by George R. R.
“No.” just the thought was disgusting. “Blaze, that’s awful. It’s like I was a lovesick teenager, and Dad gives me a wad of money to go to a whorehouse and get it out of my system.”
“Nothing like that. I just want you to engage your critical side, your objectivity.”
“Yeah. That always works with love.”
* * * *
We didn’t talk about that any more that month—or much else. I went to the airport alone.
Carolyn and I had one embrace, and then off to the cages.
It was a routine show of force. The governor-general of Panama, our well-loved puppet, was giving a speech in Panama City, and we were there to stand at attention and look ominous. Which we did, I had to admit, nine of the soldierboys set to “camouflage” in the bright sun. That didn’t hide them; it made them glittering, shifting statues you couldn’t quite focus on. Scary. My own soldierboy, platoon leader, was shiny black.
Our presence wasn’t really needed, except for the press. The crowd was hand-selected, and applauded and cheered on cue, no doubt eager to have it over with and get back into the air-conditioning. It was in the high nineties and steamy still.
Do you feel warm? Carolyn asked without words. I thought back that it was psychosomatic, sympathy for those poor proles outside, and she agreed.
Then the speech was over, and we got together in a line for our dramatic exit. It was a routine extraction, but it was a good demonstration of our inhuman strength: we stood shoulder to shoulder with our left hands raised, and a cargo helicopter with a retrieval bar came swooping in, churning along below treetop-level at more than a hundred miles per hour, and snatched us away. It would have torn off a human’s arm, but we hardly felt it.
Carolyn’s output suddenly went black, apparently unplugged by the mechanical shock. “Carolyn?” I said over the emergency vocal circuit.
When she didn’t respond, I asked permission to disengage. There was no reason for us to stay in the soldierboys, other than the convenience of walking them to storage after we landed. My request wasn’t answered by Command. They were probably off fighting a war someplace, I figured.
So we landed by the service bay and walked our machines in. Carolyn’s wasn’t under her control, obviously; the soldierboy normally mimicked her natural physical grace. This time it staggered like a cartoon robot, some tech moving it with a joystick.
I popped our cages and we were suddenly in the real world, naked and sweaty, joints popping as we stretched.
Carolyn’s cage was open, but she wasn’t there.
One person in the room was dressed, a medical officer. She walked over. “Private Collins had a massive cerebrovascular failure, just prior to extraction. She’s in surgery now.”
I felt the blood chase away from my face and arms. “She’ll be all right?”
“No, Sergeant. They’re trying, but I’m afraid she’s...well, she’s clinically dead.”
I sat down on the edge of the cage base, hard concrete, my head spinning. “How is that different from plain dead?”
“She has no higher brain function. We are contacting her next of kin. I’m sorry.”
“But...I—I was in her brain just minutes ago.”
She looked at her clipboard. “Time of death was 13:47. Twenty-five minutes.”
“That’s not enough time. They bring people back.”
“They’re trying, Sergeant. Mechanics are too valuable to throw away. That’s all I can tell you.” She turned to go.
“Wait! Can I see her?”
“I don’t know where she is, Sergeant. Sorry.”
The others had gathered around me. I was surprised I wasn’t crying, or even trying not to cry. I felt gut-punched, helpless.
“She’s gotta be at the base hospital,” Mel said. “Let’s go find her.”
“And do what?” Candi said. “Get in the way?” She sat down next to me and put an arm around my shoulders. “We should go into the lounge and wait.”
We did, me walking like a zombie. Like a soldierboy without a mechanic. Lou got a credit card from his locker and bought us all beers from the machine. We dressed and drank in awkward silence.
Akeem didn’t drink. “Sometimes one wishes one could pray.” Samantha looked up from her meditation and nodded. The rest of us just drank and watched the door.
I got up to buy a round, and the medical officer came back. I took one look at her eyes and collapsed.
* * * *
I woke up suddenly in a hospital bed, like a noiseless splash of ice water. A nurse stepped away with a hypodermic, and behind her was Blaze.
“What time is it?”
“Five in the morning,” she said. “Wednesday. I came as soon as I heard, and they said they were about to wake you up anyway.” She picked up a plastic cup and held the straw toward me. “Water?”
I shook my head. “What, I just passed out? Twelve hours ago?”
“And they gave you something, to help you sleep. It’s what they do, when someone has a loss like yours.”
It all came back and hit me like a car. “Carolyn.” She took my hand in both of hers, and I jerked it away. Then I sat partway up and took her hand back.
I closed my eyes and I was floating, falling. Maybe the drug. I swallowed, and couldn’t find my voice.
“They said you’re on compassionate leave for the rest of the month. Come home with me.”
“What about my people? My platoon?”
“Most of them are waiting in the hall. They let me come in first.”
I sat up and held her, she held me, until I was ready to see my mates. They came in as a group, and Blaze waited outside in the hall while we made a wheel, each right arm a spoke. Mel and Candi and Samantha whispered a few words, but it was more the silent communion than any specific sentiment, that gave me a place to be. A place where I could breathe for a while.
* * * *
Blaze took me home with her, and after some long time, I was her lover rather than the friend who needed a strong arm, a soft breast. Later on, we laughed because neither of us could remember the exact night, or afternoon or morning, when it became sex. But I think I know when it became love.
The army counselor I’d been going to said I should see my loss as a wound, which had to be protected by stitches, which is to say a set of responses that could protect me while it healed. Stitches that would fall away when they were no longer needed.
But Blaze, a doctor of physics rather than of medicine, said he didn’t understand. There are wounds too large to close with stitches. You have to leave them open, and protect them, while keloid tissue grows over them. Keloid tissue doesn’t have normal nerve endings. It keeps you alive, but numb.
That’s where I am, years later. For ten days each month, I lock myself into the cage that gives me superhuman power. The rest of the time, I have her calm and sweet acceptance of the loss that will always be my center.
The soft cage of arms and legs that protects me, and gives me a measure of amnesia.
<
* * * *
Robin Hobb
New York Timesbestseller Robin Hobb is one of the most popular writers in fantasy today, having sold more than one million copies of her work in paperback. She’s perhaps best known for her epic fantasy Farseer series, including Assassins Apprentice, Royal Assassin, and Assassins Quest, as well as the two fantasy series related to it, the Liveship Traders series, consisting ofShip of Magic, The Mad Ship, and Ship of Destiny, and the Tawny Man series, made up of Fool’s Errand, Golden Fool, and Fool’s Fate. Recently, she’s started a new fantasy series, the Soldier Son series, composed of Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage, and her most recently published novel, Renegade’s Magic. Her early novels, published under the name Megan Lindholm, include the fantasy novels Wizard of the Pigeons, Harpy’s Flight, The Windsingers, The Limbreth Gate, Luck of the Wheels, The Reindeer People, Wolf’s Brother, and Cloven Hooves, the science fiction novelAlien Earth, and, with Steven Brust, the collaborativ
e novel The Gypsy.
Here she takes us to the edge of human endurance and considerably beyond, for a harrowing study of the ultimate meaning of loyalty, when everything else has been lost.
* * * *
The Triumph
The evening winds swept across the plains to the city and pushed on the iron-barred cage hung in the arch of the gate. The man in the cage braced himself against the bite of the inward-facing spikes and stared into the westering sun. He had small choice in that. Before they’d hoisted his cage into position, they’d cut away his eyelids and lashed his wrists to the bars, so that he could not turn away from the fiery gaze of the Carthaginian sun.
The dust-laden wind was drying his bared eyes, and his vision was dwindling. Tears, the tears of his body rather than the tears of his heart, ran unchecked down his cheeks. The severed muscles that had once worked his eyelids twitched in helpless reflex; they could not moisten his eyeballs and renew his vision. Just as well; there was little out there he wished to see.
Earlier in the day there had been a crowd below him. They’d lined the street to watch the laughing, mocking soldiers roll him along inside the spiked barrel of his cage. Despite the earlier torture he had endured, he’d still had a bit of defiance in him then. He’d seized the bars of the cage and braced himself, fighting the momentum of the bumping, bouncing cage as they tumbled him along. He hadn’t been completely successful. The spikes inside the cage were too long for that. They’d scored his body in a dozen places. Still, he’d avoided any immediately mortal wounds. He now doubted the wisdom of that.
At the bottom of the hill, beneath the arch of the city gates, the crowd had roared with avid approval when his guards dragged him out and sliced the eyelids from his face. “Face the sunset, Regulus! It’s the last one you’ll see, dog of a Roman! You’ll die with the sun today!” Then they’d forced him back into his spiked prison, lashing his wrists to the bars before they hoisted him up high so that all might have a good view of the Roman consul’s slow death.
His torment had drawn a sizable crowd. The Carthaginians hated him, and with good reason. Very good reason. They’d never forgive him for the many defeats he’d dealt them, or forget the impossible treaty terms he’d offered them after the battle at Adys. He bared what remained of his broken teeth in a grin. He still had that to be proud of. His gallery had pelted his cage with rocks and rotten vegetables and offal. Some of the missiles had ricocheted off the iron bars that confined him, a shield wall that flung their insults back into their upturned faces. Others had found their mark. Well, that was to be expected. No defense was completely impenetrable. Even the Carthaginians could hit a target sometimes. He had tucked his chin to his chest to offer his eyes what shelter he could from the dazzling African sun and looked down at the crowd. They’d been both exultant and furious. They had him caged, Marcus Atillius Regulus, and their torturers had wreaked on him all that for so long they had desired to do, but feared. His final defiance of them had pressured them to do their worst. And now they would watch him die in a cage hung from the city gates of Carthage.
His cracked lips pulled wide in a smile as he looked down at the hazy crowd. A film obscured his vision, but it seemed to him that there were not so many of them as there had been. Watching a man die painfully offered an hour or two of amusement to vary their tepid lives, but Regulus had prolonged their voyeurism too long, and they had wearied of it. Most had returned to the routine tasks of their ordinary lives. He gripped the bars firmly, and with all his will he bade his fingers to hold fast and his trembling legs braced him upright. It would be his last victory, to deny them any spectacle at his passing. He willed himself to take another breath.
* * * *
Flavius looked up at the man in the cage. He swallowed. Marcus appeared to be looking straight at him. He resisted the temptation to look aside and tried to meet his old friend’s gaze. Either Marcus could not see Flavius or knew that if he recognized him and reacted to him in anyway, his old friend would pay with his life. Or perhaps more than four years of slavery in Carthage had changed Flavius so much that even his childhood friend could not recognize him. He had never been a fleshy man, and the hardships of slavery had leaned even his soldier’s muscles from his frame. He was a bone man now, skeletal and ravaged by the harsh African sun. He was ragged and he stank, not just his unwashed body but also the dirty sodden bandage that wrapped the still-oozing injury on his left thigh.
He’d “escaped” from his master a scant month ago; it had not required much subterfuge. The overseer was a sot, more intent on drinking each day than on wringing work out of slaves that were no longer capable of real labor. One night, as the slaves made their weary way in from the grain fields, Flavius had lagged behind. He had limped more and more slowly and finally, while the overseer was haranguing another slave, he had dropped down amongst the rustling stalks and lain still. The grain was tall enough to conceal his supine body; they would not locate him without a search, and even so, in the failing light, they might miss him. But the old sot had not seemed to notice even that he was one slave short. When the moonless night had deepened, Flavius had crawled to the far edge of the field and then tottered to his feet and limped away. The old injury to his leg had already been suppurating. He had known then that the broken dragon tooth inside it had begun to move again. The pain had awakened memories of how he’d taken the injury, and made him think of Marcus and wonder about his friend’s fate.
How long had it been since he’d last seen him? Time slipped around when a man was a slave. Days seemed longer when someone else owned every minute of your time. A summer of forced labor in Carthage could seem a lifetime with the sun beating down on a man’s head and back. He counted the harvests he could recall and then decided that it had been over four years since he’d seen Marcus. Over four years since that disastrous battle where everything went wrong. On the plains of the Bagradas, not far from the cursed river of the same name, Consul Marcus Atillius Regulus had gone down in defeat. Flavius had been one of the five hundred soldiers taken prisoner. Some of those who had survived had pointed out that being captured alive was one step above being one of the twelve thousand Roman dead who littered the bloody battlefield. On the longest days of his slavery, Flavius had doubted that.
His eyes were drawn again to his friend and commander. The spikes had pierced him in a dozen places, but blood no longer trickled from the injuries. The dust-laden summer wind had crusted them over. His chest and belly looked like a map of a river system where the red trickles had dried to brown. Stripped of armor and garments, naked as a slave, Marcus’ body still showed the musculature and bearing of a Roman soldier. They had tortured him and hung him up to die, but they still hadn’t managed to break him. The Carthaginians never would.
After all, it had not been the Carthaginians who managed to defeat Consul Regulus, but a hired general, one Xanthippus, a Spartan, a man who led his troops not out of love for his country but for cold coin. The Carthaginians had hired him when their own Hamilcar had been unable to deliver the victories they needed. If Marcus had been fully cognizant of what that change in command would mean, perhaps he would not have pressed his men so hard toward their last encounter. That fateful day, the sun had beat down on them as fiercely as if it were a Carthaginian ally. Dust and heat had tormented the troops as Marcus had marched his forces round a lake. Toward evening, the weary soldiers approached the river Bagradas. On the other side, their enemy awaited them. Everyone had expected that their leader would order them to strike a camp, to fortify it with a wall and a ditch. They’d counted on a meal and a night of rest before they engaged in battle. But Marcus had promptly ordered his forces to cross the river and confront the waiting army, thinking to confound the Carthaginian force with his bravado.
Had Hamilcar been the Carthaginian general, the tactic might have worked. Everyone knew that Carthaginians avoided fighting in the open, for they dared not stand against the organized might of a Roman army. But Xanthippus was a Spartan an
d not to be taken in by show. Nor did he allow his men to fight like Carthaginians. Marcus had drawn his force confidently into their standard formation, infantry in the middle and their cavalry flanking them on both sides, and moved boldly forward. But Xanthippus had not drawn back. Instead, he sent his elephants crashing squarely into the middle of the infantry formation. Even so, the beleaguered square of infantry had held. Flavius had been there. They had fought like Romans, and the lines had held. But then Xanthippus had split his cavalry, a tactic that Flavius had never seen in such a situation. When the horses thundered down on them from both sides, their own outnumbered cavalry had gone down, and then the flanks of the infantry formation had caved in and given way. It had been chaos and bloody slaughter the like of which he’d never seen. Some men, he had heard, had escaped, to flee to Aspis and be rescued later by the Roman fleet. Those soldiers had gone home. Flavius and close to five hundred others had not.
Consul Marcus Atillius Regulus had been a prized captive and a valuable hostage and was treated as such. But Flavius had been only a soldier, and not even one from a wealthy family. His body and the work he could do had been his only worth to the victors. As a spoil of war, he’d been sold for labor. He’d taken a blow to the head in the course of the defeat; he’d never know if it had been from a horse’s hoof or a random slingstone. But for a time, he’d seen rings around torches at night and staggered to the left whenever he tried to walk. He’d been sold cheap, and his new master put him to work in his grain fields. And there he had toiled for the last four years. Some seasons he plowed and some he planted, and in the heat of the summer as the grain began to ripen, he’d moved through the field, shouting and flapping his arms to keep the greedy birds at bay. Rome and his soldiering days, his wife and his children, and even Marcus, the boyhood friend who had gotten him into this situation, all had begun to fade from his thoughts. Sometimes he’d felt that he had been a slave always.