by P. J. Fox
“Fluids?” Kisten prompted, trying to get him to say it.
“Ah, male fluids.”
“Male fluids. Right. Is that a technical term?”
“God, Kit, you’re disgusting!”
“You’re the one telling me a story about lovelorn goats.”
Aros made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort. “The paddock started to smell, and my father started to demand an explanation of what exactly was going on in there. Our entire farm smelled of, um…”
“Male fluids?”
“Finally, I had to ask the vet for help. The vet was Sonam’s father. Which, trust me, was still better than going to my own father. Doctor Paras came over, as requested, and examined Aja. I asked him what was wrong, and why wasn’t she more interested in Deva’s advances? Should I return Deva to my friend and ask to borrow a different goat instead?
“Aros,” Doctor Paras said, straightening up, “this isn’t a female. It’s a wether.”
“You literally couldn’t tell the difference between its ass and its elbow.” Kisten was unable to contain his mirth, as cold and starving as he was. For some reason, the problems of goats seemed hilarious. There was something so mundane, so normal about the image Aros had created. Men fought wars and agonized over their own problems and in the meantime nature marched on. Realizing that put things in perspective. “Aros,” he said seriously, “someone needs to sit you down for a little chat about the birds and the bees.”
Aros glared.
“Didn’t your father explain anything to you?”
“Did your father explain it to you?”
The very concept was appalling. “No,” said Kisten, “the head groom did. While he was intoxicated. He gave us a very colorful series of examples, all of which involved the pastry chef.”
The next morning, they awoke to an ominous stillness. The enclosure had taken on a yellow cast, and a strange sort of breathless anticipation pervaded the air. Before the end of roll call, the sky had begun to darken as dense, sullen-looking clouds massed on the horizon.
Kisten watched nervously as they built ever upward. The wind began to pick up then, darting and gusting through the camp almost like a live thing. Their blanket almost blew away. A host of smaller clouds scudded before the larger like an advancing line of soldiers before a tank. He retreated under the blanket with Aros. This was no simple rainstorm, but the kind of destructive force that leveled towns and ruined entire fields’ worth of crops. If it had been sent in answer to Aros’ prayers, then Kisten didn’t want to meet the god responsible. He shuddered.
Beside him, Aros said nothing. His brief flirtation with his once typical cheer had ended and he was morose once more.
The skies opened.
It wasn’t like being rained on; it was like having bucket after bucket of water dumped on his head. Crashes of thunder broke over their heads and blue lightning stabbed down. The air crackled with electricity. The air was so filled with water that Kisten had to tilt his head forward and cover his nostrils with his hands to keep from breathing it in.
Their campground became a rushing torrent of debris-filled water. He felt like the rain was bruising him, it pelted him so hard. The swamp flooded next, overflowing its banks in a rush of human waste and other effluvia. The smell would have been appalling if the rushing water hadn’t beaten it back into the earth. Soon, the slow-moving creek looked more like the vast River Cerne that bisected Chau Cera.
The ground shook beneath them as the east wall of the stockade collapsed inward. Immense timbers as thick around as a man and taller than most houses whirled across the enclosure like toothpicks. Shots rang out in warning, as though anyone was remotely in a position to escape. Kisten could barely see his hand in front of his face. Panicked, some of the guards started shooting indiscriminately. To pass that way would be suicide; he stayed put.
Kisten had no idea how long the deluge lasted. All he knew was that it had better end, or he’d be drowned. Cries throughout the camp indicated that a number of prisoners already were.
The storm abated as quickly as it began, the clouds breaking up into nothing as a brilliant winter sun burst forth. Squinting against the glare, Kisten shaded his eyes with his hand. He’d never gotten used to the strength of the sun on this planet and it bothered him terribly.
Beside him, Aros rose shakily to his feet.
The sight before them was incredible. A dense fog, the likes of which Kisten had only ever seen clinging to the surface of the ocean at dawn, rose from the thousands upon thousands of soaking men. From their clothes, from their hair. Those who’d survived tried to be merry. Kisten only cursed their inability to conserve even a small fraction of that water. After a storm like that, what were the chances of another rainstorm between now and three nights from now? How far would he and Aros have to travel in the throes of dehydration?
And then it happened.
“Water!” someone yelled. “Water!”
He and Aros joined the throng surging toward the voice. It was near them, on the north side of the enclosure. “Water!” he yelled again. Voices answered back, asking him what water? Had some been saved after all, in a ditch or catchment? How long would it last? What unthought-of amount would be enough to satisfy the thirst of half a hundred thousand men?
Kisten stopped. Aros began to pray, but Kisten stayed silent. He didn’t have the words, and nothing he’d said would have been enough.
“A spring!” The speaker was a thin-faced Braxi. “A spring!”
Kisten absorbed the thrilling words. Before his eyes, gallon after gallon of crystal clear water shot into the air in a column and splashed down over the exposed rock. The rain had scoured away a channel at least ten feet deep in the mud, and the spring was at the bottom of it. It had been there all along, of course; that was why water had trickled into the depressions left by his boot heels as they sank into the spongy ground.
An excavation team couldn’t have done so much in so little time, even with the best equipment. What lay before him was, quite simply, impossible. A faint gust of wind blew water from the column in a fanlike spray, wetting Kisten’s face with a gentle mist. The guards had massed in a line across the collapsed wall, but no one cared. No one was even looking at them. Every man’s eyes were for that spring, and those lucky enough to have reached the front moved back so that others could come forward and have a look for themselves.
“This is a miracle,” said Aros quietly.
Men began sliding down the steep banks on either side of the gorge to fill up their cups and buckets and bring back water to those too weak to help themselves.
After that storm, Kisten believed in God. His faith would never be the source of comfort that it was for Aros, nor would it be as simple and unquestioning. But he’d keep it for the rest of his life.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Kisten sat in front of their lean-to, watching the guards drill holes in the ground in between the stockade wall and the dead line in the early morning light. The narrow strip of earth was overgrown with weeds, but even they couldn’t disguise the heaps of trash that various guards had dropped down off the walls. Sometimes they pissed down onto it, too; it smelled.
He hadn’t been able to concentrate on forming a plan as much as he’d have liked, because he’d been too busy trying to keep himself and Aros alive. But tomorrow night was the night.
He glanced over at Aros, and hoped he’d be up to the challenge.
Aros was lying prone on the ground, doing and saying nothing. His condition had deteriorated alarmingly over the past week. His gaze was still alert under his half closed lids, and he still had his moments of levity, but he’d been showing less and less interest in getting up in the morning. Or doing much of anything at all. Even the prospect of escape failed to excite him.
The guards were probing the earth in order to search for tunnels. At least one was always discovered on these expeditions. The prisoners responsible thought themselves very clever, digging day and night with knives
or whatever implements they had on hand. They tended to work mostly at night, on the supposition that the guards couldn’t see them then. In the morning, when the sun began to rise, they’d pour the telltale dirt from under their blankets or out of their haversacks—wherever they’d hidden it—into their pockets. Then, believing themselves to be attracting no notice, they’d slowly sprinkle the dirt around until it was gone.
Usually one of the sicker men was deployed to lie over the tunnel’s mouth. When those in charge of roll call asked to see him, they sometimes asked him to roll aside and sometimes didn’t care enough to bother. No one had ever escaped through a tunnel.
Palawan Prison was deep behind enemy lines. Most of the land around them was prairie, and there was no cover for miles in any direction. The rebels had the home field advantage, as well as the advantages of health, numbers, and bloodhounds. And speed. The fastest runner in the world couldn’t outrun one of the off-road vehicles that the rebels had appropriated from the Alliance. Kisten had watched them patrolling, while he’d been outside the stockade on burial detail.
No, a man had no hope once the rebels began looking for him.
He sat up straight. “That’s it!”
Aros roused himself from his stupor. “What’s it?”
Kisten glanced around to make sure no one was in earshot and then spoke quietly. “We’re both going to die.”
Aros scowled, annoyed. “Of course we’re both going to die, you nitwit.” He laid back down.
“No, that’s not what I mean.” Kisten motioned him to sit up, and come closer. “I have an idea.”
“Where have I heard that before.” Aros sighed and shut his eyes again.
Undaunted, Kisten laid out the details of the plan that he hoped would get them both out of Palawan, a plan that was still forming in his mind as he spoke. He and Aros were going to play dead and get themselves carried out of the stockade and thrown onto the dead pile. No one would be looking for them, because no one would realize that they’d escaped.
“Once the bodies have been tagged and numbered,” Kisten said, “no one counts them again. The guards on the burial detail don’t even know how many bodies there are supposed to be, because no one tells them. After the list of the dead is compiled, it’s delivered straight to the commandant.” He shook his head, the soldier in him disgusted. “No one communicates with each other, here.”
“Right,” said Aros, plainly unimpressed. “Someone’s apt to notice that we’re not dead.”
“No,” Kisten assured him, “they won’t. First of all, look at us.” He waved a hand to indicate his own sad condition. Aros looked even worse. “From where we are now,” Kisten said, “dead isn’t much of a stretch. And second, no one examines the bodies too closely—especially when they’re afraid of catching something.”
“But we’re not sick.” He coughed. Aros was sick.
Kisten held up his hand, silencing further complaint. “We’re going to be,” he said inscrutably. “And then we’re going to groan our last. We’ll ‘die’ after having wrapped ourselves up in our blanket, and they’ll carry us out like that. They won’t be able to see us too closely and trust me, they won’t want to. Everyone here is terrified of disease; we could be singing the imperial anthem and they’d probably chuck us on the pile just to get rid of us. But, just in case, having something wrapped around us will help to disguise our breathing.”
Aros nodded slowly, acknowledging that Kisten was right but just as plainly not caring. Increasingly, diseases of all kinds ravaged the prison. Prisoner and guard alike avoided anyone who so much as coughed or looked pale. In a break with tradition, they no longer stripped the bodies for fear of contagion. Neither their blanket nor their clothes would be disturbed. The plan was a risky one, and what slim chance it had of succeeding rested entirely on Kisten’s assumption that the specter of disease was enough to protect them from discovery.
It was a long shot, to be sure. But, Kisten believed, it was also the only shot.
“It’s a gamble,” said Aros.
“Everything’s a gamble.”
Aros was silent for a long time. One of the guards found a hole and let out a loud whoop. Kisten shivered and wrapped his arms around his chest. Even having grown up in a tropical climate, under normal circumstances he wouldn’t have found this weather to be particularly cold. But he was so skeletally thin that he felt almost like the wind passed right through him.
“I don’t think I can do it,” said Aros. “I’m…tired. Besides, I’d open my eyes, or twitch, or…something.”
“You can do it,” said Kisten. “You have to.”
They spoke no more of their plan. Aros, fatigued from their short conversation, went back to sleep. Kisten stayed where he was, watching the guards and thinking over his situation.
No one appeared to be paying the slightest attention, but they were all the same in this place. There was nothing else to do except study one’s neighbors; and too many of his fellow prisoners, by this juncture, were desperate enough to betray their best friends for even the hope of improved conditions. Kisten had seen men fall on each other over their rations, bludgeoning their former friends to death and for what—a scrap of rancid meat? Hunger destroyed even the strongest loyalties. No, there was no one here they could trust.
The sun rose higher and the drum beat for roll call. Kisten straightened up. If they were playing dead tomorrow morning, today’s rations were all the more important. This would, if all went according to plan, be the last time they’d eat until they were rescued.
He flicked a pebble at Aros, but Aros refused to move.
“Aros,” Kisten said irritably, “get up.” Roll call would also give them both a fine opportunity to show off their new ailment, too. As luck—or divine intervention—would have it, typhoid had been reported on the far side of the enclosure. The symptoms were easy to fake and the disease itself was highly contagious. Kisten was almost excited at the prospect.
Aros groaned. “Leave me alone.”
Kisten turned, surprised. Aros had been showing a marked lack of enthusiasm for food, lately, but—this? Only a few hours ago he’d been discussing escape. Well, Kisten amended, he’d been discussing escape and Aros had been lying there beside him like a lump on a log. His tanned skin had turned pallid, and his eyes seemed to have sunk back into his head.
Kisten wondered what to do. He couldn’t understand his own behavior, let alone anyone else’s. Since arriving at Palawan, he’d seen hundreds—maybe even thousands—of men do things that made absolutely no sense.
Afterwards, he’d look back on that day as the culmination of a process that had begun when he and Aros were first captured. His first impression of Palawan had been one of death. He couldn’t decide which was worse: the shocking privation all around him, the brutal treatment of the prisoners by the guards, or everyone’s total indifference to both. At first, he’d lived in a constant state of shock. After a few months, he found himself growing accustomed to his new home—to the point where death became so much a part of his life that its very ubiquity blunted his reaction to it. Kisten had never been an overtly emotional man, but in prison he’d grown numb. He’d had to.
He and Aros were two products of the same process: of becoming accustomed to death and, eventually, reconciling oneself to its inevitability. Kisten was always prepared for death, but Aros had passed that point. He’d grown indifferent to all death, including his own. He’d learn, later, that this process was a defense mechanism and the means by which the mind survived an experience like the one he’d had. Which seemed to him to be a paradox: the same apathy that kept his friend’s mind from breaking was also killing him.
Kisten reminded him in low tones that, as they’d just been discussing escape, his refusal to budge showed a remarkable lack of ambition. “If you don’t eat something,” he advised, “come tomorrow morning you won’t be pretending. Now get up.”
Aros waved him off. “I’m too tired.”
“You were fine
a few hours ago, you fool, so you can’t be that sick now.”
Aros cracked a gummy eyelid. “What does it matter? I’ll just lie here and rest for awhile, until it’s time for us to go. There’s nothing a cube of rancid meat can do for me, anyway.”
His hand dropped down to his chest, and he shut his eyes again.
Even those most charitably inclined toward Kisten would never have described him as naturally empathetic. He wasn’t thoughtful, and he wasn’t kind. And although time would bring maturity—and perhaps already had—he’d never fully lose his keen sense of his own interests or his consuming need for control. But the other side of that coin was that he blamed himself when things went wrong. He still regarded Asif’s death as a personal failure. If he’d thought of the soup sooner, if he’d shared his own rations…the list went on. He punished himself with it in the small hours of the night.
He glared at Aros. They’d come this far, he’d be damned if the bastard would die on him now.
Digging his bony fingers into the lieutenant’s equally bony arms, Kisten hauled him. “If you don’t eat something, you’re going to die. Is that what you want?”
“I don’t care!”
“What about your little sweetheart?” Kisten demanded. He could not for the life of him dredge up that woman’s name. Sahar, Sarim, Sussan, something like that. He had enough trouble with the names of the women he was sleeping with. “She’s waiting for you, isn’t she, back in that hateful little hamlet? Are you just going to abandon her?”
“She never liked me as much as I liked her,” Aros complained. “She’ll find some nice rug merchant, if she hasn’t already….”
“So you want to die a virgin?”
“I told you, I am not a virgin!”