I skipped back to my cell and forgot completely about Peter’s cover story of my having been beaten. I tried to explain to my fellow sufferers that I was just highly resistant to pain and that it hurt like hell on the inside, but they were having none of it. I honestly could not have cared less.
All this warm feeling lasted about an hour, insofar as I could judge, before the ubiquitous gloom of Below began to get to me. After all, I was no better off than before. Even so, some superstitious little part of me had decided that I would not have had such a meeting simply to be left to rot the next minute. I seemed to have developed a belief in destiny. Even Trethowan did not go so far as to toy with predestination, writing:
My discoveries here have proved that there is no pattern to the world save that which life makes. There is no such thing as inevitability so long as there is at least one living cell left. Whilst the unliving moves from health to decay by degrees, life is the chaos which grows and builds and moves from less to more organised forms, thus confounding the general trend of the universe towards entropy. Some ancient writers even claimed that life was the universe’s attempt at self-preservation.
Trethowan, of course, was fighting against the common belief of humanity that we were doomed and so why bother? Perhaps he would have looked kindly on my sense that I was destined for something better than Below. Trethowan was a seeker after hope, after all. Hope that even with the sun expiring daily above us, things could somehow change for the better.
*
Later we had another visitor to Below, this one not a conversationalist.
I first became aware of it simply through the reaction of my fellow prisoners. There was a kind of ripple of alarm from the cells down the hall. It was nothing so much as an exclamation, barely even a sound. Rather, it was a sense of movement, of each man in turn shrinking back from something and freezing into complete quiet and silence. It was a prey reaction, as Trethowan would have said.
I looked into the gloom and saw nothing, even though there was a good scattering of sunbeams lancing through our perpetual dark. Still I heard the ripple of revulsion, and it was getting close to me. Then something crossed a shaft of light. All I saw was the movement, at first. Then there was another flicker, and I had the impression of something stick-like poling forward, and then another, and then…
Under the faint sunlight it looked nut-brown, and hard as a nut too, and at first it seemed suspended in mid-air until I saw the webwork of legs holding it up. There were several of them, four, six, maybe eight, and none was more than an inch or two in diameter: a network of thin, black, jointed pipes to hold up a lozenge-shaped body perhaps four feet long. As it slid through that beam of light I saw no eyes or anything else to tell it that it was giving itself away. Instead, the leading end of that body had two clasping, raptorial arms and a long, bent beak that must have been eighteen inches long. The rest of the body was hard shell above and just darkness below, where the light did not touch it. It moved with an awful deliberation, one leg at a time, rocking slightly in between steps. The span of its legs was huge, and it could have touched the corners of a room far larger than the cramped corridor. It paid us no heed, and that hard, shiny body could not have passed through the small gaps in the cell walls. It was after other prey.
It must have heard the Warden coming before I did. Perhaps those wide-spread legs felt the vibrations of his footfalls. Abruptly it stopped, and began to hoist itself into the air. One leg at once found purchase amongst the bars of the wall and on the ceiling and carefully inverted itself, until it was clinging upside down above us, only one leg crossing a sunbeam to tell of it.
I could hear the Warden approaching now, the idle scuff of bored footsteps. There was a terrible tension amongst my fellow prisoners.
The Warden rounded the corner. All I could see of him was his lamp, which was pointed mostly down to light his way. I thought of that stiletto beak and what it would do to a human body. I opened my mouth to say something, but the very suspense was weighing down on me. The fixed anticipation of dozens of my fellows charged the air, filled it, leaving no room for sound. It may seem strange to you now, but I was physically oppressed by that expectant silence. It was as if the mean, starved minds of the Below prisoners reached out and forced me back, shut me up, as if they were using the inner energies that had got me into this mess. People in desperate situations can find unexpected reserves.
The Warden came close, and I saw the one visible leg shift slightly in the light as the creature adjusted its position. In the gloom between sunbeams I saw the long, hard body lower itself down in that cradle of legs like a man climbing with ropes. I convinced myself that I could see the two grasping arms unfurled slightly, ready to strike. I imagined that lethal beak folding out. The hunter, eyeless and deadly, was ready.
The close, tense bloodlust of my fellows clamped down on me, and must have spoken to the Warden at some level because his tread faltered slightly, just short of the monster’s reach. That gave me the smallest window through which to shout, “Look out! Above you!”
The Warden jerked back, and the thing struck at him. I saw very little of it, just the suggestion of movement in the dark. In my mind’s eye, however, I can picture it even now: dangling down on its horrible legs, claws extended, beak raised like a dagger.
It fell short, although the Warden must have felt the air before him being cut by those grasping arms. In the next second he was out with his club, striking the creature a massive blow across the body. I heard the carapace crack, and then the creature was wobbling away, step after jerky step, trying to escape across the ceiling. The Warden stepped in calmly and struck it twice, three more times, finally knocking it to the floor, where he stamped hard on its soft underside and then continued to beat it with his club until its legs had stopped thrashing.
There was an appalled silence to follow. The Warden stood quite still over the shattered corpse of his attacker and still all we could see of him was his lamp. That beam of artificial light passed over the cells and each prisoner in turn shrank back from it, as though they, too, were lurking insects awaiting a stomping. Only I faced up to it, and I think that told him who it was that had warned him. The light pinned me for a long time, and then the man was tracking off down the corridor. When a strand of sunlight caught his head and one shoulder I realised that I did not know him.
After he had gone, I could taste the anger in the air. There was not a man down that stretch of corridor who was not hating me with a passion. They had wanted their entertainment. To make up for their sunless lot they had wanted to see a Warden die, and I had thwarted them. Not a word was said by that desperate multitude, but I could feel the sour disappointment radiating from them in waves. They would gladly have torn me apart right then, for spoiling their fun.
I didn’t care. I had given up on them. I turned my back on their lethargic fellowship. I hoped.
*
Later, they came for me. Sometimes it was a regular circus Below. You couldn’t move for Wardens and semi-aquatic carnivores.
In this case there were three of them, none of them men I knew. They marched up purposefully to my cell and opened the door, and then one of them dragged me out. I sensed that my fellow prisoners were getting their hopes up again. They would shed no tears if I were executed.
As soon as I was out of my cell, one of the Wardens grabbed my injured shoulder and another punched me hard in the stomach, doubling me over and sending me to the floor. I curled up as tightly as possible, protecting my head and my vitals, because by now I knew the drill. I got a sound and businesslike kicking from the three of them. After this long in the Island I could tell a beating on orders from a beating for reasons of personal pleasure. From the clipped efficiency with which the boots slammed into my arms, legs and back I judged that this was a special request from the Marshal, who had apparently decided to hurry my demise. A bruised and battered man is more susceptible to all manner of deaths.
After they had kicked me around a bit they hauled me to my feet. I let myself hang between them, in order to assure them that they had done me harm, and they dragged my away. I was going on another excursion.
The Wardens hauled me out of Below, and once we had started going up we just kept going. We were headed to the Governor’s own rooms. I fought the rising tide of fear and bile within me and decided that I would try to face my judgement like a man.
It struck me then that the Governor’s rooms were like Below, in that the sun was blotted out by hangings and tapestries and the gloom was perpetual. It also struck me that if the Governor had been a sun-lover and allowed the light in, then the entire Island would have been a brighter place. In such a way, one man’s eccentricities made everyone’s life a little worse.
The Marshal was there waiting for us. Even in my bruised state I noted that there was the slightest edge of agitation to him. His steel eyes flicked from my captors to myself, and back.
“Leave us,” he spat out, and the three Wardens obediently turned on their heels and were gone. The Marshal and I were left quite alone.
Something was definitely wrong with him. Normally the only emotion one could read in his face or body language was that stock blind hatred that seemed to fuel his every waking moment. As I stood before him there was… a shiftiness, is the best way I can describe it. For the first time, the Marshal was going outside the rules.
It all happened faster than it takes me to tell it. He looked quickly, right and left, to make sure that we were unobserved. I think that some part of me knew what was coming then. He bared his teeth and slammed my back against a wall by my bad shoulder. There was a knife in his other hand. He was going to kill me.
The knife jerked in; an awkward, murderous motion. I tried to twist in his grasp and abruptly a gate in my mind was down and I flung everything I had at him, trying to get a hold of his brain.
It was like trying to hold a greased lead bullet, and I could not do it. His mind slipped through my concentration, streamlined and predatory as a swamp-monster. When I brushed him, though, he flinched away from me, loosed his hold on my shoulder, the knife stuttering in its strike. In a single motion, I ducked under his arm and was three steps away. When I looked into his face again it was as expressionless as ever, his attention was focused beyond me.
I heard the footsteps and turned despite myself. Had the Marshal struck then, he would have had me, but on this one occasion he was shy of committing murder in front of witnesses.
Coming out of the doorway from the Governor’s chambers was a haggard, long-faced man with a vaguely shabby look. He was distinctive only in that he was dressed neither as a prisoner nor a Warden. Beyond that, he was around my age, washed-out and faded at the edges. His long coat had been patched too often. His satchel (an academic’s mainstay – I once owned a satchel just like that) was scuffed and threadbare. Everything about him had seen better days, as had he.
He turned on me a look that I had never seen on another before, but knew well from having used it myself so often. It was a blankly uncomprehending “why?” kind of a look from a man who had been kicked by the world in places he had not known existed.
Do you remember Louyere? Let me jog your memory: Louyere, mediocre student and appalling gambler, who owed me money once and redeemed his debt with Helman’s marker. Louyere, that little link in the chain of my life: there he was on the Island, looking as though his penchant for losing at cards had finally caught up with him. He must have been in desperate straits to come here. It is no coincidence that the Governor could attract nothing more in the way of academic talent than Louyere. Who in his right mind would leave Shadrapar of their own free will? Louyere must have racked up the sort of debts that even God could not have bailed him out from. And now he was staring at me as he passed, bewilderment and loathing on his face. I would see him again before the end. Farewell to Louyere.
Even as he was descending the stairs to go, the Marshal and I had more company. It was Leontes himself, Governor of the Island, and behind him…
Lady Ellera’s appearance wreaked exactly the same havoc as it had before. She was beautiful like the sun; exactly like the sun, because you could see the sickness in her. Being in the same room as her set the heart racing and twisted the gut all at once.
The Governor was almost stamping. He looked for all the world like a preternaturally large toddler in a foul temper. He stormed flabbily up to me and looked me up and down, his round face trying to knot itself into a scowl.
“He looks half dead,” he complained to the Marshal, as though he was examining some distant image of me. “What’s happened to him?”
“The lowest level is a dangerous place,” the Marshal said with the smooth confidence of a man who knows his version of events will be believed.
The Governor’s little eyes found mine. “You are an annoying man!”
I blinked at him, speechless. He had said it with real fire, as though I should have been quite hurt. In a lifetime of them, it was the most ineffectual insult I ever received.
“Honestly,” he whined, “I really feel that it is a slight to this institution that I am forced to rely on the services of my own wards to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.” He glared at the Marshal as though implicating him in this conspiracy. “After all we do for them, you would think that we’d rank a little higher in their esteem. But no! All they send us are shoddy little men!”
In Shadrapar, of course, the Island was nothing more than where bad people went. The Governor’s demands and desires meant nothing beyond his walls. I wondered what had condemned him to this post. We were all prisoners of the Island in our ways.
“Sir, this man is a troublemaker,” the Marshal stated. High praise indeed. “I still say he should be executed now. We will regret it otherwise.”
“Oh, they’re all troublemakers to you.” The Governor was in an unhelpful mood. “Why else are they here? This is a prison, Marshal. We have to work with what we’ve got. I want my Trethowan!” he shouted wretchedly. I kept a carefully blank face.
“Then I’ll fetch your Academy scholar again,” the Marshal said. “He can do the work for you. This man is dangerous.”
“It wasn’t the same!” the Governor complained. “It was awful. It had no life to it. It wasn’t the same as when Advani was doing it.” I was content to remain a piece of furniture in this debate. That was how I was being treated by the Governor: an object that provided a service. Until he had wrung that service out of me he was loath to give me up.
All the same, hooray for Old School Shorthand, and score another point for obsolete education.
“Sir,” the Marshal continued desperately, “he is a danger to you. He is a danger to your…” He wasn’t looking at the Lady Ellera – the Marshal didn’t like to admit to the existence of women in general or her in particular. Still, it was plain who he meant.
For a moment I saw Leontes waver. Of course, he would be remembering my supposed tainting of Kiera and the Lady Ellera’s horror at it. He twitched and turned, cringing a little before her.
But her gaze was on me, not on him. “Thank you for your concern, Marshal,” she murmured, putting a long-nailed hand on the Governor’s rounded shoulder. “I am sure that this wretch will not harm me.”
Pinned by her gaze, I felt incapable of doing anything at all.
“There you go,” Leontes declared. “I want him to finish it. Marshal, you have such a small mind. It wouldn’t matter to you. Trethowan had ideas. He saw a vision of the future.”
The Marshal shrugged. Why should he care about the future? I was surprised the Governor was so emphatic about it. Then I remembered his obsession with the stars. He was quite a cerebral man in his way, and thank the Wasted God for that. Was ever a man saved by such a tenuous thing as a slightly superior writing style?
And all that time, the Witch Queen regarded me thoughtfully. That should have worried me more than it did.
“Put him back into his old cell!” the little bald man commanded. “Set him back to work, anything, but he has to keep on writing.”
“We might as well keep him Below, sir,” the Marshal started.
“No, no. It’s dangerous down there. You said so. He might get eaten or something. Let him keep writing. The moment he’s done you can cut him into a thousand little pieces for all I care.”
I privately resolved to take as long as humanly possible over my translations.
“And while I’m about it,” Leontes continued, rounding on me again, “None of this changing writing. None of this getting other people to do it. Look at this.” He pulled a folded piece of paper from inside his tunic. “I want it done like this. So it looks nice.”
He showed me the paper’s contents and my heart skipped slightly. I was really not sure of the reaction my next words would receive.
“Excuse me… sir,” I dared. “That’s not actually my writing. You see I was employing another of the prisoners… I was dictating to him, you see. I thought it would be quicker. And neater, obviously…” I trailed off into silence. The Governor regarded me blankly, the Marshal furiously.
“Well do that, then. Have this man, this… who?”
“Roseblade, sir. Shon Roseblade.”
“Well have this Roseblade write for you. Marshal, see that he has this man available when he writes.”
“But sir—”
“You heard him. It will be quicker that way. We all want this to be over with, do we not?”
The Marshal did not trust himself to speak. If he could have forced his mind onto me then I swear I would have combusted there and then in a pillar of fire.
“Now get him to his cell and get him fed up properly,” the Governor said dismissively, and then Lady Ellera was sweeping out and he was pattering behind her.
He left me alone with the Marshal again, but I didn’t care. I was a charmed man at that moment. The Marshal was malevolent and hateful, but he did indeed have a tidy little mind, and it was propped up at all corners with order. He imposed it and he fed off it. Discipline, regulations, obedience: he who lives by the chain of command shall also die by it. To kill me beforehand would have been excusable. No doubt he would have been defending himself, or some such story. To kill me after the Governor had given him his orders would be to disobey his one superior. Such an act of chaos would set echoes fit to bring the Island down. I am sure that this was the way he thought.
He called the Wardens again and told them to take me back to my cell – my upper cell. For want of a better word, I was going home.