A Dictionary of Fools (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 2) Page 10

  “But—I can’t! We’ll fall off!”

  The sergeant cuffed him, equally as lazily. Kisten’s eyes hardened. “Well then I guess,” he drawled, “you’ll just have to hold on.” He smiled evilly. “Or, if you prefer, I can just shoot you now.”

  The man—he was a boy, really, no more than nineteen or twenty and terrified—began to sob.

  Kisten didn’t see what happened next, because the enormous double doors began to shut. They squealed in their tracks, jerking together unevenly, and Kisten jumped back to avoid being crushed. Metal met metal with a hollow clang. Thin strips of light filtered in through the gaps in the slats, but other than that they were in darkness. Sixty men, none of whom had had a bath in days. Or weeks. Or, God forbid, months.

  Aros joined him a few minutes later, materializing by his side as if drawn together from vapor. They stared out at their inch wide view of the world, a slow-moving collage of heat-scorched grass and collapsing houses. Some were still occupied, if in a desultory fashion. Some were burned out husks. The grass was as still as death, not a breath of air to be had.

  The one good thing, Aros pointed out, was that the unexpected boon of cattle had thrown the camp into an uproar. Someone had forgotten to order an inspection, meaning that no one was stripped of his clothes or valuables. Aros still possessed a small knife; he and the other men between them had, in addition, amassed a blanket, a square of canvas tent fabric—waterproofed—a haversack with a small hole in the bottom, a battered metal cup and a spoon.

  Kisten had already learned that this represented, to the average prisoner, a trove of wealth.

  To the delight of all, Kareem then produced a thin piece of mottled soap. They agreed to save it until such time as water could be had. And then, they further agreed, they’d share it amongst themselves only for a Sabbath morning wash.

  They passed a farm that was still burning, and Kisten turned away. He didn’t see the sun again for forty-eight hours. The train cut north, through the high passes that led up into the mountains, bringing them seven hundred miles through a terrible rainstorm. Because the train was so old and poorly maintained and the track so narrow, it never went faster than twenty or so miles an hour. There wasn’t room to lie down, so the freight car’s occupants took turns shuffling up to the tarred wooden slats and leaning against them. Some managed to sleep; most didn’t. There was no food, and water came only from what rain blew through the slats and when the train stopped for refueling and they were hosed down like cattle.

  Trains on the Home Worlds used a method of propulsion involving magnets and the more modern trains on the colonies did, too. But public transportation had been shut down early in the war and most of the new track destroyed besides, which meant that the rebels relied instead on the old mine locomotives that burned pitch pine. Their squat, blackened stacks belched forth clouds of acrid smoke that enveloped the freight cars in a suffocating pall. Not a breeze stirred and, as the engine wheezed and time passed, the air sickened until it was nigh on unbreathable.

  Kisten wondered why the rebels were bothering with prisoners of war in the first place. As they clearly had no interest in keeping their charges alive, it would have been more economical to shoot them. As it was, several men did die during the journey: a few of heat prostration and dehydration, as the sickly-sweet stench in the freight car began to attest, and once Kisten thought he heard a voice cry out from the roof as a shape plunged over the side.

  There was only one event of note during their long period of confinement.

  As wonderful as it was, Kisten wished it hadn’t happened.

  SIXTEEN

  The train got diverted for reasons that were never explained.

  Kisten hoped that it had something to do with the rotting corpse a few paces to his right but, after all, the fact of the poor bastard’s demise hadn’t bothered his captors so far. More likely, their stop in the small, sylvan town had something to do with questions about fortifications. The officer accompanying them had seemed very curious about certain of the official buildings, what materials had been used in their construction and whether they had basements.

  Kisten saw this, because the doors were opened to air out the freight cars. Guards came and removed the bodies—there were several—and those still standing were allowed to mill around in the culvert ditch next to the tracks. The sun was hot, but at least the air was dry.

  He stood quietly in the knee-high grass, absorbed in the sheer animal pleasure of being able to breathe free. The insides of his lungs felt charred from inhaling the burning pitch. The man who’d died was carried out and disposed of. A cool breeze had begun to blow and Kisten was, thankfully, standing upwind. He tracked the corpse’s progress with his eyes, up the culvert and to the road beyond. On the other side of the road there were trees and, among them, houses—and people.

  Women, mostly, and a few boys too young yet for school. They came forward in a determined-looking group, confusing the guards. This was a rebel held town and these women’s husbands were probably rebels, themselves, so the guards couldn’t very well shoot them. But they couldn’t allow them to fraternize with prisoners, either, as seemed to be their intent.

  The guards urged them back. One of the women, a plain-faced, matronly sort and obviously their leader, stepped forward. “We’ve come to bring these men sandwiches,” she announced. Her tone was brusque, businesslike, and brooked no interference. She reminded Kisten of his childhood nurse.

  “No,” said the guard, “step back.”

  “Yes,” countered the woman, undeterred. She took a threatening step forward.

  “They’re prisoners,” complained the guard.

  “And wherever my son is,” she said, meeting his gaze, “I hope some nice woman is doing the same for him.”

  That explained it: her son was a prisoner of war, too. Lady, Kisten thought, we’re treating your son a hell of a lot better than your boys are treating us.

  The guard acquiesced, throwing up his hands. “Make it quick,” he said, “and be it on your head if one of them takes it into his mind to try anything.” Although looking at the line of grimy, famished prisoners spread out along the culvert, the notion that even one of them was capable of trying anything strained credulity. Kisten had never seen a sorrier group of men in his life.

  “Alright,” said the guard, turning to regard them. “You can come up to the fence, but no further.” He gestured, indicating. The “fence” was a haphazard line of rusted out concertina wire. This command was repeated up and down the length of all three freight cars. The few men still resting up top scrambled down; the prospect of sandwiches was too good to be ignored.

  Kisten noticed that the sobbing man was not among them and wondered if it was this voice that he’d heard.

  He saw Aros and his other so-called friends down near the end of the line. He’d avoided them and they, for the most part, had let him. He would have liked to consider himself too good for sandwiches—certainly too good for accepting a handout from some rebel—but he wasn’t. He was, in fact, desperate for food. Any food at all, whatever its source.

  The admission, even to himself, galled him.

  He found himself shuffling forward like all the rest, pathetically grateful for the sight of food and even more so for the sight of another human being and a reminder that someone still thought of him as a human being, too. He stopped at the concertina wire and trailed his fingers along its iron thorns, thinking that this must be how pigs felt at slop time. He stood as still as a statue, terrified that someone would forget to give him a sandwich and hating himself for being terrified. Perversely, the rejection would be easier to take if he hadn’t asked for it. If he hadn’t said please, please me and then been ignored.

  A few minutes later, he found himself looking down into a pair of warm, almond-shaped brown eyes. Their owner was petite and very pretty, even in her shapeless sack of a dress. She was clean, too, and smelled of lavender, and Kisten was painfully conscious of the fact that he hadn�
��t showered or shaved in God knew how long. He could no longer smell himself, and that wasn’t a good sign.

  She smiled, and he smiled back—or tried to.

  “It’s not much,” she said, “just roast beef and cheese and pickles.”

  “That sounds lovely,” said Kisten. It sounded ambrosial.

  She handed it across the concertina wire. He’d never eaten anything so fast or so disgustingly in his life. Her eyes sparkled with amusement, but it wasn’t malicious. She was one of those women who liked watching men eat.

  “Thank you,” he said, meaning the words more than he’d ever meant them in his entire life.

  “Go on, finish your sandwich.” She smiled again, but the expression held nothing of suggestion in it. She didn’t find him attractive, just sad. He was an object of pity to her, one anonymous soldier among thousands. He wondered if she, too, had a brother or a sweetheart in an Alliance internment camp. She was too young to have a son more than a year or two old.

  And suddenly he saw himself as she must see him: the grimed-in dirt, the ragged uniform, the hollowed out cheeks, the sunken eyes. The beard. He’d grown up accepting his sex appeal as nothing more than his due. In his present condition, he couldn’t pay a woman to touch him. Hell, he wasn’t sure if he could get it up. No wonder no one had recognized him; he didn’t recognize himself. Aros, he acknowledged ruefully, was better at his job than Kisten had thought. There was nothing of the sleek, confident prince in the hunched over wretch who clutched his last crust of bread to his chest like a treasured heirloom.

  Compassion kindled in the sandwich bearer’s eyes, as if she somehow sensed his thoughts. He’d been on the giving end of charity before, in his other life: endowing hospitals and soup kitchens and making the occasional press-conscious appearance in them. But he’d never been on the receiving end. He hated it, more than he’d ever hated anything.

  But not enough to turn her away, and that was what galled him most of all.

  “Do you have someone at home?” she asked.

  He shook his head, realizing as he did so how true it was. How hollow his life, up until this point, had really been. He had his brother, of course, and his coterie of hangers-on at court. He had women he slept with. He had friends, too. Of a sort.

  But no one who loved him. He attracted them with outrageous flirting and even more outrageous presents, and he was a skilled lover. But was there a single person in the world, male or female, who’d talk to him again after seeing him like this?

  “Do you?” he asked.

  She blushed, happiness lighting her eyes for just a moment, and then she sobered.

  “I hope everything works out for the both of you,” he said sincerely.

  “I’d ask you to pray for him but….” She turned away, uncomfortable.

  “But I’m on the wrong side?” he prompted gently.

  “Because you’re—oh, I’m sorry.” She smiled again, but less genuinely this time. “I have to go.”

  “Of course,” he said graciously, his manners still those of a courtier. “Goodbye.”

  Awkwardly, she turned away before he had a chance to thank her again.

  He watched her disappear, first up the far side of the culvert and then across the road and into one of the houses. He hadn’t asked her name, and she hadn’t asked his. He wished, now, that he had. Would she have told him? And what did it matter? He knew what she’d been about to say: because you’re a heathen. It’s all the same God, he’d wanted to tell her. If God even existed, which he was beginning to doubt. He’d never thought much about the existence of God, merely taken for granted that God existed and gone through the motions of prayer.

  But now he wondered: if God existed, and there was a plan, then how was this—all of this—part of it?

  He knew what Keshav would say, if he were here. But he wasn’t.

  “Alright,” called the same guard, “you’ve had your sandwiches, now form up into a line.” His tone was magnanimous, as if he’d been the one acting chivalrous. The men, by some silent consent, returned to their respective places. Even the men condemned to the roof went without complaint. It was a phenomenon that Kisten saw for the first time that afternoon, but would see many times again: the instinctive comradeship of those who have nothing.

  His gaze dropped to the crust of bread still clutched in his blackened, sweat-damp hand. She’d given him the sandwich, because she was a good person, and she’d tried to be pleasant, but he was repulsive to her. He’d never felt such a bone deep sense of shame.

  SEVENTEEN

  Kisten wouldn’t actually see himself in a mirror until some time after he’d arrived at Palawan Prison.

  Soon he was calling it Hell, like everyone else. That the term held no exaggeration wasn’t long in the discovering, although every sigh of relief that at least this is it, this is as bad as it can get was seemingly followed by a fresh depredation until Kisten found that he could no longer fully remember what life had been like before. The experience of being given the sandwich, which would remain clear in his mind for the rest of his life, seemed then to have befallen some other person: a real human being with rights and a real life.

  Their struggles were shaped not so much by their captors but by the geography of the prison itself.

  Located on the other side of the mountains, Palawan Prison was deep behind the rebel line. It owed its location to the same circumstance that had heralded the arrival of the cattle: the rebels couldn’t gather food for their armies anywhere except the middle of nowhere. The once fertile farmland nearer to Dharavi had all been trampled into mud, and the farmland to the east and south was securely under Alliance control. Which meant that the rebels, of necessity, had to travel west and north. Trains arrived near the front lines heavily laden and departed empty; until someone got the bright idea of shipping the prisoners of war north.

  What to do with captured soldiers had always been an issue: feeding and clothing them was expensive, and large groups of men tended to draw attention to themselves. By dumping them in the middle of nowhere, the rebels ensured that their ever-growing tally of officers and enlisted men wouldn’t be found.

  The Alliance had experienced, so far, great difficulty in locating the base camps of the various rebel cells and in tracking their movements. Looking around him, Kisten understood why. The rebels were safe, simply because they were so primitive. Nothing in this place would show up on any of the tracking equipment that the Alliance possessed. There was no electricity, no running water. Not even the simplest machinery hummed in the background. They might as well have been living in the forest and even the Alliance, with all its manpower, couldn’t scour an entire planet over and over again for camps that might turn out to be camps of deer.

  Most of the rebel camps weren’t permanent, which complicated the issue. A rebel camp might be spotted and, by the time someone arrived to investigate, it might be deer. More than once, frustrated trackers had zeroed in with guns blazing and found only latrine pits.

  Kisten surveyed the scene around him. Thankfully, clouds obscured the brutally bright sun.

  It wasn’t a prison, per se; or, at least, it didn’t fit with what he’d always imagined when he’d heard that term. Rather, Palawan was a stockade assembled from enormous, rough hewn pine logs. Each log was about twenty-five feet long, he estimated, set in a trench about five feet deep. He found out later that the structure, which was oblong in form, enclosed sixteen acres. The longest side faced north. There were two gates in the western side, one near the north end and one near the south. Both gates were small; when he and his companions were marched into Palawan, they had to do so single file.

  As they passed through, Kisten craned his head to stare up at the artillery platform high above him. It ran the length of the western wall and he counted sixteen guns. They, too, were of the old fashioned type.

  A different officer, one Kisten had never seen before, stepped forward to address them. “Welcome to Palawan,” he said calmly. He was accustome
d to public address; his voice carried, without him appearing to speak much above conversational volume. “Look around you. You’ll notice”—he gestured—”that along each section of wall is a line of poles. Step inside those poles, and you’ll be shot. Congregate in unusual groups near those poles, and you’ll be shot.” He paused. They waited. This recitation of the rules had the feel of a canned speech. One that had been given many times before, to many such groups of men. “You may be expecting rescue,” said the unknown officer, “in which case, know this: should Alliance troops approach within seven miles of where you stand, you will be shot.”

  And on that pleasant note, the officer turned on his heel and left.

  It was no idle threat; there were guns mounted along the entire length of both the east and west walls and from their raised platforms the gunners would be able to sweep the entire prison interior. There were guard towers, too, at each corner and regularly along the walls. Under their crudely built board roofs, their interiors were too shadowed for Kisten to make out any occupants. He knew they were there, all the same; he felt their eyes.

  If the guards had shelter from the sun and rain, the prisoners did not. In terms of architectural sophistication, Palawan made the cattle pen look like the Imperial Palace. It resembled a bomb crater; only in the no man’s land between the so-called “dead line” and the walls did scattered weeds grow. They were mostly parched looking grasses, made brown from a fine coating of dust.

  They’d also joined a prison already full. Palawan had been built, according to his so-called intelligence officer comrade, to house no more than ten thousand men and that temporarily. On the day Kisten arrived, it already held 32,000 and before he left that number would swell to almost 50,000. Of those, thousands would die and thousands more would never fully recover.

  But he didn’t know that yet, of course; he didn’t know much of anything yet except that he was developing a strange longing for the cattle pen. Wryly, he remembered his outrage at discovering that the roof leaked.