by Alex Shearer
Two officials came out of the main doors and hurried on their way, their briefcases full of important (or, at least, self-important) business. They were followed by a man and a woman in what must have been police uniforms. They straightened their tunics, adjusted their hats, then separated and went in different directions. Their uniforms were braided with nooses; their buttonholes were nooses; the epaulettes on their shoulders were nooses too.
‘Where now?’
‘Just follow.’
We walked around to the rear of the town hall building. Set into the ground at floor level was a metal grille, there to provide light and ventilation, I assumed, for the cellars and dungeons below.
‘That’s most likely where the prisoners are,’ Jenine whispered as we approached. ‘We’ve heard it’s where they keep the condemned.’
‘The cells? Down there?’
‘Yes. That’s where you worry and suffer and rot while you’re waiting to be strung up.’
We went on walking. I looked down through the grille as we passed by. But all I could make out were some shadowy figures, who could have been prisoners or who could have been jailers, or anyone.
We didn’t stop. It might have looked suspicious. We just ambled on, as if we were out-of-towners who had come to the city for Quenant’s Day and were taking in the sights.
We circled the building and came back again. Again, we looked down into the cellars. Again there was nothing to see but vague shapes and shadows.
‘I think I saw him,’ Jenine said. ‘I think I saw him.’
But I felt she was seeing what she wanted to, rather than what she actually had.
I couldn’t understand how she ever expected to free her father from those cells. I couldn’t see how they hoped to save him at all. And I suspected that they had no real idea how to do it either.
But a greater and more immediate problem faced us. For, as we lingered in the main square, watching the scaffold take shape for the following day’s ‘celebrations’ and ‘entertainments’, it became apparent that there was to be some kind of ghastly dress rehearsal.
A number of armed and uniformed guards appeared and a cry went up of, ‘Make way for the prisoners!’
Three men were led out; their faces pale, their arms tied behind them. They were taken to the scaffold, as if to be measured up for tomorrow’s executions and to ensure that the whole programme went off smoothly without a hitch. It was a grim and grisly dress rehearsal for death.
The only thing was that Jenine’s father was not among them.
‘Which one is he?’ I asked, as the prisoners were trooped out, for none of the condemned bore any facial scars whatsoever.
‘He isn’t there.’
‘Then where?’
‘I don’t know. They may . . . have already killed him.’
Her face was ashen; the very scars on it looked pale. She looked at her mother, who looked at Kaneesh, as if to say, Can we already be too late? Can it be true?
‘But that’s impossible,’ I said. ‘I thought that executions were only allowed on Quenant’s Day. So how can he have been executed already?’
‘They say it’s the custom and the law . . .’ Jenine said. ‘But maybe that’s only what they tell people. Who knows what goes on in dungeons and cells?’
I noticed, from the corner of my eye, that one of the beggars on the cathedral steps had gathered up his rags, got creakily to his feet, and was heading in our direction. Kaneesh should never have flipped him that coin, I thought. It had been a mistake for him to draw attention to us, even by a minor act of charity. The beggar was clearly coming towards us. He no doubt wanted more money.
‘But if they’ve already killed him, how do we discover that? We can’t just go and not find out,’ Jenine said. ‘He might still be alive somewhere, for all we know.’
‘Perhaps we ought to move on for the moment,’ I said nervously. ‘We’ve been standing here too long. People are starting to notice us. Let’s walk.’
I glanced back at the approaching beggar. His bowed, hooded head was nodding, as if he had some kind of palsy. People shied away from him, as if the condition were contagious. Which maybe it was. Or perhaps he was simply rotten with vermin.
‘Walk on?’ Jenine said, indignantly. ‘We don’t just walk on. We have to find out where my father is. We have to know what happened to him.’
‘But it won’t help him if we get taken prisoner too,’ I pointed out, with what I hoped would seem like calm logic, but which came out sounding more like mounting panic. ‘Look, let’s just walk on a little. Let’s not stand here looking as conspicuous as a bunch of tourists.’
‘Let them think we are tourists.’
‘Jenine . . . there’s someone coming.’
The beggar was but a few steps away. He limped along, supporting himself with a staff, his few tawdry belongings held in a cloth bundle. His hand was already out for money: its permanent position, as likely as not.
‘Alms . . . alms . . .’
Kaneesh glared at him.
‘Clear off. I gave you alms. Greed kills charity every time. Settle for enough. Forget more.’
‘More. More alms.’
All the beggar had to do was to make a fuss. Fuss breeds attention. Attention breeds interest. Interest attracts bystanders. Bystanders attract more bystanders and turn into a small crowd. Which turns into a larger one. Which soon attracts the attention of the authorities. Who would be delighted, no doubt, to have another four non-believers to hang on Quenant’s Day.
There might be a reward too, for the finders and the denouncers of non-believers. And a beggar in need of money could always do with a handsome reward.
‘Alms, kind sir. More alms. Alms for a poor man.’
‘I told you, I just gave you alms. What do you think I am? A pit of money? Be off. Beg somewhere else.’ Kaneesh pushed him roughly away. But he just came back.
‘Alms, sir. Alms. More alms.’
I reached to take Jenine’s arm, to try to steer us away.
‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘Let’s just move on.’
She shrugged from my grasp.
‘Not until I find where my father is. If he isn’t in the cells, where is he?’
The beggar was right by us, close enough to take in every word. I nudged Jenine with my elbow, put my finger to my lips. But it was too late, the beggar had already overheard. And to prove it, he said the most extraordinary and unexpected thing.
‘Perhaps, my child,’ the beggar said, ‘he escaped.’
We stared at him, at his filthy, ragged clothes, at his threadbare, moth-chewed cloak, at his grimy hands, at his face, hidden deep in the shadowed recess of the hood around his head. Two piercing eyes stared out from the darkness.
‘Father . . . ?’ Jenine said. ‘Is that . . . you?’
‘Mikhail?’ her mother whispered, transfixed by the voice and the appearance of the beggar.
‘Brother?’ Kaneesh said, his voice trembling. It was the first time since I had met him that I had seen him at a near loss for words or for deeds. Mikhail, is that . . . you? You look filthy.’
‘I thought you’d never get here, Kaneesh,’ the beggar’s voice said. ‘What took you so long? And you don’t look that clean yourself.’
I thought the game was up then. For I had never seen such visible, true and spontaneous happiness on the faces of people. I thought the whole square was about to erupt in a riot of such an affectionate and tearful reunion that everyone would wonder to see it, that they would stop to watch it, that they would see four scar-faced Cloud Hunters hugging and kissing each other in the way that only those who had believed each other lost or dead can do. I could picture them all but dancing around in celebration. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they actually had. Then the next thing would have been the cry of, ‘I spy heathens and non-believers!’ And then we’d all be up on the scaffold for Quenant’s Day.
I had underestimated them.
Barely a flicker. Barely a motion. All th
at was to come. Time enough to celebrate when there was the safety in which to do it.
‘Where is the boat?’ Mikhail, the beggar and Jenine’s father whispered.
‘An hour’s walk,’ Kaneesh said.
‘We’ll go ahead and lead the way,’ Carla said. ‘You follow at a distance, husband. It won’t take long.’
But the beggar shook his cowled head.
‘Ah no,’ he said. ‘We cannot leave.’
We stared at him.
‘But Father, why ever not?’ Jenine said.
He nodded towards the scaffold.
‘The other prisoners,’ he said. ‘We have to take them with us.’
Kaneesh’s eyes glittered with anger.
‘We came, brother, to save you. Not the whole world. We can’t take a hand in everyone’s business. We aren’t redeemers to save the universe. Just Cloud Hunters, who save their own.’
‘No. We save them too. We must. There’s no one else to do it.’
‘No, brother. We cannot. We cannot take such risks for the sake of strangers. Now we will leave and you must follow – at a discreet distance, so as not to arouse suspicion.’
‘I am not leaving my fellow prisoners to their fate,’ Mikhail said. ‘If it hadn’t been for them I would never have escaped myself.’
‘It’s a hard world, brother. Your thanks will have to suffice. You can burn a candle in their memory, make an offering for their happiness in the afterlife. But we must leave. You must come now.’
‘I’ll be hanged,’ Jenine’s father said, ‘if I will.’
Kaneesh looked at him.
‘You’ll be hanged, brother,’ he pointed out, ‘if you don’t.’
Jenine had not told me which of the two brothers was the elder. Was it her father, or was it her uncle? It was hard to tell, for each appeared to be as stubborn and as resolute as the other. Maybe they were twins.
If it had come to a fight between them, I felt they would both have lost and both have won. They’d have died together, still arguing the toss. For they looked like the kind of brothers who would protect each other to the death. If they hadn’t fought each other to it first.
34
mikhail’s story
‘Who’s the boy?’ Jenine’s father wanted to know. ‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Work experience,’ Kaneesh said drily – which made me think that he might have a sense of humour after all. Or perhaps his brother just brought out the sarcasm in him.
‘He wanted to come along. He’s from my school,’ Jenine explained.
‘And we thought that we might need another pair of hands – to get you out of this place,’ Carla said.
We were sitting in a small tea shop.
Jenine’s father, the beggar, had abruptly limped away from us as we stood in the square. He must have decided that we were starting to look conspicuous together. So we let him go and then followed at a distance, pretending to be taking in the sights, glancing at the merchandise in shop windows, and feigning interest in the preparations for Quenant’s Day. (Although I wasn’t feigning; I was interested, and with a horrified fascination.)
Her father led us into a maze of narrow streets. He stopped, glanced back, and disappeared into a small tea shop, which looked neither too expensive, too clean, nor too discerning in its clientele. In fact, if there was a criminal class in this society (and there no doubt was a small one, even with the dire punishment of death for the most trivial of offences looming over their heads and around their necks) then this looked like the sort of establishment where they might (so to speak) hang out.
We went in after the ragged figure and found him already seated at a table.
‘Keep your hoods up,’ he said, as we joined him. Though this didn’t apply to me as my unscarred face didn’t need to be covered; I wasn’t so obviously from elsewhere. ‘They don’t mind criminals here, but they’re not so keen on foreigners,’ he whispered.
(Which showed that even when there is honour among thieves, there is still a certain amount of prejudice against strangers.)
‘What’ll you have?’ he asked, as a waiter approached, his face as dirty as his turban, which was, in its turn, as grimy as his apron, which was also, in its own way, about as filthy as the dish towel he had tucked into it, which was of similar hue to the tablecloth. ‘You’d better make it tea,’ Mikhail said. ‘There’s nothing else that’s drinkable.’
So tea was what we ordered. And that was when he looked at me and asked again, ‘Who’s the boy? What’s he doing here?’
Once we had settled who I was, the others wanted to know how he was and how he had escaped.
‘It was simple enough,’ he said. ‘Easy enough, that is, to get out of the prison. Getting off this blighted island, though, that’s another matter. There were four of us condemned men, held in the dungeon cells. Every morning they brought breakfast to us. I arranged with the other prisoners to create a disturbance when my food was brought to me one morning. Which they did. The guard went to settle the trouble between them, leaving my cell door open and unlocked for a moment. I was then supposed to slip out, slit his throat – or strangle him – and free the others.’
He mentioned the throat-slitting and the strangling in a perfectly matter-of-fact, everyday, businesslike tone. And the others nodded in placid agreement. Even Jenine. As if all accepting that such things were a necessary and unavoidable occurrence, and a sadly inevitable component of ordinary life.
‘However, just as I was about strangle him – slitting his throat was out of the question, for I had no knife – two of the other guards, who should never have been there, as normally there is only one man to deliver the breakfast, came down the stairs. It was all I could do to fight my way free of them and to get out of the place. I couldn’t help my fellow prisoners as intended. But I made it out of the dungeon and onto the street.
‘There I was, in the middle of the city, with the guards after me and the alarm sounding and the hue and cry everywhere and shouts of “Escaped prisoner! Escaped prisoner!” echoing in my ears. There wasn’t a chance of my making it to the coast or even to the outskirts of the town. Every Believer in the place would be after me. And this place is nothing but Believers – take my word. They don’t suffer from doubts in this place. They can’t afford to.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I did what I had to. There was only one choice. If you cannot run, you must hide. And how, and where, can you hide when your pursuers are but a few corners behind you, about to appear at any second? You hide right under their noses, that’s where. Because that’s where most people never think to look. For escaped prisoners run, don’t they? As fast as their legs will take them. Instinct tells them to do so. And who would not follow his instincts to save his neck?’
‘So what happened then, Father?’ Jenine said. ‘What did you do?’
‘I made myself slow down, forced myself to walk. Not to run – to walk. Slowly, deliberately, casually. I pulled up my hood, covered my head, and I walked – with a limp. I saw a stick lying by a wall. I took it and used it as a crutch. Then I hobbled slowly over to the cathedral steps. I could hear the furore behind me. The yelling, the shouting. The guards giving the people in the square rough treatment. “You! A prisoner’s escaped. Did you just see a man running? Where did he go?”
‘But they hadn’t seen a man running. And no one was looking for a poor, lame beggar. So as the commotion continued, I sat myself down on the cathedral steps with all the other mendicants, who squat there all day long, with downcast eyes and miserable expressions – which, need I say, is part of their stock-in-trade. And having downcast eyes, they had seen nothing. They didn’t know who I was, or care. I was just another of their kind.
‘So there I sat among them, head bowed, eyes lowered, hand out, expression miserable, and I joined in the chorus of, “Alms, Believer. Alms for a poor man.” And I’ve been living that way ever since – while waiting for all of you –’ he spoke sharply and accusingly now,
with a measure of long-borne and ill-concealed impatience – ‘to turn up. And you took your time.’
‘Husband –’
‘Brother –’
‘Father –’
Mikhail raised his hand for silence. He didn’t let them speak another word, and plainly wouldn’t until he had finished what he had to say. Maybe he was starved for conversation.
‘There is no way off this island by your own efforts, believe me. And I have tried hard enough to get off it. It’s impossible. Without a sky-boat of your own you’re marooned. All right, you can sky-swim a little way. But how fast and how far can you go without being caught, or before the thermals or the sky-sharks get you?
‘So I’ve been a beggar on the cathedral steps ever since I escaped from the cell. And, irony of ironies, one of those who flings me a coin every once in a while is the very jailer I was going to strangle. So he’s not such a bad sort, after all. It’s an odd thing, life, don’t you think?’
For the first time since I had met him, he smiled.
‘Mikhail, we did everything within our power to save you,’ Carla said. ‘The international courts, the tribunals, we went to them all. We had verdicts in your favour, indictments and decrees. But the Quenant won’t pay the slightest attention to any of them. They’re a law unto themselves.’
‘Fanatics have no interest in any laws other than their own bigotry,’ Mikhail said.
‘Well, we’re here now,’ Jenine said.
‘And the boat is under an hour away. We could be on it and out of this place before the midday bell,’ Kaneesh reminded him.
‘I made an agreement,’ Jenine’s father said, with calm, resolute insistence. ‘We shook hands on it. Those other three prisoners – they would help me to escape, and I would help them. I gave them,’ he said, ‘my word – as a Cloud Hunter.’
Kaneesh’s jaw twitched, then his expression became set, as if in stone. That statement had clinched it. The matter was beyond dispute. His brother had given his word as a Cloud Hunter. What could be more binding than that?
Yet, admire as I did Mikhail’s honour and integrity, I couldn’t help but think to myself that I hadn’t given my word, not as a Cloud Hunter or as anything. And neither had anybody else, just Jenine’s father.