Three days later, the unexpected happened. I was awoken some time after dark by the scratching of a key in the lock of our cell, and then the door was eased open. I had a whirl of wild speculations, from a secret cull of the inmates by the Wardens to the stealthy entrance of Gaki (but somehow I thought he would not need a key). Then I saw that there was a prisoner at the door, a man unknown to me. Lucian and Onager were up and ready, and a strange and exciting thought hit me.
“Is it a breakout?” I asked them. “Are we free?”
There was general laughter and derision, and Lucian explained it to me. Essentially, one of the prisoners had got hold of the keys to this stretch of cells. It happened sporadically. Sometimes the keys were stolen, but, more often, a Warden leant the keys out in return for some service, or perhaps something uncovered in the swamps. This place had been a city, long ago in the unremembered depths of time, and valuables could still be found. The Wardens, on leave in Shadrapar, would sell these trinkets for a little extra cash. In return, one section of the Island would get a night’s freedom; a chance to brawl and gamble and gossip and do all the things the prisoners liked to do. This was all strictly against the Marshal’s rules, of course, and if he decided to come down and investigate then somebody would be for it. For this reason, according to Lucian, he tacitly allowed it to happen. They gave him an excuse to destroy any particular individual he felt deserved it, or to order some random deaths. Not that he needed a pretext, but he was a man who loved rules and laws and due process, however nonsensical and self-imposed. I suspect it made him feel righteous to catch us in the act of defiance.
Each Outing, as they were called, was a lottery, depending on whether the Marshal knew and whether he was feeling withdrawal from murderous tyranny. With the Wardens and even the Marshal in on this peculiar arrangement, I think only the Governor, way up on the top floor, was ignorant of the business.
You might think that, with this risk hanging over every such gathering, the inmates would not chance it. You have probably not been caged up like we were; it was worth it for just a little freedom. Our stretch of cellway was sealed off by other doors, to which we did not have the keys, but maybe half a hundred prisoners were abruptly free to gather in a largish storeroom and talk, and mingle, and play games.
The Island had an ecosystem; every place does. On the bars and slats of the Island there grew a kind of tough, greenish mould or lichen that was too hard to scrape off with a fingernail. It was soft enough to make food for a variety of little mites and silverfish. These, in turn, were stalked by amphibious beetles the size of my little finger’s top joint. These were the prey of whip-scorpions and spiders the size of my thumb, and of a kind of mantis-thing that could change colour to match the lichen perfectly. All of these invertebrate predators went to feed a kind of gecko that had huge black eyes in a wedge-shaped head and could cling upside down to ceilings. The lizard was food for the prisoners, who were in turn food for a number of lice species and several internal parasites I do not wish to talk about. In addition, the lizard was a good pastime, or so I was assured.
The mantids, spiders and whip-scorpions were all pressed into service as duellists: placed in a ring in pairs and not allowed out until they had found each other and grappled in mortal combat. The winner got a meal. The winner’s owner, and anyone who bet on it, got their share of whatever was being bet. Sometimes it was food, sometimes services. Sometimes it was just a favour in the future. There was a great deal of deficit spending, but that was endemic in our culture.
The geckos, we raced. If you saw a promising-looking beast and there was an Outing in the near future, you swiped it and hid it. They were docile enough to be stored down the trousers, and if the Outing was cancelled one could always eat the prospective racer. Some inmates had developed a keen eye for a good bet, and would spend ages sizing a reptile up before plucking it from its roost.
The little athletes would be placed at equal distance from a set point, and shown some morsel, usually an insect with most of its legs pulled off. Released, they would be off. Even if you had nothing to bet, it was quite gripping to see a dozen lizards of various colours making a determined dash for a crippled bug. I may not have mentioned it, but we were starved for entertainment. It was a time-honoured tradition to release the winners at the end of the night. The losers were frequently used to pay off debts, consumed or freed as the new owners willed it.
It was all a far cry from Shadrapar, where animals of all kinds were absent or exterminated as vermin. Here on the Island, surrounded and invaded by nature, we used it to our advantage.
Of course, at the beginning of my first Outing it was all I could do to accept that I could go out of my cell. Hermione, too, took a bit of persuading, and Lucian had to go through the whole rigmarole of explanation again before she believed it. Lucian was being very attentive to Hermione, sensing a softer touch than Onager.
I wandered into the storeroom and saw the end of a brutal fight to the death between a pair of largish spiders. There was a great deal of rejoicing from over half the watchers, and the others grumbled and paid up or made promises. Just as in real life, of course, debts were only as good as your means of enforcement. Just as in real life, again, debts could be used as currency. If someone owed you something, then you could pay your own debt by passing on the debt that was owed to you. It was a good idea to pay quickly, because you never knew who would end up holding your marker. I think that was another reason that Lucian made so much of Hermione. He wanted people to see that he had a big, strong friend to pass bad debts on to.
After the fight, I was introduced to our benefactor, the holder of the keys, a young-looking man named Thelwel. At the time I noted him only very briefly, seeing a neat, decent-looking man distinctly out of place amongst the riot of gambling inmates. He had a perpetually hairless face, like me – a modification fashionable back home, so that my hair was past my shoulders by then, but my chin was as smooth as a child’s. If Thelwel looked like anything, it was a junior librarian. He will have a particularly important part to play in my story, and he had an unusual secret, which I will eventually share with you, but when I first met him it was only in passing. All I understood was that he had been out on the boats all week and found a few artefacts that our Warden liked. I wondered at that, because it was the stone-faced man who hated us all very much. Perhaps stone-face had his own debts to pay. Perhaps he was just trying to work off his evil karma with a gesture of generosity. I never knew.
I, of course, had nothing to wager, caught off guard by the whole business. I did not participate in any of the games but watched several. Lucian introduced me to various curious inmates as “The Professor” but I put a stop to that as quickly as I could. I didn’t see why I should be lumbered with “The Professor” just because I had an education.
I did not see Shon. He was on a different stretch and had not been released. Gaki was also notably absent. I suspect that his cell had not been unlocked, although I did not check. Gaki was quite capable of coming and going as he pleased. He didn’t need charity from the Wardens.
Several of the prisoners had heard in some vague way that I was of interest to the Governor. They had never met him; he was a kind of legend built from misinformation and invention. The inmates mostly believed that he had it in his power to free any prisoner with a word and a gesture. As someone apparently in with the Governor, I was therefore courted assiduously. I received a wide variety of offers, some dubious and others salacious. Even those that I might have accepted, I took with a pinch of salt. I know all about bad debts, after all. I was hardly of a physique to enforce any service that was promised to me.
Hermione was also the subject of some attention, and I don’t doubt that she had some interesting offers too. About half an hour into the Outing she floored one overenthusiastic inmate with a single slap and after that she was mostly left alone. She obviously considered everyone, with the possible exception of Lucian and myself, as her enemies. Thelwel told me later that he and Hermione had quite a conversation at around this point. He was always a good listener, though, and if anyone could win Hermione’s trust then it was him.
I became absorbed in the first of the great lizard races, then, and found it mildly enjoyable. Compared to most of my Island activities it was the height of culture. In the back of my mind, however, the last work of Trethowan festered, demanding attention. I wondered if the great man himself had raced lizards across this floor in his time. It would have been in character, from what I knew of him.
In all, it was rather a pleasant way to spend a night. No matter that we would all be sluggish and bleary-eyed the next morning (and many of us beaten because of it). No matter, too, the dire end of this night’s Outing. In all, it was good. It reminded me of Peter’s words concerning the Wardens and their lack of cameraderie. I will not claim that we were all brothers together, we prisoners, but in some strange way we had a better standard of living. We were already in as much trouble as we could be without actually being dead, and therefore could take ourselves less seriously.
There was a bout of mantis-baiting, and then another lizard race in which the winner won by more than a body length. The owner made a lot of his acquisition, and speculated idly about finding an equally fast lady lizard and setting up the first ever gecko-breeding stables. Someone else asked how you were supposed to tell a lady lizard anyway. Hermione put in that they were the ones that were too smart to get caught in the first place.
Bets were being taken for the next race. The winner of the previous one was entered quickly, at flat odds, and there was a battery of hopefuls ready to test themselves against him. It was actually quite a sharp game, because each time a lizard won, it ate, and the more it ate the less interested it was in running for the next meal, so a winner’s form declined through the evening, whilst a loser gained an extra edge from hunger. Betting on foot races was a common practice amongst Academy intellectuals, but I think even those dons would have been hard put to weigh the odds in our little games in the Island.
For some time I amused myself by trying to use my mental energies to fix the outcome of lizard races. It had no discernible effect. I could not at the time decide whether the lizards’ brains were too small; or whether I was not concentrating properly; or whether the entire business was just sham and hokery. The city and my studies seemed so far away. At around that time the fight started.
I had been bending my will on a small, yellow-spotted specimen, attempting to make up for its poor track record so far, when the first punch was thrown. It was considered very bad form to make trouble there, for reasons that will become obvious. Onager, however, was not a great respecter of traditions. The Outing had given him an opportunity too good to miss.
Onager, in common with all large and thuggish men, had a couple of large and thuggish friends on the same stretch as us, and of course they were out mingling just as we were. Also like all men of his size and temperament he had no compunctions about stacking the odds in his favour. One of his friends was a particularly ugly man named Tallan, and the other had a shock of dung-coloured hair, and I have entirely forgotten his name. Their target, needless to say, was Hermione. The extent of the plan, to my knowledge, was for all three to jump her and beat her senseless.
Even the simplest plans go wrong, especially when put together by the simplest people, and Onager was no Academy graduate. Anyone intending to start a small localised brawl in a room full of convicts is just asking for trouble. Trouble, naturally, came running at the call.
I am told that Onager threw the first punch, and that Tallan and friend were intended to hold Hermione’s arms behind her back to best receive it. I am dearly sorry that I missed the repercussions of this. Thelwel assured me that no sooner had Onager’s blow thudded dully against Hermione’s cheek than she woke up to what was going on and hit Onager with his own henchmen, sweeping her arms from behind her back, and taking the two men with her. All three fell in a heap, and Hermione wisely decided to kick one very hard in a delicate area. It was the shock-headed man, who would be unmistakable for the next week owing to his pronounced limp.
Of course, you could not have thrown a stone in that room without hitting two or three inmates, and three large convicts took a lot of other people with them. Most of those decided to hit whoever seemed most responsible. Many hit people who had been doing nothing save watching a race or cheering on a whip-scorpion. In a few moments, everyone had a piece of the action whether they wanted one or not. I sincerely hoped that the lizards and other assorted wildlife took the chance to creep into the gaps in the floor, because there was a great deal of trampling going on. Some of the prisoners were professional thugs, duellists and killers, and others were fiercely defending their amateur status. Still more, such as Lucian and myself, were just doing our level best not to be stomped. I think that I must have run literally from one end of the room to the other some ten or twelve times to keep out of harm’s way. All around me people were venting their aggression on any target that presented itself. A quiet den of gambling and vice had become a battlefield in the blink of an eye.
I remember seeing Lucian getting elbowed in the back of the head accidentally as some fighter geared up for another punch. Tallan, Onager’s ugly henchman, was hit in the eye by someone else. At least four people tried their luck with Hermione and got floored for it.
Thelwel, a pacifist, came through it all without landing a blow. He passed through the fray like a dancer and nobody laid a finger on him.
I remember being backed into one corner of the storeroom as Onager pounded away at someone. All around on the floor prisoners were shaking their heads groggily, or just playing dead and hoping not to be stepped on. From somewhere there was the distinctive sharp clap as Hermione slapped someone across the side of the head. Onager dropped whoever he was working on and turned to face her furiously. He had a cut above one eye and the bruises from the previous night had a new complement of friends. I expected him to lunge at her full length across the room. Instead he stopped dead still. So did everyone else. Hermione looked from Onager to the doorway almost disinterestedly, and folded her arms. I crept out from Onager’s shadow and saw that we had acquired an audience.
It was the Marshal, and he had with him some half-dozen Wardens. All of them had guns of one type or another, from shiny new flintlocks to older and deadlier devices I could not place. The expression on the Marshal’s face meant death.
It was a specific death, though. It was around now that the third of my near-death experiences occurred.
Shameless and spurious suspense, I know. I had not so much as met the Marshal since my induction into the Island. He had his mind on bigger prey. His hawkish eyes raked over us all and he said, “Lorgry.”
A man I had never noted before, a broad, bearded and anonymous creature, snapped his head up. I just had time to see the expression of hate and fear on his face before the Marshal shot him. It was a simple chemical projectile gun, of the kind that the ancients were so good at making. It made a mess of his head, certainly. The thought, inane as it was, came to me that it was a terrible thing to die with such a twisted expression on one’s face. That one look was his last will and testament.
“Well,” said the Marshal, almost in good humour. “I think that deals with the ringleader.” Needless to say, Lorgry had played no great part in any of the preceding events that I was aware of. He had simply attracted the prior ire of the Marshal and this brawl had given the Marshal the opportunity to call in that debt. I never did find out what he had done to seal his fate.
“Get these men back to their cells,” the Marshal ordered, and then held up a hand to stop the Wardens even as they moved in. “No. Fighting. Socialising. Forbidden things. I think we had best set some kind of example to prevent further chaos. Get me a troublemaker.”
The Wardens exchanged glances and one was about to ask the Marshal to specify when his gloved hand stabbed out blindly. It could have fallen on anyone standing, and I was close to the front now. Curiosity had gotten the better of me. When that deadly finger pointed my way my heart froze. But of course it was not me. Some quirk of fate had conspired to let a little justice into the stale heart of the Island. The Marshal was pointing at Onager.
The big man was obviously going to make a fight of it, although I would have thought he would have had enough of being beaten. One of the Wardens jammed the barrel of a pistol underneath his chin, the flint drawn back and a tense finger on the trigger. All the fight went out of Onager right away. He had that much sense.
“Take him Below,” was the Marshal’s cryptic sentence, and Onager was led away. Only later, when Lucian regained consciousness, would I understand what that meant. Only later still would I see why it was so terrible. Certainly, I would never see Onager again.