by P. J. Fox
Aros found Kisten’s ignorance hilarious. “They wouldn’t seem so magical if you had to milk one. Goats bite! They’re needy buggers, too. Did you know that certain breeds of goats can actually die of fright?” Kisten did not. “They can die of loneliness, too.”
“Is there anything they can’t die of?”
Aros shrugged. “Eating rat poison, I suppose. One of ours got into it by accident and a fortnight later he was still fit as a fiddle.”
“How many slaves did you own?” asked Kisten.
Aros laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
Kisten stared at him blankly.
“My parents didn’t have slaves, they had children.” He meant it as a joke. “They had seven, total, before my mom ran out of steam: three boys and four girls. I was in the middle but near the top, so she deputized me to care for the youngest few. I fed them and changed their nappies and made them lunch. So you see,” he added dryly, “I’ll make an excellent husband.”
“You didn’t have a wet nurse?”
“No,” said Aros, half amused and half irritated. “Farmers don’t have wet nurses. All nine of us managed with just two bedrooms. We went out to dinner once a year and the first time my mother owned a new piece of furniture was after I bought it for her on my last leave. But you know,” he said wistfully, “my parents were—are—wonderful people. I had a good childhood. I never wanted for anything.”
Kisten didn’t know if his own childhood had been happy.
“Being a prince probably sounds better than it is, too,” Aros allowed. There was no one around to hear them and, given the current state of affairs in the camp, no one who cared. “You know, all those state dinners and ribbon cutting ceremonies and getting to meet all the famous film directors you want. Women throwing themselves at you….”
Kisten shrugged. “State dinners are awful—and the food! You’d think it would be wonderful, right?” He snorted. “I went to this one where the host had been abroad in one of the colonies and acquired a new chef. He served us macaroni and tripe.”
“Thank you,” said Aros formally, “for telling me something that doesn’t make me hungry.”
“You’re welcome,” replied Kisten, equally formally.
Both men burst out laughing.
“And as for the women,” Kisten continued after awhile, “they—”
“Well that Lady Daphne sounded pretty exciting.”
“She was, until her husband caught us.”
“Well yes.” Kisten could hear the smile in Aros’ voice. “There is that.”
“Really though,” Kisten told him, “the constant politicking gets old. When you’re the state’s most eligible bachelor, no one likes you for you. They like your titles or your land, or their vision of what you should be like. And some of the mothers!” He rolled his eyes. “One ambitious matron wasn’t above dumping her daughter in a gutter before I walked by. I was meant to rescue her and, suitably impressed by her helplessness, ask for her hand.”
“Because that’s what everyone wants, a useless woman.”
“Judging by who’s popular at court, you’d think so.”
“You can’t complain about how shallow the women in your life are, when you’re just as shallow. Women of substance….” He stopped, aware that he might have said too much. He was right about Kisten, of course. Even Kisten could see that. Women of substance weren’t interested in men who spent their free time playing ecarté naked with feather dancers.
“Years ago,” he said, “there was a girl. She was a little older than I. I thought she loved me. I thought, I suppose, that I loved her. Predictably, her fascination turned out to revolve more around my wallet than my rapier wit. In any case, we stopped seeing each other.”
“Did you?” Aros asked. “Love her, I mean.”
“No,” Kisten said honestly. “I was infatuated with her, like every boy is the first time he discovers a woman who challenges him as well as gives him liberties.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Kisten checked. “You mean you’ve never…?”
Aros smiled apologetically. “Once or twice, with the girl next door, but not for a long time. Sonam wanted to wait.”
Dear God. “So? Were there no other women in Palamau?”
“Some of us,” said Aros, with a touch of asperity, “are acquainted with the notion of self-control.”
“I’d never marry a woman who had such…repressive expectations.” Kisten made a face. The idea that he’d ever see any woman ever again, much less one willing to touch him, seemed rather fantastical at this juncture. Still, a man could dream. He continued to trace patterns in the dust, idly filling the time. Disturbingly, he found himself feeling jealous of Aros for having someone worth waiting for.
“For us plebes,” he told Kisten, “marriage is about teamwork. My parents rely on each other—not just for companionship, but for survival. They both work, and hard. At different things, perhaps, but their contributions are equally important. If my mother has certain, as you put it, expectations, she’s earned them. She’s earned my father’s respect. And as for me….” Aros shrugged. “I’m religious.”
“I see.” He didn’t, though, not really.
“Besides,” Aros said, lightening the mood, “more than one women is more free time than I have. And would require more brain power, too! I’d end up calling one by the other’s name and then there’d be an upset, and I hate upsets. I can’t even imagine how one goes about juggling them all.”
“Call them all by the same pet name,” Kisten responded promptly.
Aros laughed again and Kisten thought that, perhaps, they might have just become friends.
TWENTY
When the sun rose the next morning, Kisten had formed a plan.
Asif had survived the night, but he wouldn’t survive much longer if they couldn’t do something about their food situation. Not everyone went without in equal degrees; the roving gang of thugs that occupied the northwest quarter operated a little restaurant of sorts. They served bread, sometimes soup. Once in awhile, there were even vegetables for sale. Newcomers to the prison were often shocked to find such bounty in the midst of such destitution.
Bounty, Kisten had discovered, for those who could pay.
What anyone wanted with oblong pieces of paper, he couldn’t fathom. They were no good to eat, and too small to use as shelter. He supposed that this insistence on money over barter was symptomatic of what his mother had always referred to as the problem of faith. Money had no intrinsic value in and of itself; its value lay in what it represented or, rather, what their society as a whole agreed it represented. These fools wanted cold, hard cash because they believed that—what? They’d return to the outside world rich? Off of selling cubes of stale bread at a daric a cube?
Of course, to the man who had no darics, even one was a fortune. There had to be another way. Kisten stayed up most of the night, thinking about what to do. And then, after the last of the stars had winked out and dawn was breaking over the horizon, the answer came to him.
He explained it to Aros at role call.
Aros nodded slowly. “Alright, if you’re sure.” Shading his eyes, he stared across the enclosure at the thugs. “They must have, all together, amassed a fortune of at least fifty darics by now. Think of the lives they’ll lead!” His tone was sarcastic. “Women! Cars!”
“Poems are as tragic as the listener,” muttered Kisten.
“What?” asked Aros, confused.
Kisten shook his head. It didn’t matter. No one talked from then until, some time later, the ration wagon appeared. Asif had been too sickly to join them. Kisten explained the situation and walked the sergeant over to their campsite. Asif waved weakly from his ditch. The blanket, at least, kept off the worst of the sun. A little while later, Kisten was back with his ninety and the sergeant was supervising the distribution of food.
“You’re sure about this?” Aros spoke under his breath. When Kisten nodded, he stepped forward and ma
de his request. He didn’t fully understand what Kisten was at. But it had occurred to Kisten the night before that each ration of meat consisted of, in addition to the meat itself, a shank bone on which a small amount of lean meat remained. Today, blessedly, they were getting beef instead of pork. Kisten had long gotten over the ignominy of eating an unclean animal; God would forgive, if He even existed. Kisten’s relief was due to the fact that beef—or, specifically, beef shank—was better suited to his purposes.
They brought their rations back to camp. Cornmeal, today, no bread. Aros cut up the beef and arrayed it on the blanket so the men could study their portions. The hulking great bone towered over the diminutive scraps. After every man had claimed his favored cube and gone about his business, Kisten retired to the shade of the blanket with his bone. Asif grunted in greeting. Aros came over to watch him, decided it was pointless, and left to forage for fuel.
He laid the bone on the ground and, after studying it carefully for a few minutes, brought the edge of the frying pan down hard a few inches in from the end. He repeated the procedure. Each time, the bone cracked. Satisfied, he got out his awl and went to work. He’d known that awl was a bargain.
What no one else had apparently thought of was that, while the bone itself wasn’t too thrilling, it contained a wealth of nutriment in its rich marrow and oil-filled joints. He was now liberating that nutriment with his awl, and scraping it into the largest of the tin cups.
Kisten was still working when Aros came back with a battered lump that more or less resembled a stock pot.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Kisten.
“I traded sexual favors.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Relax. I found it in the swamp—and I washed it.”
Kisten began transferring the pieces of bone into the pot. He never said anything, but he’d wonder for the rest of his life which of those two explanations was the truth. After the bone was transferred, they brought the pot back to the swamp, if indeed that was where it had come from, and filled it with water from their footprints. There wasn’t much competition for water, or for fuel either; dysentery had struck again.
The oil in the joints was extracted by boiling the water.
“You know,” said Aros, “I’m surprised you thought of this.”
“I might be useless,” said Kisten, “but I am an engineer.” He could figure things out, if he had to.
Aros just shook his head.
The sky was darkening and Aros had made two more trips for fuel before Kisten announced that he had achieved soup. He couldn’t have been prouder if he’d developed the prototype propulsion drive. Hunger, too, made it taste divine. There was enough for all four of them to have some, and a few extra servings besides. Along with their other rations, it seemed a feast. Kisten’s stomach twisted in knots, watching the other men eat their scraps of beef. He wouldn’t see another bite of solid food for some time. Cornmeal mush was filling, he supposed—as filling as anything else—but it wasn’t the same. He sighed.
Finishing his own small meal, he brought some soup in to Asif. He helped him sit up, as he had the night before. And Asif still protested the indignity, but with a smile on his face.
“You made soup.”
“Yes, and it’s delicious.”
“You say that with all the conviction of a drill sergeant…telling the new recruits how much they’ll love boot camp.”
“Eat the soup.”
Asif made a dismissive gesture. “You shouldn’t waste food on me.”
“You thought you were going to die last night,” scolded Kisten, more harshly than he’d intended. “You’ll definitely die if you don’t eat, so shut up and do as I say.”
“Well when you…put it so charmingly….” Asif coughed.
Kisten helped him eat his soup, holding the communal spoon to his lips. It took a long time. At one point, he looked up to see Aros watching him. The lieutenant’s face was unreadable. Asif coughed again. When he’d finished, Kisten asked him if he wanted some more. There were extra servings. Asif shook his head. “This is more than I’ve eaten…in months.”
“Glutton.”
Asif patted his hand gently. “Thank you.”
After Asif had fallen asleep, Kisten joined the others outside.
“I still think you’re a spy,” muttered Walid, but without much conviction.
“Yes,” agreed Kisten, “I’m fattening you up to interrogate you.”
They debated what to do with the rest of the soup, and eventually decided to sell it. As Ali pointed out, they never knew when they’d need money—for medicine, or bribes, or who knew what else. So they sold the remaining three servings at two darics a serving. Ali claimed that they should have asked more—they could have sold it if they’d asked ten—but Kisten vetoed the suggestion as immoral and, surprisingly, Walid backed him up.
An hour later, Kisten slipped the precious funds into his boot for safekeeping. His was they only pair not riddled with holes. The enclosure was full of night sounds: men ambling about, men pissing, the low moans of the sick and dying. During the day, his every movement was to the undertone of thousands of murmured voices, voices that died away at night into…this. Occasionally, someone cried out during a dream.
Guards paced back and forth along the top of the stockade, silhouetted in the light from the bonfires. “Post number one,” a voice called out, “nine o’clock and all is well!” A second later it was repeated. “Post number two, nine o’clock and all is well!” And again, and again, as the assurance that all was well circled the barricade. Every half hour, the time was sounded. All is well. Indeed. Kisten snorted, but halfheartedly. The guards weren’t trying to serenade the prisoners to sleep, out of the goodness of their hearts; they were trying to ensure that their own numbers remained awake.
He leaned back in the dirt, felt the trickling sensation of a louse crawling down his neck and flicked it away. Bugs had protein; maybe he should try eating them. There was still no moon, and he found himself counting the stars. There were different stars, here, of course; he didn’t know the names of the constellations, or even if the constellations had proper names. He hoped so. As a child, he’d regularly snuck out of the house to see the stars. His favorite viewing spot was the fields, which were some miles distant. He’d lie down amongst wheat that rippled like the ocean in the nighttime breeze, its stalks a blacker black against the sky. He’d dream about the stars, and the frontier, and the things he’d find.
He picked off another louse and resettled himself in his dirt bed. Life at Palawan was like something out of a bad opera: too melodramatic to even evoke pathos. When he should feel sad, he wanted to laugh. When he should laugh, he felt nothing. He was too numb to appreciate his own pathos! He smiled crookedly. What a ludicrous situation he was in.
Sabihah, his sister, had been gravely ill as a child. Kisten used to sit on the edge of her hospital bed and read to her and, occasionally, help her eat her soup. They’d been closer, then, before horror at her own family’s peculiarity had driven her into the arms of the most boring man alive. Sabihah had liked adventure novels; so had Kisten. He’d even read her the occasional romance, marveling as he did so that anyone could stomach this tripe. He hadn’t seen Sabihah for a long time. She’d found religion as an adult and was convinced that the hedonistic, dissolute wreck of a brother who’d taken a leave of absence from school to come home and read to her was going to Hell. He’d never met his nephews. He would have liked to; he liked children. He’d written to Sabihah and she, when she bothered to respond, had informed him that he was a bad influence.
As, of course, was Keshav.
Keshav…where was he?
Kisten had made no attempt to escape because, so far, there was nowhere for him to escape to. Even in the best of health, he’d be hard pressed to travel more than seven hundred miles on foot and without assistance. This deep into rebel territory, every hand would be turned against him. He could speak the local language, but he co
uldn’t pass for a full-blooded Charonite. His eyes gave him away. And what about Aros and the others? He couldn’t very well leave them behind. Asif was, at present, too weak to do more than roll himself over and that with great effort. No, he had to wait until he had outside help. Someone would come for him—Keshav, or someone he’d sent—and give him a way off this accursed rock.
Kisten drifted into, if not true sleep, then at least oblivion.
In the morning, he checked on Asif. Asif chatted with him, and seemed more animated than he had in a fortnight.
“His color’s improved,” Kisten told Aros during role call, when he was describing the experience.
Aros grumbled noncommittally.
“I think he’s getting better. I wonder if we should attempt more soup.”
“We?” The lieutenant shot him a jaundiced look. “Keep it up,” he advised, “and you’ll be right there on the ground beside him.”
The ration wagon rumbled along its pitted track. A fresh batch of prisoners had just arrived that morning and, watching them, he was painfully aware of how he must have looked to Asif. Scrawny and ill-fed, they looked like fatted calves to Kisten: young and glistening with health. Some would be dead before the next sunrise, murdered in their sleep by bandits. Some would die from breathing in the diseased air of the swamp, or from drinking the water. And some would just die. They looked around themselves, wide-eyed at horrors that Kisten took for granted to the point where he no longer saw them.
He really did think that Asif seemed a little stronger, and a little more alert. He’d sat up on his own to eat a few mouthfuls of Kisten’s cornmeal mush, and had praised the soup again as having been the best meal he’d ever eaten. Perhaps tomorrow, he’d be able to join them for roll call. And then he could eat, and then he’d get better. There wasn’t much to their rations, this was true, but Asif had lasted this long. He was stronger than he looked. He could last a few weeks longer, and then help would come and with it, food and medical care.