The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XXXV — Nessus Again

WHEN I LIVED among the torturers, I often saw clients beaten. Not by us, for we inflicted only such punishments as had been decreed, but by the soldiers who conveyed them to us and took them from us. The more experienced shielded their heads and faces with their arms, and their bellies with their shins; it leaves the spine exposed, but little can be done to protect the spine in any case.

Outside the inn I tried to fight at first, and it seems probable that the worst of my beating took place after I lost consciousness. (Or rather, when the marionette I manipulated from afar had.) When I became aware of Urth again, the blows still rained down, and I tried to do as those unlucky clients had.

The fusiliers used their boots and, what were much more dangerous, the iron-shod butts of their fusils. The flashes of pain I felt seemed remote; I was aware mostly of the blows, each sudden, jolting, and unnatural.

At last it was over, and the officer ordered me to rise; I floundered and fell, was kicked, tried again, and fell again; a rawhide noose was slipped around my neck, and I was lifted with that. It strangled me, yet helped me balance too. My mouth was full of blood; I spit it out again and again, wondering whether a rib had punctured my lungs.

Four fusiliers lay in the street, and I recalled that I had wrested his weapon from one, but had been unable to release the catch that would have allowed it to fire — on such small matters do our lives turn. Some comrades of the four examined them and found that three were dead.

“You killed them!” the officer shouted at me.

I spat blood in his face.

It was not a rational act, and I expected another beating for it. Perhaps I would have received one, but there were a hundred people or more around us, watching by the light that streamed from the windows of the inn. They muttered and stirred, and it seemed to me that a few of the soldiers felt as they did, reminding me of the guardsmen in Dr. Tabs’s play who had sought to protect Meschiane, who was Dorcas and the mother of us all.

A litter was contrived for the injured fusilier, and two village men pressed into service to carry it. A cart filled with straw sufficed for the dead. The officer, the remaining fusiliers, and I walked ahead of them to the wharf, a distance of a few hundred paces.

Once, when I fell, two men dashed out of the crowd to help me up. Until I was again on my feet, I supposed that they were Declan and the sailor, or perhaps Declan and Hadelin; but when I gasped my thanks to them, I found that they were strangers. The incident seemed to enrage the officer, who fired his pistol into the ground at their feet to warn them away when I fell a second time, and kicked me until I rose again with the aid of the noose and the fusilier who held it.

The Alcyone lay at the wharf, just as we had left her; but alongside her was such a craft as I had never seen before, with a mast that looked too slight to carry sail, and a swivel gun on her foredeck far smaller than the Samru’s.

Seeing the gun and the sailors manning it seemed to put new heart into the officer. He made me stop and face the crowd, and ordered me to point out my followers. I told him I had none and that I knew none of the people before me. He struck me with his pistol then. When I got up once more, I saw Burgundofara near enough to have touched me. The officer repeated his demand, and she vanished into the darkness.

Perhaps he struck me again when I refused again, but I do not recall it; I rode above the horizon, futilely directing my vitality toward the broken figure sprawled so far away. The void put it at naught, and I channeled Urth’s energies instead. His bones knit, and his wounds healed; but I noted with dismay that the cheek torn by the pistol sight was that which Agia’s iron claw had once torn too. It was as if the old injury had reasserted itself, only slightly weakened.

It was still night. Smooth wood supported me, but leaped and pounded as though lashed to the back of the most graceless destrier that ever galloped. I sat up and found I was aboard a ship, and that I had lain in a puddle of my own blood and spew; my ankle was chained to a staple. A fusilier stood nearby with one hand on a stanchion, keeping his balance with difficulty on that wild deck. I asked him for water. As I had learned when I marched through the jungle with Vodalus, when one is a captive it does no harm to ask favors — they are not often granted, but when they are refused nothing is lost.

This principle was confirmed when (to my surprise) my guard lurched off toward the stern and returned with a bucket of river water. I stood, cleaned myself and my clothing as thoroughly as I could, and began to take an interest in my surroundings, which were in fact novel enough.

The storm had cleared the sky, and the stars shone on Gyoll as though the New Sun had been flourished across the empyrean like a torch, leaving a trail of sparks. Green Lune peered from behind towers and domes silhouetted on the western bank.

Without sails or oars, we skipped like a thrown stone down the river. Feluccas and caravels with all sail set appeared to ride at anchor in midchannel; we darted among them as a swallow flits between megaliths. Aft, two gleaming plumes of spray rose as high as the barren mast silver walls erected and demolished in a moment.

Not far away I heard guttural, half-formed sounds that might almost have been words. It was as if some suffering beast sought to speak, and then to whisper. Another man lay on the deck near where I had lain, and a third crouched over him. My chain would not let me reach them; I knelt to add the length of my calf to it, and thus got close enough to see them as well as they could be seen in the darkness.

Both were fusiliers. The first lay on his back, unmoving yet twisted as if in agony, his expression a hideous grimace. When he noticed me he tried to speak again, and the other man murmured, “It’s right, Eskil. Doesn’t matter now.”

I said, “Your friend’s neck has been broken.”

He answered, “You should know, vates.”

“I broke it, then. I thought so.”

Eskil made some strangled sound, and his comrade bent over him to listen. “He wants me to kill him,” he told me when he straightened up again. “He’s been asking for the last watch — ever since we put out.”

“Do you intend to do it?”

“I don’t know.” His fusil had been across his chest; as he spoke, he laid it on the deck, holding it there with one hand. I saw light glint on the oiled barrel.

“He’ll die soon no matter what you do. You’ll feel better afterward if you let him die naturally.”

I would have said more, perhaps, but Eskil’s left hand was moving, and I fell silent to watch it. Like a crippled spider it crept toward the fusil, and at last closed on it and drew it toward him. His comrade could have taken it back easily; but he did not, and seemed as fascinated as I.

Slowly, with an infinity of pain and labor, Eskil lifted and turned it until its barrel was directed toward me. Dimly by starlight, I watched his stiff fingers, fumbling, fumbling.

As the striker, so the stricken. Earlier I might have saved myself, if only I could have discovered the catch that would have permitted the weapon to fire. He who knew so well where it was and how it operated would have killed me, could only he have made his numb fingers release it. Impotent both, we stared at each other.

At last his strength could no longer support the weight of the fusil. It fell clattering to the deck, and I felt that my heart would burst for pity. In that moment I would have pulled the trigger myself. My lips moved — but I scarcely knew what it was I said.

Eskil sat up and stared.

As he did, our vessel slowed. The deck sank until it was nearly level, and the plumes of water behind us vanished as a wave does that breaks on the beach. I stood up to see where we were; Eskil stood too, and soon the friend who had nursed him and my guard joined us.

The embankment of Gyoll rose to our left, cutting off the night sky like the blade of a sword. We drifted along it almost in silence, the roaring of whatever engines they had been that had propelled us with such speed muffled now. Steps descended to the water, but there were no friendly hands to tie us up. A sailor leaped from the bow to do it, and another threw him our mooring line. A moment more and a gangplank stretched from ship to stair.

The officer appeared at the stern, flanked by fusiliers with torches. He halted to stare at Eskil, then called all three soldiers to him. They held a long conference in tones too faint for me to hear.

At last the officer and my guard approached me, followed by the men with torches. After a breath or two the officer said, “Take off his shirt.”

Eskil and his friend came to stand beside us. Eskil said, “You must remove your shirt, sieur. If you don’t we’ll have to tear it off.”

To test him I asked, “Would you do that?”

He shrugged, and I unfastened the fine cloak I had taken from the ship of Tzadkiel and let it fall to the deck, then pulled the shirt over my head and dropped it on the cloak.

The officer came nearer and made me turn so that he could examine my ribs on both sides. “You should be nearly dead,” he muttered. And then, “It’s true, what they tell of you.”

“Since I don’t know what’s been said, I can neither confirm nor deny it.”

“I’m not asking you to. Dress yourself again. I advise it.”

I looked around for my cloak and shirt, but they were gone.

The officer sighed. “Somebody’s filched them — one of the sailors, I suppose.” He glanced toward Eskil’s friend. “You must have seen it, Tanco.”

“I was looking at his face, sieur, not at his clothes. But I’ll try to find them.”

The officer nodded. “Take Eskil with you.” At a gesture from him, one of the torchbearers handed his torch to the other and bent to free my leg.

“They won’t find them,” the officer told me. “There are a thousand hiding holes on a boat like this, and the crew will know them all.”

I told him I was not cold.

The officer slipped off his uniform cape. “The man who took them will cut them up and sell the pieces, I imagine. He should make something from them. Wear this — I’ve got another one in my cabin.”

I disliked taking his cape, but it would have been foolish to refuse his generosity.

“I must fetter your hands. Regulations.” The manacles gleamed like silver in the torchlight; still, they bit into my wrists like others.

The four of us crossed the gangplank to water stairs that seemed nearly new, mounted them, and marched in single file up a narrow street bordered with little gardens and rambling houses mostly of a single story: a torchbearer first, I following him, the officer behind me with his drawn pistol hanging at his side, and the second torchbearer bringing up the rear. A laborer on his way home stopped to stare at us; other than he, there was no one about.

I looked over my shoulder to ask the officer where he was taking me.

“To the old port. One of the hulks there has been fitted up to hold prisoners.”

“And then?”

I could not see him, but I could visualize his shrug. “I don’t know. My orders were to arrest you and bring you here.”

So far as I could see, “here” was a public garden. Before we walked into the darkness beneath the trees, I looked up and beheld myself through their frost-blighted leaves.