibly the case that Siuzan, dizzy (who knows?) with dreams of martyrdom, would not make this legal appeal; but even in that eventuality I still had several days. Even if the trial happened that very day, and sentence passed, Siuzan would retain her head for thirty more hours.
I had to deduce some way of escaping the compound. Perhaps, I thought (although I flinched as I thought this) I could simply leap from the wall, and run - push on through the pain of the truncheon-effect in my ordinator. It seemed unlikely to me; but perhaps, I reasoned, the effect would cut off after a while. There must be some overload, surely; for the notion that a consciousness could endure such pain for longer than a few moments was impossible to entertain. But contemplating this, I decided it was more likely that the pain would be continuous; and that I would lie in the dirt just beyond the wall until my heart seized and killed me.
Alternatively, I thought to myself, perhaps it might be possible to disable this truncheon effect. I could not think how, and did not assume that it would be easy, or else prior generations of headless conscripts would have discovered it and escaped. But there might be a way.
A third possibility suggested itself to me. Perhaps I might communicate my confession to the police some other way than in person. If somehow I could get to a radio or some other form of ansible, and contact the police, I could confess the crime. I could tell them that only the fact that the military were not prepared to hand me over stood in the way of prosecution. Would that be enough for the police to suspend prosecution of Siuzan? They could hardly raid the camp and arrest me. But perhaps pressure applied, as it were, from one branch of the government to another . . .
My attention was redirected to the present by a commotion at the pot. It transpired that, even though we had all assiduously poured back a portion of our ladlefuls, there was still nothing left in the pot for the last man . . . in this case Syrophoenician. ‘You idiots!’ he groaned. ‘You greedy idiots, you have taken it all and now I must do without!’
‘It appears that they have reduced the ration,’ observed Garten dispassionately, ‘without informing us.’
‘We were not to know,’ Geza pointed out. ‘It was reasonable of us to assume that the ration would be the same amount as it was yesterday - or the same as it was earlier today, at breakfast.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ Syrophoenician complained. ‘You have a full stomach!’
‘Hardly full!’
‘Fuller than mine!’
‘I recall,’ Garten said coolly, ‘that when this same thing happened to me yesterday, you advised me to be philosophical.’
‘What use is your babbling?’ demanded Syrophoenician, gesturing theatrically with his arms. ‘Your words can’t fill my empty stomach!’
‘What if they reduce our ration every day?’ asked another man. ‘Eventually we will all starve.’
‘It must be some sort of test,’ said Steelhand. ‘They expect us to pull together and face down adversity.’
‘Either that or they just enjoy torturing us,’ I put in.
‘It is hardly torture,’ said Bil Costra, sitting on his bed with his hands folded in at his lap. This was, perhaps, unwise of him.
‘You say so, do you?’ cried Syrophoenician, going over to him. ‘As you sit there with a full stomach? Are you saying it’s a comfortable thing, going hungry?’
‘I only meant that, compared to the truncheon—’
‘Is the truncheon the only torture?’ squealed an outraged Syrophoenician. ‘I say not. Are there other forms of torture? I say there are.’
‘The torture,’ I put in, hoping to avert a fight, ‘is the uncertainty these actions of theirs create in our minds. It is that uncertainty, rather than any person missing a meal, that is the torture.’
I averted a fight, but only because Syrophoenician left Bil and veered towards me. ‘Another headless idiot uncaring of my empty belly, eh?’
‘Do not forget, Sieur Syrophoenician,’ I said sternly, ‘that I went without breakfast this very morning.’
Syrophoenician stood very close to me, leaning in with his wide torso, as if to intimidate me. Then he stepped back and wailed, ‘Oh how can I spend the rest of the day marching and marching on an empty belly? How can it be done?’ He threw his arms into the air, making himsel
f into a Y-shape, a theatrical or operatic gesture.
‘You are a comical fellow,’ said Garten.
The mood became less fraught, and more comradely. We gathered together in a huddle and discussed how we might determine the number of ladlefuls that were in any given soup bin before we began scooping. One obvious way would be to count them out, emptying each ladle into some second receptacle or tureen; but we had nothing that could serve in this secondary capacity. We discussed the matter at length. One person suggested we each use one of our shoes as a makeshift bowl, but this idea was raucously dismissed. ‘We may as well block the toilet bowl with a blanket and pour the soup in there,’ shouted Syrophoenician.
‘I have a different question,’ I said. ‘I am very keen to disconnect, or otherwise unprogram, whatever device it is that creates the truncheon effect in our ordinators.’
The group considered this. ‘It is surely impossible,’ said Geza.
‘Why do you say so?’
‘Even if we could do it - and which of us would not wish the threat of truncheon-agony lifted from us? - but even if we did it the military would discover what we had done, and would punish us severely.’
‘I do not ask this for everybody,’ I said. ‘But only for me, that I might escape from the camp and give myself over into police custody.’
Several headless murmured at the propriety, or possibility, of this thing. Some insisted that we should consider ourselves as bondsmen; others insisted that we had chosen service freely and that therefore there was no bond. Discussion was cut off by the reappearance of a superior. He ordered us outside.
That afternoon we marched and marched, this time over rough terrain rather than in the parade ground. For the first hour the food inside me, and my resolution somehow still to save Siuzan from her fate, gave me energy; but as the forced exercise was prolonged I began to sag. Clambering up steep and abrasive rocks, that bruised and cut my fingers when I grasped them to obtain purchase for the climb: this quickly became a very disagreeable business.
We climbed the artificial hill. We clambered down the other side. We climbed back up. We climbed down again, such that we found ourselves where we had been before.
‘Now,’ said the superior, ‘you will all turn your headless backs on the hill. Turn about! Sharp!’
We did as we were told.
‘You will climb the hill, without turning around. Anybody turning around,’ yelled the Superior, ‘will feel the truncheon. Do you understand ?’
All our voices were as one multi-tracked voice. ‘Superior!’
‘After you have climbed, you will descend. Again you will descend without turning. I will watch carefully, and anybody turning - even for a moment to gain their bearings - will feel the truncheon. Standing, back to the drop, on this irregular slanted surface is not a place,’ he bellowed, ‘where you want to feel the truncheon. Believe me. Perhaps, falling, you might not break your skulls, since you lack those. But you would break other bones. Do you understand?’
As one: ‘Superior!
‘When you are down on the other side you may take yourself away to the barrack. Begin!’
And so we began the arduous business - really quite astonishingly arduous, much more so than I would have believed. I backed up to the first block, and hopped up onto it as I might have slid myself, sitting, onto a tall table. But then, standing, I could feel nothing behind with my hands, and I had to kick with my heels, and explore by lifting my left foot. Eventually I stepped up, and then nearly unbalanced as I drew my right foot up.
I do not wish to prolong my account tediously. Climbing the artificial hill backwards was a tiresome process of feeling each step of the way. I could see, looking ahead of me, several less rapidly ascending headless stumble on steps, or taking them very slowly. The only reason that I knew I had reached the top was because I very nearly fell backwards in my repeated attempts to feel the next backwards step-up, first with my hand and then with my feet. At this point I sat down.
I tried to prepare myself, mentally, for the downwards journey. Descending backwards a chaotic and irregularly arranged staircase, very steep and precipitous, is a difficult thing when you are not allowed to look behind you, or even to angle your torso. Sitting is no good. You must stand, and tentatively run your toe down the step behind you, lowering yourself as far as you need to on your other leg as the toe probes the way down. I alternated my legs, but nonetheless my thighs were stabbing with cramp and pain after only half a dozen steps. Sometimes the steps were very short. On several occasions, on the other hand, I was forced to lie flat on my belly, clutching at what I could with my hands, whilst my dangling feet searched for a base.
At one point I heard a scream, and could not help pulling my shoulder back to give my eyes a glimpse of a headless body - Bil Costra, I later discovered - cartwheeling down. It was an alarming sight, made worse when the screams ended abruptly in a solid noise of collision out of my sight.
Eventually I made it to the ground. The fallen man was on his back on the dirt. His arm fitted into the torso oddly low against his body.
A superior was standing over him. He gave me no specific orders such as go away or return to barracks, and so I stood and gawped.
‘Why are you not on your feet, carcass?’
‘Superior, it is my shoulder. It is a cold pain.’ I recognised Bil Costra’s voice.
‘Dislocated,’ said the superior, matter-of-factly, and touched his truncheon.
Bil thrashed and groaned on the dirt, so vehemently as to kick up spurts of smoke-like dust. Later, in whispered discussion in the darkened barrack, we decided that the superior had used the truncheon deliberately in an attempt to jerk Costra’s dislocated shoulder back into its socket. This might, I suppose, have worked (perhaps the superior had had success with this brutal strategy on previous occasions); for the random lurching and fitting might lever the joint back in. But then again, perhaps this was simply the instinct to punish a soldier lying on his back when a superior was addressing him. It might even, conceivably, have been nothing sadistic, no torturer’s instinct. It might even have been a sort of habit. I have thought about this often, in the years since that time - I mean, thought about the superiors’ casually brutal attitude to us in general, of which this was one example - and I have come to the conclusion that few superiors used their truncheons maliciously. They had no access to or experience of the sort of pain they were causing their victims; there was nothing comparable for them. I daresay they watched the floppings and writhings of headless men with the same dispassion that anglers watch a fish on the wooden slats of the pier. To them it had, through continued use, become merely a habitual thing.
But in this case the thrashing about, encouraged by the agony that Costra was experiencing, did not reconnect the shoulder bone in its socket. When the superior switched off the truncheon Costra was still twitching on the floor, still moaning, and his arm still seemed connected to his shoulder too low down, a positioning accentuated by his lack of a head. Orders for him to get to his feet had no effect. A second bout with the truncheon produced a markedly more listless thrashing, and then nothing at all. I watched as the superior stood over the body of Costra flicking the switch of his truncheon on, off, on, as if testing an electrical connection. Then he spoke into a lapel microphone, and shortly afterwards two purple-uniformed men came running over and pulled Costra away by his heels.
I made my way back to the barrack, and went through to the toilet at the back. There was no sink, taps or soap in this small room, for it was deemed that the headless needed no such luxuries. If our hands were dirty, then so what? Nobody would touch us, and we had no mouth, nose or eyes to contaminate with restless fingers. Some of the troop would run outside the main door after depositing solid waste in the toilet and rub their hands in the dust to clean them; others were less scrupulous.
But though there was no sink there was a toilet bowl, and in this bowl was water; and after a full day of sunstruck exercise we were all so thirsty
that we were no longer fussy about drinking such water. A slender trooper called Cash was in the toilet before me, scooping water into his hands and feeding it, inefficiently, into his neck valve. I followed him. There were people waiting behind me.
After this I lay on my bed and contemplated the muscles in my legs and back, which were shivering with ache and fatigue.
Syrophoenician collapsed onto the bed beside me. ‘May the All’God have mercy and compassion in his plan for me,’ he wailed. ‘For I am about to give up the ghost.’
‘What a theatrical fellow you are,’ I said.
He rolled onto his front. ‘Well, I am, But the way I see it: life needs colour. It needs vividness. What is life without vividness?’
‘That’s mere tautology,’ I said. ‘Life and vivid being the same word—’
‘Were you a poet or a pedant?’ he said.