by P. J. Fox
For a soup dipper, he’d riveted a piece of pail hoop that had been tossed away by the guards to the side of a condensed milk can that had also been discarded as trash and washed up in the swamp. Kisten continued to break the thin ice and go scavenging, although these days not too many of the other prisoners joined him. He’d dredged up quite a few treasures, though. The rivets he’d made from a couple of local coins. He’d pounded his old and almost useless chisel through the center of each with his makeshift hammer. That project occupied several days, and nearly resulted in a serious puncture wound to his thigh. He could feel his bones, now, through the skin, and had no desire to find out what the effect of a puncture would be without much padding to cushion it.
Since the fire only lasted so long, he placed a piece of someone’s tattered woolen jacket across the top of the pot to keep the heat in. Not that the temperature of the soup mattered, of course; people would eat it no matter what. But in the cold, a little warmth would be nice.
“I’m going to market square, to sell this soup. Do you want to come?”
Aros shook his head miserably.
“Well too bad. Get up.”
Aros got up. He followed Kisten like a wraith through the rain.
Selecting a spot, Kisten sat down. He didn’t care that he was sitting in the mud; there was nowhere else to sit. Aros sat down beside him. After a minute or so, he spoke. “What are we doing?” he asked.
“We’re indulging in the Bronte instinct for trade.”
“No, I mean—what are we doing?”
Kisten shrugged. He didn’t know. Their time was running out, and he still hadn’t found a way out of the compound.
Soon, haggard-looking men began to line up. Kisten couldn’t decide if his shame was for them or for himself. There wouldn’t be enough soup for all of those who’d come to purchase it. The idea that he might have saved one man from starvation was never as real as the look of despair in the eyes of the man who didn’t get a bowl. Always, there was one: the man directly behind the man who purchased the last of whatever was on offer. Kisten could hardly bear the experience, and would have got out of the soup trade to avoid it but for Aros.
Aros was weakening at an alarming rate. Kisten had told him about the message in the hopes that Aros would be able to come up with an escape plan where Kisten had, so far, failed. That hope would motivate him to access whatever stores of strength he had left.
Kisten had also been thinking about what he’d do, when he did escape. He was always careful to think of the event in terms of when rather than if. He refused to admit the possibility of failure. Initially, he’d planned on having his scars removed. Over the last few months, he’d decided to keep them. The puckered burn marks and angry lash lines on his back, as well as the mass of scar tissue from the bullet wound were marks of character.
Beside him, Aros grumbled unintelligibly.
He sold their last bowl of soup to a soldier from Tara who paid for it with his last daric. He was nearly naked, having lost most of his uniform to the thugs on his first night inside the enclosure. Seeing that there was no more soup, the rest of the line melted back into the rain and vanished. There were so many of them. Worse than their despair was their acceptance.
Kisten invited the soldier to sit with them. His name was Rafiq and he’d recently turned twenty—or so he thought. Each planet, of course, had a different calendar. A standard Bronte year was slightly shorter than a year on Charon II. Aros gnawed on his bread and Rafiq sipped his soup in silence. It was, Kisten thought, terrible soup but at the moment it tasted ambrosial. They were all soaked through to the skin.
“I miss home,” Rafiq said quietly.
“So do I,” said Kisten.
“I wonder if I’ll ever have children,” mused Aros. Kisten started, surprised. Aros hadn’t spoken much, lately, and hardly at all since roll call. Except to complain, which wasn’t like him.
“Do you want children?” Kisten asked, hoping to draw him into conversation.
“I think so.”
“Children are nice,” said Rafiq.
Kisten said nothing. When Kisten had been Rafiq’s age, he’d been snorting bottle caps full of rum through his nose. Had his birthday come and gone? It must have; he’d been almost halfway through his twenty-eighth year when he was captured, which meant he must be twenty-nine.
Rafiq shivered incessantly from the cold. Kisten wished he had something to give the man, but he himself was barely clothed. Between them, he and Aros only had the one blanket; their other blanket had been stolen. He stared aimlessly into the distance. None of them had the energy to talk. Even thinking of something to talk about seemed almost too challenging to contemplate. Kisten stared down at his hands. His skin was the same sickly white as the belly of a dead fish. His nails were broken and grimed.
Eventually, Rafiq bid them goodnight and wandered off.
Kisten collected their bucket, ladle, blanket square and two tin cups and, bending, helped Aros to his feet.
“I still don’t like you,” said Aros, leaning heavily against him.
“That’s alright,” replied Kisten, “because I don’t like you, either.” The interchange had become a sort of ritual between them, its meaning less important than the comfort to be had from repetition. Their mutual regard—or lack thereof—was their only bond. Reminding themselves that at least some bond existed helped them both feel less alone.
Aros lay under the blanket, if not asleep then at least silent. Kisten sat up next to him for a long time, listening to the noises of the night: groans, cries, the incessant patter of the rain. From far in the distance came the low, mournful baying of the bloodhound gangs. Someone had tried to escape, then. People tried all the time, but to the best of Kisten’s knowledge no one had ever succeeded. At least not by the obvious routes. He’d heard rumors about a man supposedly bribing one of the guards, but he had a hard time crediting the truth of such a suggestion. Anyone possessing sufficient money or skills to effectuate such an enormous bribery would be far too valuable. The guards liked to milk the prisoners for all they were worth, only losing interest after every resource had been exhausted.
There were prisoners who did things for the guards, of course. There were in any institution. Usually, the guard in question accepted whatever…favor the prisoner had to offer and ignored his request anyway. After all, what could he do about it? Complain? If Kisten thought it would work, he’d seriously consider pleasuring any number of guards in return for passage through the stockade.
That he managed to view the idea so dispassionately after what he’d been through said something about his mental state. He’d gotten to the point where nothing was more important than finally escaping from this hellhole. What was one more degradation if it meant that he could finally leave?
He hadn’t been unaware that these sorts of things happened to men. A couple of years at Ceridou had taught him more than he’d ever wanted to know about the tortured complexities of male sexuality. The need for love had no gender, and there were some among his classmates who yearned so desperately for someone to touch, to hold, to share their secrets with that they’d accept whatever comfort there was and wherever—and by whomever—it was offered. In those cases, circumstances rather than natural inclination dictated his classmates’ choices. And there were cases where, if not forced, then boys had been more than gently coerced. Kisten, however, had never heard of this happening without at least some purposeful encouragement.
But he, despite what some had termed an unnatural relationship with his brother, had never found men attractive. He didn’t know how to feel about himself now that these things had happened, and so he’d done his best to avoid considering the topic at all. He’d grown up in a culture where gender roles were strictly defined, and on Brontes no man was allowed to be vulnerable. Which, of course, was part of what made sexual assault such a terrible form of torture. A woman was supposed to be vulnerable; a man, on the other hand, was supposed to be strong. A leader. If o
ther men knew, would their view of him change?
And what of that man’s concubines—or his consort? If he could be brought to such a low point, who would protect them? Would they still want to be with him? For women, there was support and, at least ideally, some measure of understanding from the men in their own families and from society at large. For men, there was a conspiracy of silence.
Gradually, fractured memories from those first few months had begun returning to him. He’d watched as other men were taken from the long line of airless, cramped cells, interrogated, and brought back. Then, from the corner of his own wretched hole, he’d heard the screams. He’d watched as one man died right in front of him. His wounds had been…horrible.
Men weren’t simply raped. They were beaten, stabbed, burned with acid, forced to sit with their legs spread over hot coals until the skin of their balls blistered and ran with pus, stretched on racks and tormented with bamboo shoots and tied down as white hot needles were slid under their skin. For a treat, they were forced to suck off long queues of stinking, laughing rebels who thought the whole thing great sport.
Kisten flicked the rain out of his eyes and shifted position. He’d been lucky, he realized with something like relief. There was no permanent damage. He’d seen, when he’d first been captured and later at Palawan, men who’d suffered far worse. One, who’d lived about six months, had left a trail of blood behind him wherever he went. Not like from a serious wound, just a spattering of drops from a hair-thin trickle that ran down his leg.
Somewhere, a shot rang out as some poor unfortunate stumbled into the pickets of the dead line. The guards, for all their vaunted watchfulness, shot indiscriminately and often wounded perfect innocents. A situation not helped by their tendency to load their guns with grapeshot, bits of shrapnel and God knew what else rather than proper bullets. Bullets, while accurate, were more expensive. Too expensive, some thought, to waste on prisoners.
And on that note, Kisten curled up in his ditch and tried to get some sleep.
He found the man from Tara in the gray predawn, when he brought his pot down to the swamp for a washing. He’d drawn his knees up to his chin in an instinctive effort to keep warm. He stared at the body for a long time before lifting it up and carrying it to the burial pile.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Kisten ignored the slow murmur of prayer coming from his campsite. In the past few months, impromptu prayer meetings had become increasingly common. There was nothing else to do, he supposed, and at least praying was one thing that Aros still showed enthusiasm for.
“Where else can a man look in his dire extremity?” Aros had asked him once.
Kisten had replied angrily that God hadn’t plunged his hands into raw sewage for a few scraps of wood or nearly lost an eye making buckets. God hadn’t done a damned thing, in fact. Aros had just smiled knowingly in a way that made Kisten want to knock him unconscious.
Today, his pious companion was listening with rapt attention to an emaciated man who looked seventy and was probably forty. He’d lost most of his teeth, but that didn’t stop him from sermonizing. He’d offered prayers over the body of the man from Tara—Rafiq, Kisten thought, or something like that—and Kisten supposed that at least he was sincere. Too many clerics, or would-be clerics, weren’t. Many of them seemed to view God as their personal imaginary friend: always supportive, never disagreeing.
Kisten tried focus his thoughts. Three more days. He still had no plan.
Twelve other unkempt, starving men were gathered around. The sergeant turned cleric’s slatted ribs were plainly visible through his open jacket. He’d lost his buttons in the mix.
“The Prophet tells us,” he said in a surprisingly strong voice, “that there are three individuals on whom God will not look come resurrection and one of those individuals is the man possessed of superfluous water who refuses to share.” He gestured toward the western gate, where the commandant often appeared. “Those who purchase a little gain at the cost of their duty to God and their fellow man shall perish.
“The Scriptures tell us, too, of God using the Prophet’s hand to strike a rock and so open a spring. I tell you, God must strike a rock at Palawan or we shall all perish from disease!”
He was right. It rained, but with a handful of cups and buckets between them the men—there were almost 50,000 now—were able to save precious little of it. The creek was drying up. Kisten himself was horribly thirsty. He thought back to the downpour of a week before and smiled slightly. Some men had, in their desperation, drunk from the horrible, undulating sludge beneath the ice. They were now dead. His hope had been to escape the enclosure before the situation with the water reached a crisis point, but it had been four days since the last rain. Two days since he’d had a decent drink.
“Let us ask Him to do this,” said the cleric, and bowed his head.
Kisten couldn’t understand praying to a God who’d let a place like Palawan exist. Aros prattled on about a divine plan and if Keshav were here he’d talk about karma, but Kisten couldn’t see any sense to the suffering around him. That boy from Tara had been twenty years old! What could he possibly have done, to bring this wrath down upon himself? Or, for that matter, Aros? Kisten had hardly led an exemplary life, but Aros might as well have been the Prophet himself.
“Men,” said the cleric, “when you awake in the night, offer a prayer for water and for deliverance from this disease. When you rise in the morning, do the same. At every opportunity, do the same.”
The men agreed that they would, and Kisten went back to pondering escape.
Later, having nothing else to do, he walked over to the east wall and watched the rebels repair the stockade. For about a month, he’d noticed that a number of the timbers near the east gate had been loosened and were sagging dangerously inward. The order to fix them came not from any fear that the prisoners might be crushed, but from recognition of the fact that a collapsed wall wasn’t much of a deterrent to flight.
Studying the problem as an engineer, Kisten thought that the probable culprit was poor drainage. If the stockade had been built in the same slipshod fashion as the other rebel-built structures he’d seen, the timbers hadn’t been countersunk very far or shored up properly. There were no dry wells or other drainage systems near the stockade that he’d been able to detect, and when the skies opened the rain rushed down the eastern slope—the stockade had, ill-advisedly, been built at the base of a hill—and battered the eastern wall.
He sat cross-legged on the ground, taking his mind off his thirst by ticking off the construction outrages before him. A great deal of sediment had been washed through the gaps in the wall—no weep holes had been placed and thus there was no release for the pressure of water against wood—and the timbers had settled out of line.
New timbers were heaved into position and the earth closely tamped in place. A detachment of guards pointed their carbines lazily into the enclosure, in case anyone got any ideas.
And then Kisten witnessed just about the craziest engineering blunder imaginable.
At long last, someone had decided to address the drainage problem. Kisten guessed him to be the foreman, seeing as the others more or less listened to him. He left some on the wall and ordered the others to begin digging what Kisten at first assumed was a culvert. A culvert, while not the best solution, would have at least been adequate—but no! The foreman had ordered his men to dig a wide, shallow trench pointing directly at the wall. The engineer in Kisten objected, even though these people were holding him hostage and certainly deserved no aid—nor did he plan to give them any. Never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake, as Keshav was fond of quoting. Still, he couldn’t help the perverse feeling of wanting to intervene.
When he returned to their camp, Aros seemed in a little better spirits than he had been. Kisten, relieved, entertained him with stories of life at court. Aros, in turn, shared his fascinating stories of animal husbandry.
“So you see,” he said, “being a young lad
of twelve or so, I assumed that since the goat had no, ah, package that it must be female.” Said goat had been a gift from a neighbor and had come with the unisex name of Aja. Aros, anxious to prove himself to his father, had volunteered to care for the goat himself and ultimately had visions of entering it into a pageant. “I’d win the pageant,” he continued, “and delight my father with the farming skills that even then I knew I had no intention of practicing.”
“Guilt?” asked Kisten.
“Oh, for sure.” Aros grinned. “I got a second goat, this one from a friend. See, my brilliant plan was to breed the two goats and so prove to all and sundry that I wasn’t a total loss.”
“So you’d already distinguished yourself,” said Kisten dryly.
“Since Aja was all alone in her own pen,” said Aros, “I thought she’d be happy to have a friend—and a male friend at that! But for some reason, she refused to accept his, ah, very willing romantic behavior. He’d prance up along side of her, rubbing his chin on her backside, and she’d just…run! Naturally, I was too embarrassed to explain this all to my father. Goats are supposed to love sex! The average goat will cheerfully mate with the nearest fencepost if no other option presents itself.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Eventually, I decided that enough was enough. If Aja was going to produce any kids by kidding season, then she’d better damn well get going! So, summing myself up as only a twelve year old can, I strode into the paddock and grabbed Aja by the horns.”
“Her friend must have been delighted.”
“Oh, yes, he was. Deva—that was his name—went to town and enjoyed himself so much that, in the week to come, he redoubled his efforts! Poor little Aja kept running all around the paddock.”
“He was just too much goat for her?”
Aros shot Kisten a flat look. “I became concerned that maybe goats mated for life and I simply hadn’t realized it. What if Aja had fallen in love at her last home and was now pining for her lost goat husband? In the meantime, Deva was marking every barn stall, fencepost, and water tank that he could get his beard on. You see goats”—virginal young Aros blushed scarlet—”spray their own beards with a combination of their, ah, fluids.”