Orphans of Chaos

1.

No, he wasn’t kidding. Yes, they put me in a jail.

He was not even kidding about the chains. There was an iron collar around my neck, with a heavy lock on one side, a crude iron hinge on the other, and a ring just above my collarbone. A chain led from the neck ring to a staple in the middle of the ceiling, next to the light fixture. The slack of the chain described the radius of my freedom.

Directly below was a cot, fixed to the floor. To one side was the barred window, as promised. To the other, the barred door. Next to the door was a shelf for a food tray. A water bucket rested on the floor beneath. There was a tall, three-legged stool of wood.

The room was a cube of gray blocks. There was a drain in the floor. Oh yes, there was a chamber pot. Let us not forget the chamber pot.

There I lay on my stomach, both hands on my red, red bottom, tears making a little puddle in my gray-green blankets, which stank of starch.

I didn’t hate him. I could not think of him as an enemy. Mean, yes; foe, no.

I do not pretend to understand myself. I don’t know why I think certain things. But the mere fact that he had spanked me made it impossible for me to hate him. Imagine, for example, that Wellington, having routed Napoleon at Waterloo, has the Emperor of France pulled from the saddle of his white horse, dragged before the drumhead court… and told to stand in the corner and go to bed without any supper. Or imagine that Adolf Hitler, instead of committing suicide in his bunker, is hauled in chains before the international war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg… and Prime Minister Churchill tans the hide of his backside with a belt strap, and washes out the mouth of Minister Goebbels with a bar of lye soap.

So I just cried. After that, I lay there, thinking about how there was nothing to think about. I cried some more.

It was the counting, the saying I was sorry, over and over, that had been so humiliating. I could not pretend I was some proud, disdainful heroine of the French Resistance, silent and unflinching as she faces her sadistic Nazi captors; or a patrician of Rome, captured by marauding Huns or Vikings, willing to perish to preserve her family’s centuries-old tradition of stoic military virtue, but not willing to cower.

It is not the way I had imagined I would behave when captured by the enemy. We were not even talking about the rack, the thumbscrews, the Iron Maiden, the boot. It was just a man slapping my bottom. Picture Joan of Arc, taken by the perfidious English, before her trial even starts, “Oh, sure I’m a witch! Let me sign the confession! Just don’t swat my behind! I’m too frail!”

Or maybe I felt so bad because I thought, deep down, that I deserved it. I should not have tried to brain the Headmaster with a rock. I hadn’t even really wanted to do it.

It was the kind of thing a heroine in a story was supposed to do. Wasn’t it? If it had worked, if I had hit him slightly harder, I would not be here now. I could have been on the outside, with my powers still active, working to free the others.

Instead of here. Chained by the neck.

It had been Victor, hadn’t it? I had been trying to impress him. I had been trying to do the kind of cold-blooded, tough-as-nails, tough-guy kind of thing people are supposed to do when they are serious.

It was hard to be serious with Boggin. It was hard to think of him as the enemy.

And Victor, I am sure, would not have been impressed with that light little love-tap I gave him. On the other hand, the idea of a rock all covered with blood and brain-stuff… Bleh. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it, had I? I hadn’t tried hard enough.

I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do what I had to do to keep myself out of this place.

I twisted to look up at the gray stone ceiling. What kind of prison was this, anyway? The Germans would have had something modern; white, spotless, with sterilized dental instruments standing by the specially designed torture chairs, and technicians in crisp uniforms. The French would have had something cunning; an ordinary-looking room, covered by one-way mirrors, microwave beams, foods containing subtle doses of sodium pentathol. The Russians would have plied insidious psychological tricks; setting clocks to wrong hours and speeds, playing tapes of distant birdsong at midnight, bringing meals at irregular times, having false messages tapped on the walls in Morse code, as if from other prisoners. But this?

This looked like a cellar dating back to the time of Bloody Mary. It probably was. A typically British jail, then; inefficient and traditional.

The damn chain looked like an antique, too. Not some modern lightweight thing made of titanium alloy or stainless steel; it looked like the links were hand cast or cold hammered out of iron.

And the collar was the same way; heavy, dull metal, also an antique. I doubt many tool-and-die shops these days are turning out slave collars too small for anyone but girls. But England has a long and glorious tradition of torture, oppression, slavery, and cruelty. If you don’t believe me, ask the Irish. (Or the Welsh, or the Scotch, or, for that matter, the Tasmanians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans. Heck, ask anyone.) So I am sure that in Surrey or Whitehead or York there were stockpiles of witch-collars and stocks and leg-irons, eye-gougers, tongue-slicers, bone bores, dunking stools, and disemboweling spindles dating from the time of Cromwell, or Elizabeth, or William the Conqueror.

Boggin probably called up one of his friends in the special “Pain Through the Ages” office of the British Royal Museum. “Hallo, Harry (or whoever)! By the by, old chap, could you ship me a gross of those old iron collars we used back in the good old days? Not the heavy big ones, no, and not the grown-woman collars, either. We need something smaller. You know those specially designed sixteen-year-old-virgin collars, used for controlling Irish maidens caught stealing potato crusts to live on, or falsely accused when they refused to sleep with their manor lords, when the young beauties were chained up in gangs to be transported to Australia as mail-order brides? Hey, and send over a chastity belt or two. You see, I have this fellow named Glum… What? No, we won’t need any whips or hanging cages or branding irons to control this one! She already was apologizing at every slap while I spanked her, and crying like a girl! Well, of course, Harry (or whoever)! Of course she is a girl! Damned if I know why she ever thought she was anything else!”

Well, the fun of thinking about how I wasn’t actually being tortured or burned as a witch wore off after a while.

Why had he made me count, damn him?

For a while, I fortified myself with the knowledge that someone trying to humiliate you, to wound your pride, is no different than someone trying to wound you with a knife. Except that, unlike a knife wound, this one can’t cut unless you let it.

That made me feel better, for a time.

Then I remembered where I had heard that idea. Quentin had been told that, when he was being comforted after his ordeal. Quiet, gentle Quentin, who, despite his fear, had spit defiance into the face of his tormentress at the time when he seemed sure to die. Comforted by Boggin. It was Boggin’s idea I was repeating to myself.

That made me cry all over again. I am not sure why. But it did.

After I went through all these thoughts and recriminations, I stared up at the ceiling some more. And then, like a phonograph record, I went through all these thoughts and recriminations again.

When that was done, I did it again.

And again and again.

You see, it helped prevent me from thinking about the unthinkable nightmare thoughts, wondering helplessly what was happening, what was being done to Victor, Vanity, Colin, and Quentin.

2.

You are wondering why I did not simply duck into hyperspace and slide out from there, or at least slide out from the collar?

After Boggin had reestablished the boundaries which Vanity had opened for me, while I could see a little way into hyper-space, I could not move that direction, not at all.

I could “see” that the collar was only “around” my neck in the way a flat circle of inch-high bricks on a floor in a plane might go “around” someone sitting on that floor. But if that someone cannot get up that inch, that flat line is just as good as a tall wall.

And there was nothing to look at in hyperspace. It’s dark and murky, and filled (at least, near the surface of the Earth-disk) with a heavy fluid medium. Whatever sunshine there might be falls off too rapidly to reach the Earth.

And my new senses did not give me much to look at, either. My utility detector was deaf; there was nothing useful to me in the room. The internal nature of the cold iron collar was that it was heavy, merciless, and powerfully antimagical. There were no lines or strands of moral obligation reaching out from me; iron was inert, unthinking, dull. Only creatures who are free to act, can do good or do bad.

And time seemed to go slower when I stared into the dimness of the four-space. No, I did not have much to look at. And the endless distances, the volume upon hypervolume of wide, curving voids out there, an inch out of reach, just mocked me. Staring into hyperspace made me feel like a crippled angel at the bottom of the well, able to see the distant stars of the infinitely high night sky.

Believe it or not, staring at the ceiling stones was more fun.

3.

At the end of the first day, there came a noise at the door. It was the beautiful Miss Daw. Behind her was Sister Twitchett, the school nurse.

“Am I to be released?” was the first thing I asked them. To me, it seemed as if I had already been in the cell for as long as would serve any purpose, as long as could be imagined.

Miss Daw took out a tiny tape recorder of a type I had not seen before; it played a crystal disc that shimmered with rainbows instead of a cassette. When she pushed the button, the sound of her own violin music filled the cell. It was one of these intricate things by Bach, all grace notes and mathematically symmetrical themes and counterpoints. Even though my powers were off at the moment, and my higher senses were dim, I could still tell it was flattening space in the area around me.

“I didn’t know you could do that with a recording,” I said. Again, no answer from either of them.

Without speaking, the Sister took out a hypodermic, rubbed alcohol on my elbow, found the vein with her needle, and gave me an injection.

The first of several.

They no longer trusted us to drink our medicine, and I am sure the doses were larger. I grew faint from the medicine, and they dressed me and put me to sleep in the cot.

I wish the drug had knocked me out. After they went away, I spent most of the night unsleeping, feeling sorry for myself, and fearing that I would roll off the cot in the night and choke to death.

4.

Two days went by, then three. The only person I saw was Miss Daw. She would appear at the door, holding a bowl of food and a beaker of water, dressed in some smart outfit of plum or burgundy or palest rose to bring out the color in her peaches-and-cream complexion. On the third day, there was a fresh roll of toilet paper on the tray.

She would pick up the bowl from the previous meal, which I was supposed to have washed with my limited supply of washing water, and carry away the chamber pot.

In the evening, she would come by with a bucket of warm water, lead me over to the drain, undress me, and give me a sponge bath. I wore the same nightgown I had before, and the same school uniform by day, plaid skirt and white shirt. They did not have any prison tunics, I suppose.

5.

The only fun thing I did on the third day was trying to use my trick to decrease the mass of the collar. I waited till just before Sister Twitchett and her nightly hypo were due, figuring that Dr. Fell’s foul drug would be weakest at that time.

I found I could move a few of the plumb-straight world-lines, which ran from the collar toward the core of the Earth, to the left or right. This did make the collar lighter, but it now wobbled unexpectedly on my neck, shifting weight oddly, as if it were on the deck of a pitching ship, even though my body was firmly on shore. That hurt more.

A fourth day went by. A fifth.

Miss Daw was always dressed nicely, as if for a social call. I do not know which was more ill-suited to a dungeon; her high-heeled pumps and sleek semiformal dresses, topped by tiny Continental hats pinned to her hair, or my schoolgirl’s uniform, knee socks and jacket and with a bow in my hair. And heavy iron collar and chain. Let’s not forget that. At least I did not have to wear that dumb necktie.

I complained about the collar to her. She was clearly under orders not to talk to me but, when I talked about chafing and bruises and raw spots around my neck, she nodded. “I’ll see what I can do, dear.”

That was the only human voice I heard for days. That one comment. “I’ll see what I can do, dear.”

And that was my life.

No, he wasn’t kidding. Yes, they put me in a jail.

And jail was boring. Bee, owe, are, eye, an, gee. Boring.

6.

I began to find other things to think about. I wondered how old I really was.

You would think I could have at least established a minimum age, right? I mean, count how many winters since you started having your period. Find something you know happened the summer before that, and the Christmas before that.

One problem was, I did not know, when I was young, that I was supposed to start counting. I did not even know people had ages, till I came across the idea in a book I read when I was young. I started keeping track then, but how old was I when I started reading? There were no younger kids around to measure myself against, except for Colin and Quentin and Vanity. They started reading younger than I did.

A person who had met a hundred five-year-olds, and had them clearly identified, knows what a five-year-old looks like. At what age do boys grow beards? A normal person knows the answer, or at least can give a range of dates. All I had to go by was Shakespeare’s speech about the ages of man given in As You Like It. When I was young, I thought I would know when Victor had reached the age of being a soldier because he would start having strange oaths on his lips.

What age is a girl when she develops breasts? Nine? Twelve? Twenty? All I knew is that Vanity had them before I did, and I thought they would get in the way of swimming and wrestling.

I did not know years had numbers until we came across them in a more modern history book. Herodotus and Thucydides didn’t have dates in them, aside from so-many-years since so-and-so. No dates are given for anything in the Bible, except, “Augustus ordered all the world to be taxed…” Or “When Herod was governor of Syria…”

We had lessons, but we did not have grades. I could not say to myself, “I must have been in grammar school when I read Euclid and college when I read Lobechevski…” because I did not know when other students read things.

Once or twice, we were let out to play with some of the children in nearby Abertwyi. Mrs. Wren organized a game, or something. If, during our chatter, some topic came up from schooling, the village children simply seemed like bumpkins to us. Even children much older than us seemed not to know grammar, or languages, or geometry, or logic, or rhetoric, or astronomy, or electronics, or the sciences. I met a boy I was sure was older than me, once, who told me that the Earth has weight because of the spin on its axis. I asked him if things were weightless at the North Pole, and he was stumped. Other boys we sometimes played ball with talked about people they wanted to be like when they grew up. I had never heard of any of them. Were they sports figures, perhaps? Rock-and-roll stars? But they did not know who Admiral Byrd or Sir Edmund Hillary or Yuri Gagarin were. They never heard of Sir Ernest Shackleton. They thought Captain Cook was a character from Peter Pan.

They seemed to know a lot about how to cheat on tests, they knew all about their computers and electronic games, and they knew about the characters on television. We were only allowed to watch the television in the Common Room once a week. Headmaster said it would rot our brains if we saw too much.

I just could not believe that everything the Headmaster said was a lie. So much seemed to be true. I believe what he said about television, for example.

But when I added up memories, and counted events, I knew I was older than the fourteen years he gave me. Unless my puberty was very late, I doubt that I was actually twenty-one.

But, thinking back, I realize that Headmaster Boggin certainly must have lied. I did not envy Vanity when she started having her period, and frankly I was not that much enamored of growing up to be a pale sissy like Miss Daw. And if I could control my body so much as that, why hadn’t I always stayed stronger and faster than Colin and Quentin? It was absurd to think that I secretly desired to be defeated, overpowered, and outmuscled by men.

That thought cheered me for a while. Then a haunting memory rose up in my brain. I remember Grendel Glum saying he had done something to me, influenced me with his willpower, to make my secret desires exactly so.

7.

On the fourth day, despite the drugs, I was able to get my fingers under the collar and push my neck slightly into the fourth dimension. Not enough to get it off my head, mind you, but it made the collar seem slightly larger. The iron had the faintest blue sheen to it when I did that, and the faintest red sparks glinted like fireflies around my fingertips. (I could place a point of view a few inches to my left, half an inch into the “red” direction, to glimpse this.)

It must have set off some alarm, because Miss Daw came to the door almost immediately. She set up her music player, and had it play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

On the fourth and fifth day I had music. That was nice, I suppose.

Whenever the disc got to the same track, and played the Schiller poem from the middle of the Ninth, however, and I heard the German voices singing about the Joy of Man, light, free notes rising and rising to unimpeded glory, I cried again.

8.

On the sixth day I begged Miss Daw to speak to me, but she shook her head and looked pensive. I asked her if I was to be allowed to go to Chapel tomorrow; I needed to pray for my soul.

That got a reaction out of her, a little smile with her head tilted to one side. “I had not heard that you were especially devout. In fact, I have heard rumors to quite the opposite effect, if such rumors can be countenanced.”

Two dozen words, or more! An oasis after the endless sand dunes of silence.

“Everyone gets religion when they are in prison, Miss Daw.”

That answer perhaps was too flippant, for she smiled a gracious but cold smile, and began to turn away.

“Oh, please!” I said. “For the love of God, please! Even if you don’t believe me, even if you think it’s just a trick to get me out of this horrid room, please Miss Daw, please, isn’t it simple decency, simple plain English decency, to let a girl who thinks she is about to die go pray?”

“Who has told you such a falsehood, Miss Windrose? No one is going to kill you.”

“Who told me otherwise? You won’t talk to me!”

She looked around the cell; a soft, sad look came into her eyes for a moment. She was thinking that I had been waiting for days for some execution, tormenting myself with a fear that was utterly false, a fear she could have alleviated with a word.

“Well,” she said, “I will see if you can be taken up to the Chapel tomorrow. You do not have the energy relationship in the moral direction a person devoted to his God normally manifests. Your relational structures are extensional rather than intentional, and form nodes going into two time-directions, but not toward eternity. This type of atrophy is typical of atheists and agnostics. But—take heart, my dear, do not be so downcast. The forms must be observed. That is why we have forms to begin with.”

“Then I can go to Chapel?”

“I’ll see what I can do, dear.”

My lip trembled. “That is what you said about this collar…”

“That will be looked into.”