Navran awoke screaming. His legs thrashed against wet stone. His hands flailed wildly, beating on slime-covered walls and bloodying his knuckles. His voice echoed back at him in a cacophonous howl. He blinked. He saw nothing. He blinked again. And then he remembered.
He was in the dungeon beneath the imperial palace. He saw nothing because there was nothing to see except darkness. If he did see something, it would mean he was going mad. Was he going mad yet? It would be a relief if he were.
He looked up. Still nothing.
He was alone. He was never getting away.
His cage had originally been a cistern in the lowest keeps of the palace, or so he inferred. The cistern was mostly empty, but water still condensed on the stones and trickled to the bottom, where a few inches of foul water stank around his ankles. The walls were damp and slick with grime. The bottom was mud, which churned up a bilious, sulfurous odor when he stepped. He had screamed and kicked when the Red Men brought him, but they had forced him into the hole, and when they let him go he slid, shredding fingernails and the flesh of his toes all the way to the bottom. A wooden cover sealed the top. When they first put the cover over the hole, he could see a rind of torchlight around its edges, but in a few minutes it shriveled away. Then the darkness was total.
He had yelled and beaten the walls until he was hoarse. No one answered. Eventually he slept. He had no idea how much time passed. Waking was like sleeping, full of nothing but darkness and nightmares.
Many-legged things crawled over his hands. He shook them off, sputtering curses. He pissed and shit in the muck of the cistern. He slammed his head against the stone, hoping to knock himself out, fall into the water, and drown. When he failed at that, he fell into the water and sobbed and licked at the hot blood that dribbled down from his forehead.
Time passed. He lapped at the trickles of water on the wall to slake his thirst. He thought of trying to catch and eat the many-legged things crawling on the walls and mucking up the water, but failed to lay a hand on them. He rested his head against the wall and waited to die.
He slept.
He dreamed.
“Navran!” Father shouted. “You piece of goat shit. Where are you?”
The pile of firewood beside the house hid him from Father’s view. He crouched and peeked through the gaps between the sticks to see if Father was getting close. The man’s face was red and inflamed with rice beer, and he held the halves of the sickle handle in his hands.
“You keep hiding, boy, and I’ll break your bones like you broke this sickle.”
Navran pressed himself closer to the mud wall of their house. On the far side of the woodpile, he heard Father stumble in his drunkenness and fall to the ground. He swore loudly and smacked the halves of the handle against the ground, then rumbled to his feet, cursing and yelling down the road. Navran let out his breath.
An insect ran over his hand. He reached suddenly to scratch it, but his movement made the sticks rattle. With a monstrous groan Father turned towards the sound and lurched around the corner. Stealth had expired—Navran jumped to his feet and ran.
He didn’t get far. Father’s long arms snagged him by the wrist then jerked him around to stare into Father’s spittle-flecked face. He grabbed Navran by the throat and squeezed.
“Do you have any idea how much a sickle handle costs to fix?” He shook Navran violently then threw him to the ground.
Navran choked and gasped for air. Father began to beat him with the splintered halves of the handle, screaming incoherently. Navran curled into a ball and covered his face. The blows battered the top of his head and ribs. He did not cry, though. He never cried.
Father stopped for a moment and grabbed Navran by the wrist, jerking him to his feet again. “You hiding down there on the ground? No, you look at me.” Father grabbed Navran’s jaw and jerked him around to face him.
His other fist punched Navran in the ear. An agonizing ringing exploded in Navran’s head, and he crumpled to the ground.
“You filthy, worthless child,” Father said, kicking him in the shins. “Go away and leave me alone.”
He threw the halves of the sickle handle to the ground and stomped into the village, his curses following him like a tail.
Mother meekly washed the wounds with goat milk and gave him a half a bowl of rice to eat. He drank four cups of water before he went to bed. Then he lay awake on his dirty reed mat until late in the night, when Father came stumbling through the door smelling of beer and collapsed next to the fire. A moment later he was snoring.
The moon was high in the sky, and sheep and goats bleated outside the window. Navran crept forward and picked up his father’s leather beer flask where it had rolled from his hand. He tip-toed out the door and found a spot in the shade where he could pour out the beer. It fizzed and crackled as it soaked into the ground. Then he hitched up his dhoti and peed into the flask.
Once the flask was nearly half-full again, he screwed the cap on. Inside the house, he hooked the flask on the nail in the mud wall where it belonged, then lay down on his own mat in the far corner of the room. Aching and satisfied, he slept.
Navran woke up in darkness. He began to thrash his legs in a panic, splashing chilly water and muck against the walls. It smelled of urine and rot all around him. Then he remembered.
He had been dreaming or remembering. Was there any difference in the darkness? Memory and madness were one and the same.
His chest heaved for a few moments while he sat in the muck, then he lurched upright and felt the walls. There was the trickle of water. He pressed his lips against it and drank, licking the mold-covered wall until his thirst was slaked. Then he collapsed against the wall and cursed.
Sometime later he had to pee. The sound of the splashing trickle and the slight warmth spreading through the water around his ankles were the closest he came to pleasure in the darkness. He smiled.
“You know how to play sacchu?” the man said.
“Like how we played sheep knuckles back in Idirja?” Navran asked.
“Idirja?” The man laughed. “Where in Am’s asshole is that?”
“Up the river. I just got here—”
“You just got here?” The man smiled at Navran in a way that momentarily disarmed his wariness. “My name is Amitu. Yours?”
“Navran.”
There were three other men playing with the carved whale-tooth dice on the dirt floor of the guest-house, who barely looked up as Amitu rose and clasped Navran’s hand. Aside from the four gamblers, the only person in the guest-house was the owner, who was in the kitchen banging pots together. The smell of boiling rice soaked the room.
“So here’s how it goes. First, you put a chit into the pot and throw a pair once…” Amitu explained the rules and the technique in rapid-fire jargon which Navran barely understood. After racing through it once, he suddenly looked surprised, and then leaned close to Navran and asked, “Do you have money?”
“Yes,” Navran said, clutching the parcel to his chest. He had stolen it three days ago. It was Mother’s stash, the one Father didn’t know about, where she piled up whatever spare coins she could scrape together. At midnight he had dug it up from its place at the corner of the house, wrapped the handful of coins in a wool rag, and disappeared.
“Then you’re fine. Cakthi’s with you and you can double that tonight.”
He played. And to his surprise, he won. The little pile of coins got half as big again, and when he looked up from the game the moon was up and the guest-house was half filled with people eating rice and glancing at the gamblers.
Amitu grinned at him. “You have fun?”
Navran stood up. “Yes, but I should get some sleep. I’ve been walking for twelve days.”
“You’re not staying here, are you?”
Navran hesitated. “I was going to.”
Amitu shook his head. “Listen, we play here, but I can get you a better place to sleep. You come with me?”
“Sure,” Navran said.
They descended the stairs in front of the guest-house and walked a few blocks. The other gamblers followed them in a loose knot. Then, once the moon hid behind the crown of a temple, a blow hit him on the back of the head. The world spun and fists battered him on every side. It only lasted a moment, and then he hit the ground with a grunt.
Amitu and the other three ran cackling down the alley, his money jangling in their fists.
He crawled through alleys cursing and fuming until he found a covered nook. He stared up at the moon as it crawled through the sky, until at last sleep found him.
When he woke up, he realized that if he stopped drinking the water, he would die sooner. How long would it take? Two days? Three days? Three days with a dry tongue, rasping and hacking and craving a taste of liquid as it crawled down the wall next to him.
He would never make it. He was too weak to die like he wanted to.
It would be starvation, then. It would take longer, and be just as painful, which is why he deserved it. Mercy was not for him.
Perhaps Ruyam and the Red Men would have pity on him and simply kill him directly.
The eastern sky was turning filthy gray when a boot in his side woke him up. He opened his eyes. The haze of beer had receded, leaving a headache like a demon’s bite, and his bones creaked from the cold and the stone underneath him.
“Get up,” the voice said. “What are you doing here?”
A face emerged from the blurry gloom. An Uluriya man, his long hair untied, still dressed in the salwar kameez in which he had slept.
“I was sleeping,” Navran said. “I collapsed here. The stars upon you, will you help me?”
“Get out, you unclean animal.”
“Please, by the stars. I follow Ulaur….”
Contempt curled the man’s brows. “You lie. How did you get here?”
“I have no money. I was robbed months ago. Please, believe me—”
“Where is your family?”
“Far upriver. Idirja.”
The disgust written on the man’s face softened into curiosity. “Idirja! That far? Why don’t you go back to them?”
Navran stared at him with a cold, horrified expression.
“Fine,” the man said after a moment. “Come inside.”
The house was a modest tailor’s home, with a tile floor beyond the front door and a tiny walled courtyard beyond. The man and his wife gave Navran a laver to purify himself, though it had been so long that he had to stop and remember how. The ablutions in his own household had been so perfunctory and so sloppy that he was afraid he would offend them if they saw how he did it, but fortunately no one intervened. Then, with clean hands and clean clothes, they let him sit at their table and eat rice and soft cheese. They asked his story, and he gave it. Most of it. He left out the money he stole from his mother, and his own drunkenness and gambling. The rest was the truth.
The wife berated her husband for his poor hospitality, and she insisted that Navran spend the night. He sat listlessly in their courtyard all day, helping the man cut cloth when asked but otherwise enjoying the unusual feeling of having food in his stomach.
The man’s tailoring knives were fine, well-honed bronze with ivory handles. He couldn’t help but notice them. Worth as much as anything else in the house, he guessed.
That night he slept, but the betrayal in his blood woke him before dawn. He hated it, but he knew what he was going to do. He found the knives where the man had hidden them, under a mat in the courtyard. He hid them inside his shirt, where the bronze bit into his ribs with cold vengeance. His steps to the door were silent, and he escaped.
At dawn he sold them then he found a guest-house and drank until he passed blissfully into unawareness.
He awoke, desperate with thirst, and pressed his lips against the trickle on the side of the wall. He licked the putrid stone, getting every drop of moisture he could find, then he collapsed to the bottom of the well. The briny muck sloshed over his thighs.
How long had it been since he had tasted beer? As many days as they had marched him up from Jaitha, plus as many days as he had been in the dungeon, however many that was. This was as long as he had been sober in years. He hated it.
Time passed. He might have slept, but sleeping, waking, and remembering had all grown hard to distinguish.
Scraping and footsteps above him. Boots stamped through puddles. Voices echoed. Yellow light etched the circle of the well above him. He had already seen visions and heard voices, so at first he didn’t stir.
Wood scraped over stone. A torch appeared directly above the well. Its brightness scalded his eyes. He shouted and put his hands up. A curse echoed down the well, and a harsh voice commanded, “Grab the rope.”
A rope? He squinted and saw a cord dribbling down the green walls and drooping into the water. He leaned forward and grabbed it. The man above heaved the rope up, but the coarse fibers ripped through his hands and burned his palms. He cried and fell back into the muck.
“Wrap it around your arms, idiot,” the voice above commanded.
The rope descended again. Navran attempted to do as instructed, wrapping the rope multiple times around his forearm and clutching the mass to his chest like a monkey seizing a branch. When the rope was heaved again Navran began to rise. The skin of his shoulders scraped against the slime-covered walls of the well, and his knees banged against the stone. But he rose.
When he reached the lip of the well he squirmed over the top and collapsed onto the muddy floor of the dungeon. He gasped for air, and made no resistance as two Red Men bent over him and unwound him from the ropes.
“Let me see him,” a new voice commanded. Ruyam’s.
Navran heaved himself up to his knees. A swish of silk brought Ruyam before him, the green and turquoise of his robes dancing in the flickering torchlight. Ruyam knelt and seized Navran’s face in his long, bony fingers.
“Eat,” he said. He thrust a soggy crust of roti into Navran’s hands.
Navran stared at the food. Was it a trick? Poisoned?
He didn’t care. He shoved the roti into his mouth, chewed it once, and swallowed.
“Now watch,” Ruyam said. He held a leather flask in his hand, which he unstoppered and waved in front of Navran’s nose. The sweet, yeasty odor of rice beer came out.
“Do you want this?” Ruyam asked.
Navran watched the bottle. His tongue was suddenly parched. He wanted it more than anything. He could almost taste it now. He nodded.
“Say it. Do you want this?”
Navran swallowed saliva and attempted to speak. His throat was dry, and words came out in a rasp. “Yes. Please.”
Ruyam smiled. He tipped the flask forward and began to slowly dribble the liquid out onto the stones.
Navran leapt forward and began to lap the liquid up off the stones. It was so good. He kissed the filthy ground and sucked the beer from the dirt. He had never tasted anything so good. The stream of liquid dripped into his beard, and he soon found himself licking precious drops from the oily strands of his hair.
“Like a dog,” Ruyam said. “You at least knew to take roti like a man, but you’ll lick beer off the stones like an animal.”
He didn’t care. Let Ruyam insult him.
“Put him back in the hole.”
“Wait,” Navran said. He would drink beer out of the dirt, but he wouldn’t go back down. “Please, anything else.”
“Put him in.”
The two Red Men grabbed him by his biceps and dragged him backwards. He batted at them and squirmed. “No, please. I beg you.”
“Enjoy the darkness,” Ruyam said. Navran spread his arms and legs and kicked, but the Red Men forced his knees to bend and lowered him into the hole. A brief drop, and he splashed back into the fetid wastewater.
“Wait,” he shouted. “Don’t leave.”
They laughed. With the scrape of wood the cover was fitted back over the well, and the light again reduced to a yellow ring. Their footsteps receded. The light died.
Darkness reigned.