A Dictionary of Fools (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 2) Page 12

  He glanced up, squinting. It might even be early fall, he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t all that familiar with the seasons on Charon II, and had never been this far north.

  Turning, he plunged his arms in again. He and Aros had moved off some distance from the others; they were the only two ambitious enough to try this part of the swamp, even though it fetched the best wood. The nearest lean-to was a good distance back from the swamp’s edge; heat had transformed the stench into something that very nearly had a life of its own, and disease was a constant source of dread.

  Aros glanced around, saw no one could hear them, and spoke. “I’m surprised,” he said dryly, wiping his nose with the back of his hand and smearing sewage across it, “that you can fold a shirt.”

  “I’m domestic,” said Kisten, not understanding why he felt so defensive.

  “Can you cook?”

  “I can make coffee,” he replied stiffly.

  “Can you make toast?”

  “I understand the theory.”

  The men continued to work throughout this interchange. Daylight only lasted so long, and there was still much to be done.

  “I pity the woman you marry.” Aros snorted.

  “Why?” Kisten demanded, straightening.

  “Because you can’t do anything.”

  Aros wasn’t being cruel, but his words stung Kisten nevertheless. “I don’t need to be able to do anything,” he retorted. “I’m a prince.”

  “Kit—”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

  “Why not? What am I supposed to call you—Your Highness?”

  “It’s what my friends call me.” Kisten sniffed. “You are not my friend.”

  Aros shook his head in mock regret. “You know,” he said, “I’ve decided that I don’t like you very much.”

  “You have to like me,” blurted Kisten, without meaning to.

  Aros looked up again. “Oh, do I.” His tone was dry.

  “I’m your sovereign,” said Kisten, sounding like an idiot.

  “Indeed.” Aros liberated another scrap of near fossilized wood. “You’re spoiled, is what you are. Spoiled and self-involved. To be honest, I’m amazed you’ve lasted this long! The navy must have seemed like Palawan, what with you being deprived of your slaves, your harem—”

  “You don’t know,” Kisten said through clenched teeth, “what I’ve been through.”

  “Oh, please.” Aros made a dismissive gesture. “I’m an intelligence officer. Did you think they gave me tea and biscuits before they threw me in that cattle pen?” He still spoke quietly, but his words had taken on a kind of vehemence that Kisten had never heard before. “They knew who I was. I was betrayed—like you. Only I know who it was that betrayed me.” He snorted in disgust. “My older brother died on this rock; I’m missing, and presumed dead—we all are. Don’t you get it? We all are. We’re all the same, here, you hidebound idiot. You, me, Walid, Ali, that poor bastard Kareem, we’ve all been through the same thing. So stop pissing and moaning to yourself about how you have some kind of corner on suffering. You don’t.”

  Kisten stared, poleaxed.

  Aros turned his back.

  NINETEEN

  Kisten knelt down and drank the water that welled up in his footprint. His hands and knees sank into the mud. He lapped it up like a dog and didn’t care; his only thought was for the near orgasmic experience of quenching his thirst. It was water he wouldn’t have touched back home, clear but with a flat, mineral taste and tinged with dirt. Now, it was ambrosial.

  He’d made the discovery, some time before, that drinkable water welled up in the depressions left by their boots along the edge of the swamp. Since then, he’d developed the habit of, before going in search of wood, trampling a few deep holes. By the time he’d finished the backbreaking, nauseating work of the afternoon, the holes had almost all filled.

  There was only a little water remaining at the bottom of the footprint, in the heel, and it was clouded with mud. He splashed it on his face, sat back on his haunches, and looked around him. No one was doing much. Few even seemed to notice his presence, and those that did tracked him only with their eyes. He scratched absent-mindedly at his chin; he hated having a beard and it was due for another trim, besides, but he had more on his mind than personal comfort.

  Still crouching, he moved over to the next footprint and began scooping the water into a battered tin cup. Having filled it, he set it carefully aside. He then began to fill the second cup, a recent acquisition that he’d gotten that morning in exchange for Kareem’s boots. It had all been done before roll call, or the rebels might have taken the choicest bits for themselves. Kareem wouldn’t mind. Kisten had liked Kareem. He couldn’t claim to be devastated, even so. He’d barely known the man, beyond a few short conversations. And death had become so common, he felt himself growing numb. That Kareem was even really dead seemed impossible; Kisten kept half expecting him to appear at their campsite in a way he never had with his friends from before.

  Already, the shadows were long. He cleaned himself as best he could, donned his tattered uniform and collected his cups. Moving carefully so as not to spill their precious contents, he set off for home. Home, he thought, what a funny word. Home had become a shallow depression in the ground, because it was his—as much as anything was, these days.

  He thought about what Aros had said, and felt uneasy. The truth was, he hadn’t considered that anyone else might have suffered the things he had. Then again, what had he been expecting? For everyone to be wearing signs? No one had asked him about the small, perfectly round burn marks on his back. He understood now that his assumption—that no one had noticed—was incorrect. No man had secrets, in a place like this, except for the ones his fellows let him keep.

  He stopped.

  That anyone might be being kind had never occurred to him. He scanned the enclosure without seeing it. What did that say about him?

  He kept walking, and did his best to ignore the frightening fact that even so little exercise exhausted him. He used to pride himself on being fit. Had, in fact, taken his health for granted. Starvation and illness had weakened him to the point where he felt like an old man. He worried that, when the opportunity finally came, he’d be too weak to escape.

  And in the meantime…had he been kind to anyone?

  Was he ever?

  Maybe Aros was right; maybe he was self-absorbed. He’d never thought of himself as being self-absorbed but, then again, he’d never thought very deeply about himself at all until recently. Until, he had to admit, he’d been captured and circumstances had forced him to.

  These thoughts—about women, about himself—were all new. And, quite frankly, unwanted. He could feel himself becoming more introspective, and he didn’t like it. He liked being the man he’d always been. Didn’t he? Hadn’t he been happy? He’d never thought of himself as unhappy, certainly. But that was before…before so many things.

  He was mercifully prevented from continuing this line of thought by his return to their campsite. Aros was preparing to light the fire, and Walid was watching him. Asif was lying down under their lean-to, where he’d been all afternoon. Ali had left to visit a friend he’d made.

  Silently, Kisten joined them. By pooling their resources, they could usually get a pretty good fire going. For a few minutes, anyway. Each man added his cube of bacon to their shared pan. Asif had brought the battered old thing with him when he’d joined their group, and it had proved invaluable.

  Kisten watched the handful of cubes sizzle and spit grease. They, along with each man’s corresponding cube of bread, constituted a full day’s ration. They wouldn’t see another such feast until this time tomorrow. According to the calculus of prison life, half should be eaten immediately after cooking and half should be put aside for breakfast the next morning.

  They’d all paid, to their despair, the price of yielding to insatiable hunger and eating the whole thing at once. One after the other, they’d had to first fast unt
il the next evening and then, unbearably, put away half their ration for the next morning—or doom themselves to repeat the cycle. Even though both cubes together made little more than a mouthful, strength was better sustained by eating them over time.

  They’d debated this, of course, as they’d debated every other issue related to food. Food dominated their lives: eating it, not eating it, thinking about eating it, trying not to think about eating it, making it possible to eat. There was nothing else to do, and nothing else as important. Every aspect of their day, from staggering forward at roll call to lying in the shade to preserve their strength to mucking around in raw sewage, was about food.

  Leaving his own cube of bacon in the pan, Kisten picked up a second cube and wrapped it in his makeshift handkerchief. He brought it, along with the second cup of water, to Asif and helped the other man sit up. The captain almost couldn’t manage it, and protested feebly when Kisten propped him up against the log that served as their sole chair. He kept his arm around Asif’s shoulders, steadying him, as he held the cup to his lips.

  Asif favored him with a wan smile.

  “Here,” said Kisten, “is a gourmet meal of what appears to be pig fat.”

  “You eat it,” said Asif tiredly. “I think I’m….” He didn’t finish his sentence.

  “Kareem is a real trendsetter.” Kisten’s flippant remark belied his concern.

  Asif felt around inside his jacket for what seemed like ages. Finally, he withdrew a battered photograph of the sort one might keep in a wallet. He handed it to Kisten, the paper shaking in his palsied grip. His fingertips brushed Kisten’s, the fragile touch of a two hundred year old man. “Keep that, please,” he said. “Send it…home, if you get the chance.”

  The whole scene seemed so distastefully melodramatic. Kisten wanted nothing so much as to get up and leave, and hated himself for it. Instead, he found himself looking at the picture. A stolid, square-jawed man in uniform sitting with a plainish young woman who was clearly pregnant. Their postures were stiff, their expressions unsmiling. The man, Kisten realized with something like horror, was Asif. Serious, confident, he’d been possessed with the kind of bulk that could quickly run to fat without constant vigilance. Kisten glanced down at Asif. Asif smiled knowingly.

  “We…she never wanted me in the colonies. After that first year, she went back to Brontes. She came out and visited me once or twice, but then we had our daughter. She said…no place to raise a child. If I wanted to see her, see either of them, I could come home. Which, as you know”—he coughed—”we only get home leave once every three years.”

  Kisten nodded. He did know.

  “We…argued back and forth. Wrote letters. Sometimes, I thought I’d won. But then she gave me an ultimatum: transfer my commission, or accept the fact of our living separately.” His mouth pinched into a thin, white line. “I couldn’t do it, couldn’t give up everything I’d worked so hard for—and for so long. I’ve been in love with the frontier since I was a boy.”

  “I understand,” said Kisten. He did. He’d dreamed of space.

  “I’ve never…met my daughter.” A flash of bitterness, there and gone in a second. It might have been a muscle spasm, or a cramp. Asif turned his head to the side and after a few minutes it became obvious that he wasn’t going to speak again. Kisten shared the silence with him. Or, he amended to himself, what passed for silence in an enclosure of forty thousand men. The clink of metal, the soft exhalation of breath, the muttered word, the shifting weight and creaking wood and occasional cough, all merging together into a low susurrus. Like the ocean, when he’d visited as a child.

  “Would you like me to sit with you?” he asked in a low tone.

  Asif shook his head, just the barest movement. “No, I think I’ll rest. Come back later, though, if you’d like. That would be nice,” he added.

  Kisten helped him lie back down. “I will,” he promised.

  He returned to the fire, where only Aros was sitting. Their tiny cache of wood had long ago burned itself into nothing. The last of the light was fading from the sky.

  Every night, beyond the stockade, the rebels built a series of bonfires. Tonight, they’d already been lit. Stretching almost to the height of a man, they each lit a wide swath of prairie. In the breathless heat, dense smoke hung over the camp like a pall. A shroud, Kisten thought morbidly, for a silent city of disease and starvation. The light itself barely filtered back to the camp, only enough to sketch an outline of Aros’ profile as he studied the fire.

  Kisten helped himself to his own ration of bacon, cutting it neatly in half with the communal knife and securing it, along with half a cube of bread, in his square of shirt for tomorrow’s breakfast. He ate his dinner slowly, contemplating. He helped himself to a small sip of water.

  Aros didn’t speak, which was just as well. Kisten still felt atrociously stupid for what he’d said earlier, at the swamp. You have to like me? What was he, five? No wonder Aros thought him a fool. Chewing his gristly, rancid-tasting bacon, he wondered which upset him more: the fact that he was acting like a child, or the fact that he actually wanted Aros to like him.

  There was nothing to do but think, at Palawan, and Kisten had been doing a lot of thinking recently. This afternoon, in particular, he’d been thinking about how insular his world had really been. His two best friends, Utpal and Jivaj, had come from a similar background to his own. Between them, they’d had a kind of cultural shorthand—that, he saw now, had made it easy to communicate on a very superficial level. They’d known, or thought they’d known, what the others felt and thought. But they’d never discussed the big issues. And since no one had ever challenged him, Kisten had never had to probe too deeply into his own motivations—for anything. Yet another thing he’d taken for granted was the notion that his own opinions and suppositions were the right ones and that they made sense.

  “He’s going to die,” said Aros suddenly.

  “I know,” said Kisten. “But hopefully not tonight.”

  They dropped the topic. Death was all around them, and their own powerlessness over it too depressing to contemplate. They clung to sanity, what sanity they still had, by ignoring it. Mourning the fallen wouldn’t bring them back but keeping calm, carrying on and laughing when they could might save the living.

  Kisten found himself thinking about Kareem, and thinking that he had to be somewhere better than this. Any place would be better than this, even if that place was no place and all that waited for them was oblivion. He liked Asif; he didn’t want Asif to die.

  Somewhere along the south wall, a gun went off. Kisten shut his eyes against the dazzling flash. A scream, cut short.

  He forced himself to think of something else. Some of the men couldn’t see well in the dark; they got disoriented and blundered across the dead line without realizing the danger. Others crossed it deliberately. Either way, the result was always the same.

  “I have a question,” Kisten said slowly, forcing himself to address a problem that had been bothering him for some time now. “Why did you want me to join your group, if you dislike me so much?”

  Aros considered his answer. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “because no one’s ever going to come for me, or Walid. Or Ali. But someone will come for you.”

  Kisten didn’t respond. The answer was an honest one, and he had no right to be upset for having heard it. Peek not through keyholes, his grandmother used to say, lest you be vexed. Hugging his knees to his chest, he used his free hand to draw a series of meaningless shapes in the dust. He wondered, uncomfortably and for the first time, if he contributed anything to this group other than his dubious value as a talisman. Had he really fallen from first officer on the Callisto to human rabbit’s foot?

  He told Aros about Asif’s consort. Asif wasn’t near enough to overhear and had fallen asleep regardless.

  “Are you married?” Kisten heard himself asking, quite without meaning to. He’d never asked Aros anything about himself, had never wanted to know. Loneli
ness, he decided, was getting the better of him.

  Aros’ smile pulled oddly on his gaunt features. “No,” he said wistfully, “but I’d like to be.” Kisten waited for him to continue and, after awhile, he did. The smoke from the bonfires had turned the air acrid, and there was scattered coughing throughout the enclosure. “Her name is Sonam. I asked her to wait for me. I hope she does.”

  “And you love her?”

  “Yes. I remember the first time we met.” He sighed. “I looked at her, and I just knew.”

  “You can’t just know,” objected Kisten, before he could stop himself.

  Kisten could hear the smile in Aros’ voice. “Yes you can.”

  Kisten let it drop. Aros was insane. You couldn’t just know. That a woman was beautiful, yes; that you wanted to bed her, certainly. But love? What if you turned out to have nothing in common? What if she turned out to be priggish and demanding? Or, even worse, boring?

  As an older man, he’d look back on that night and laugh. But at the time he couldn’t imagine being in love at all. The very idea seemed preposterous, and an utter waste of time.

  “Your problem, Kit, is that you’re disillusioned.” Aros sounded smug.

  “At least I’m not stupid,” he pointed out judiciously. “Love at first sight? Next you’ll be telling me that you believe in gremlins.”

  Aros laughed quietly. Humor was the best and only medicine to be had.

  After awhile, Kisten and Aros—to their mutual astonishment—found themselves trading stories about their lives. Movement was impossible, because there was no moon and neither of them wanted to risk getting disoriented and stumbling across the dead line by accident. Neither of them felt like sleeping. And so Kisten told Aros about Keshav, and Arjun, and some of the more colorful women he’d known, and Aros told him about life on a farm.

  Things like feeding and milking goats seemed exotic to a boy who’d always loved nature and had never been allowed to spend much time in it. Kisten explained as much, with honest enthusiasm.