Cage of Souls, page 2
I turned away. It was not pity for the workmen, but merely for myself. I might be safe whilst Peter had a voyage to whittle down with chess games, but the lot of those workmen would be my lot soon enough, when we reached the Island.
The five remaining workers were hauled up and sent below again, without further complaints, and the engines were coaxed into life. They would get choked twice more on the voyage, and the same labour would be herded out to clear them. No more men were taken by monsters, but the worker whose arm had been gashed would die three days later of some contamination. There was nothing in that jungle that was not hostile to human life.
*
So, in the aftermath of that, picture those same two men sitting across a small table, playing chess, I thinking only that if I so much as displeased the man across from me I would be back in the company of my fellow prisoners.
No amount of pretence could disguise our circumstances. The air around us rumbled constantly with the muted shake of the engines and the walls were bare rusted metal, pocked with rivets. There was the swell, as the boat wallowed in the river current, and the smell. An ageing, badly-maintained riverboat has a smell all its own: failing metal, oil, sweat and the stale urine of ages. Our one steel-rimmed window, round as a plate, was so crusted with grime that we might as well be underwater. Peter had hung a lantern up so that we could see to play.
Peter Drachmar had one quality that annoyed me from the very moment we met and persisted throughout our acquaintance. Sitting across from him, I knew myself to be his superior in education, in breeding, in understanding and in knowledge. Peter, on the other hand, had an unrefined, pragmatic intelligence that gave him the edge with people and with chess. He was beating me five games to nothing.
“That’s your move then?” he asked idly.
“I was just adjusting the piece.”
“Then you should say,” Peter said pleasantly. “It’s the rules. Otherwise it counts as your move,” and he reached over and took a piece with one of his Soldiers. That was the other thing about him, of course. Whilst I examined the board and remembered my lessons and ran every permutation of moves through my mind, Peter cheated whenever possible and took every chance to put himself ahead. This went for life as well as chess. Despite this, he was one of the most easy-going and good-natured men I ever met. Perhaps there is a lesson there somewhere.
I pushed one of my Villeins forward. My tutors had been emphatic that the secret of the game was in these unassuming little pieces, simple squares of wood. They had never elaborated on this and all my lowly little chessmen seemed to do was get in each other’s way whilst Peter’s Soldiers butchered mine. I think my problem was that I was thinking too far ahead. Also I have a very bad face for strategy. My eyebrows are especial giveaways.
It was a cold game, because of our circumstances and because we had known each other for all of half an hour. From the start the matching of wills across the board was all we had in common save our surroundings. Even as Peter pondered his next move, the water bullied our craft a little and the whole room tilted, making us clutch the table, which someone had seen fit to bolt to the floor. One of my Nobles, being the tallest pieces, skittered from its place and rolled away.
“That’s lost,” Peter declared.
“Excuse me?”
“If a piece falls off the board it’s counted as lost,” he explained.
“That’s news to me.” It had never come up in the tutorials.
“It represents random death due to disease,” Peter told me, mimicking my speech. “Or, seeing as it was a Noble, inbreeding.”
You must not think me a coward, but he was bigger than me, and I did not know him. Later I would understand that I could challenge him quite freely, and that he would think the better of me for it. At the time I let him have the point. I was so close to losing the game that it would make little difference. He eliminated my remaining Nobles in three moves and sat back, satisfied.
“You’re a fine player,” he said, and took a flask from somewhere within his shirt. It was copper and embossed with the figure of a woman.
“I’ve lost six games,” I pointed out.
“That’s my favourite kind of player,” he said easily. “If only you’d bet something, I’d be rich.”
“If only I had something to bet,” I pointed out.
“Well that goes the same for me,” he promised. I looked at his clothes and wondered, but he failed to go into details. It was a long time before Peter Drachmar let any of his past out of the bag.
“Another game,” he offered, adding, “You nearly had me that time.” It was so big a lie that even he could lend little credibility to it.
I considered the options and began replacing the pieces in their starting positions. “Anything in that flask for me?” I asked, emboldened by the stifling room. The heat from the engine mixed with the heat of the outside made the air sticky and thick.
Peter, generous in victory, handed the flask over without a second thought. The liquid inside was decidedly inferior Maiden’s Kiss, but it was enough for a thirsty man, and I took a decent sized swig before surrendering the flask. By then Peter had completed setting the board. As loser, I began, and shuffled a doomed Villein forward to start.
This time round I gave up playing to win and just stalled him for as long as possible. By this I found out a useful thing about Peter Drachmar: he got bored quickly and then started taking chances. I still maintain that I would have won that game had we driven it to its conclusion. We were some thirty moves into that tedious match, however, when the timbre of the engines changed subtly. Peter noticed it before I did, looking up sharply, one finger poised on a Villein.
“Is that your move, then?” I pressed, because by then I was getting bolder. A moment later I had caught up, and knew the engine had choked once more. I was in instant terror. Surely he had tired of me. Surely he would return me to the hold – or to that new work party even now being assembled. You cannot know, if you have not been in such a place, how it is to have your entire life suspended by the threads of other people’s whims.
“Captain can deal with it,” he said, waving away the fact that we were drifting towards an alien shore yet again. Casually, he upset the board with his elbow as he turned back, destroying all my hard work. “New game?” he offered brightly.
*
The third time that the engines choked and died, Peter and I went up on deck again. The sky was darkening by then, and the men on the platform worked faster, wanting even less to be near the water with night drawing on. As we watched, something caught my eye at the water’s edge. It was a dwelling, or something like it. A little domed construction of wicker that actually sat in the water, and perhaps could only be entered from beneath. There were other poles and struts standing out in the river, and I now know that these were fish traps. At the time all I could do was stare. Peter noticed too, and frowned, and I saw that he had no idea either.
“They call them web-children,” the captain told us shortly.
“Who calls what web-children?” Peter asked.
“Them things that built that,” the captain explained. “They live out here.”
“People live in this jungle?” Peter wondered.
“Ain’t people.” There was something in the captain’s voice that made it clear that he was not just being prejudiced against some race of mankind. At that moment I saw something moving between the trees, half-hidden and watching the boat. There was a manlike quality in the way it moved but it was not human. I wanted very much to go below again, after that, and Peter must have felt the same. I was no stranger to horror, even then, but I knew that this place would test me beyond all bearing, and I really did not think that I could survive it. There are so many deaths in the jungles, after all.
I lost the next three games to Peter. It didn’t make things better. I slept, packed into another man’s armpit in the hold, and when I awoke, we had arrived.
2
An Undesirable Residence
They dragged us all out into the morning to look at it, because it was a vital part of breaking our spirits. Here was our new home, and our mass grave.
To a citizen of Shadrapar, the Island was nothing but an idea. It was where criminals go, and most people thought that this was a good thing. I had thought so myself, before I began to hold opinions unpopular with the state. The details were not known to the general populace. The understanding that the Island was a long way away in the jungles of the east; that no escapee has ever made it back to trouble the law-abiding; that it killed off prisoners as fast as it received them, and was thus never full, these facts were as much as anyone wanted to know. I had never speculated how such a place might work before my fall from grace. Even when I hid in the blighted Underworld, companion to beggars and beasts, I gave it little thought. On the boat, when they had finally caught me, I tried to envisage my destination and found that, after such a long period of avoiding the question, my imagination failed me. I would never have been able to hit upon the truth.
The jungle was more of a swamp now, and the water spread on all sides, a glistening wetland choked with reeds and knotted trees. The air was rank with flies. The boat moved slowly through what must have been the only channel deep enough to take its draft, and ahead of us the water broadened out into a lake. It was half mud, and strange plants thrust out from its shallows at intervals like the hands of drowning men. At the heart of this lake was the Island.
Everyone’s first glance at the Island was the same: one took it for its namesake. In the middle of this lake, you assumed, there is a hill, and the hill has been covered by the structure. The Island was roughly square, with the top two floors of decreasing size and the lower three all of the same dimensions. It was made of wood and cane, as though the entire building was a barred cell. The higher levels had a few spaces of solid wall, so that the staff could steal a little privacy. The lower levels were all of reinforced slats, cane bars and a vast webwork of rope that held it all together. It was possible to see clean through the Island, if one picked the correct opening. The eye’s path took you through a dozen intervening slatted walls and out to the foul waterscape on the other side, past a hundred sullen inmates. As the boat approached we could see a few of those inmates, shadowed figures behind the bars. They gave us a sense of scale. The lake was larger than we thought. The Island was far larger than we thought. It was larger than any castle, and the prisoners within must have numbered over a thousand. We would vanish in that mass of the deprived and the lawless, and never surface. Our faces would be lost to the powerless mob.
I pride myself in thinking that I was one of the first to make out the last demoralising thing about the Island. I saw that it was misnamed. As the boat chugged closer, finally breaking onto the open waters, we bobbed in the swell that troubled the lake. I watched as we rose and fell against the line of trees, and saw that the Island, too, rose and fell. It was a moment before I could separate real movement from the illusion caused by our own, but then I knew. The Island was afloat, however impossible that might be. Either there was some great portion of it below the water, and the lake was far deeper than I had guessed, or… I knew the truth, I think, even before we pulled closer and heard the dull and muffled thumping of machinery from the nearest corner. Some constant effort was keeping the whole construction afloat, and I could foresee even then how that would shape the lives of those aboard. It was not an island at all, but the most perilous of boats.
Some of my fellow prisoners swore, and some cursed, but most just stared. From this moment, so we all saw, there would be no privacy, no dignity, no escape from the flies or from each other. The hold of the prison boat would be like a palace to us. There were about twenty-five of us when the voyage began. Now one was dead, another with a wound that would kill him. Before the year was out there would be less than twelve of us left. The Island was a living thing worse than the jungle, and it ate humanity. It roasted men in its furnaces, sweated them in its machines, digested them in the swamp waters and ground up their bones.
The rivermen themselves were oblivious. Their attention was on the prisoners not the prison. All this was some part of their obligation to their employers. The new arrivals must be allowed to see their destination from the outside. It was an effective lesson for us to learn. Beyond the crew’s impassive faces and levelled weapons, I saw Peter. He was standing aloof from us, of course. From his bearing and his clothes he could almost have been the ship’s owner. I saw his expression, though, and it was not the face of a happy man. He might not be going under lock and key but he would be a prisoner of this godforsaken place as much as we.
There was a small boat coming round the side of the Island, a wide-beamed dinghy without oars or sail, but I heard nothing of the engine. At first I assumed that it was hidden beneath the sullen growl of our own but, as the craft drew nearer, I saw that there were crooked arms that reached into the water at sides and rear. A constant play of droplets hung in a mist about these devices, and every so often a fish would leap up out of the water and away from them. It stirred vague memories in me of things learned once and long forgotten, but by then my attention was taken with the craft’s occupants. There were three, including the steersman. They were all in black: jackets with grotesquely high collars rising almost to the level of their ears at the back; trousers belted with a club and a knife; boots and gloves of shiny rubber or plastic. Their hair was shaved close to the skull. The man at the prow also wore a headband that marked him out as a leader of men. Beneath it, he was almost bald, without even the stubble of the others. He had narrow eyes and a face that defied expression. In all the time I knew the Marshal – for it was he – I never saw any real flicker of thought betray itself on his face.
“How many?” His voice was very sharp and thin, a good fit for his slot of a mouth. The captain told him our number and never mentioned the dead man that the river creature had taken. Perhaps nobody mentioned him, and the Island went unaware that it was one life short. I feel sure that the Marshal would not have cared. He made his feelings about the prisoners quite clear from the start.
Our prison boat cut its engines a hundred yards or so from the Island and coasted most of the rest of the way. When it was close enough, a few men in convict grey threw ropes to the crew, who made them fast. We watched our fellows on the Island haul with aching arms to drag us the last few feet until the blunt nose of the boat touched the splintered timber. There was a kind of dock there, a wooden platform ringed with cane, with another handful of black-clad Wardens watching suspiciously. One of them was armed with some kind of gun that I did not recognise.
“Get your worthless hides off the boat!” the Marshal screamed at us, and the captain backed him up with, “You heard him, bastards! Move!” After a few blows from the clubs of the rivermen we began heading forward in a reluctant, uncooperative mass.
Although the boat had been secured, there was still a gap between it and the Island that changed size constantly as the swell rocked us. We were forced to jump across, with the water to catch us if we fell. I nearly did, but the man behind me caught my shoulder, so that I was able to make it across with a long step. The simple, wordless act of kindness surprised me. I had looked upon my fellow inmates with the horror of a well-bred Academy man. Joining the growing huddle of criminals in the square, I examined them with new eyes. They were not just a mass of grey-clad malice now, but individuals as nervous and scared as I. I took a good look at the man who had helped me as he joined us, dark and unassuming save for the mark that ran from one ear almost to the point of his chin. I thought it was a birthmark but later I discovered that it had been scored in by an energy blade during a fight. Whether he was lucky to have survived, given his current position, was an interesting philosophical point.
“Stefan,” I told him.
“Shon,” he replied. His eyes were on the guards and I could see that he, like Peter, was a man of action. He never tensed enough to make me think that he was going to try something, though. Where would he go? Aside from a dive into the water or onto the hostile boat, there was only one exit, a narrow, dark doorway that led into the body of the Island. We would go there soon enough without any fighting. There was no need to hurry matters.
I saw Peter get off the boat with a graceful little step and stand away from us, at the water’s edge. One of the guards went over to him and inspected his papers. The inmates who had tied the prison boat fast were now reappearing, carrying heavy sacks that they handed down to the rivermen.
“What do they make here? What can you export from a prison?” I whispered, but Shon just waved me silent with a hand that was missing most of its little finger.
The morning sun was rising from behind the trees like a bloated red mushroom. The mists that hung about the jungle were the colour of blood. I have heard that the sun is dying by degrees, swelling up with some illness and parching the land into the lifeless deserts you find to the west of the city. For the first time, in those jungles, I looked up and saw that it was true. In that disease-ridden place even the sky looked unhealthy.
We were kept waiting for some time beneath that relentless sun. A few tried to sit down but guards came with black, dense clubs and struck them until they staggered to their feet. I was beginning to feel slightly faint by then. The mounting heat of the morning was beginning to tell on me. I glanced again at Peter and saw him waiting still, standing as we were. He had no baggage, nothing but those slightly fancy clothes he stood up in.
There was a thump from behind me, and I turned to see that one of my fellows had fainted. There was a bruise on his temple that a riverman or a Warden had put there. I expected him to be kicked into either wakefulness or concussion, but the guards were ignoring him. They had other things to watch for. The Marshal had disembarked from his boat and was coming up to us. I learned later that he always escorted the new arrivals in: he was a man for whom control was an absolute and realisable dream, and it manifested itself even to such absurd lengths.
The five remaining workers were hauled up and sent below again, without further complaints, and the engines were coaxed into life. They would get choked twice more on the voyage, and the same labour would be herded out to clear them. No more men were taken by monsters, but the worker whose arm had been gashed would die three days later of some contamination. There was nothing in that jungle that was not hostile to human life.
*
So, in the aftermath of that, picture those same two men sitting across a small table, playing chess, I thinking only that if I so much as displeased the man across from me I would be back in the company of my fellow prisoners.
No amount of pretence could disguise our circumstances. The air around us rumbled constantly with the muted shake of the engines and the walls were bare rusted metal, pocked with rivets. There was the swell, as the boat wallowed in the river current, and the smell. An ageing, badly-maintained riverboat has a smell all its own: failing metal, oil, sweat and the stale urine of ages. Our one steel-rimmed window, round as a plate, was so crusted with grime that we might as well be underwater. Peter had hung a lantern up so that we could see to play.
Peter Drachmar had one quality that annoyed me from the very moment we met and persisted throughout our acquaintance. Sitting across from him, I knew myself to be his superior in education, in breeding, in understanding and in knowledge. Peter, on the other hand, had an unrefined, pragmatic intelligence that gave him the edge with people and with chess. He was beating me five games to nothing.
“That’s your move then?” he asked idly.
“I was just adjusting the piece.”
“Then you should say,” Peter said pleasantly. “It’s the rules. Otherwise it counts as your move,” and he reached over and took a piece with one of his Soldiers. That was the other thing about him, of course. Whilst I examined the board and remembered my lessons and ran every permutation of moves through my mind, Peter cheated whenever possible and took every chance to put himself ahead. This went for life as well as chess. Despite this, he was one of the most easy-going and good-natured men I ever met. Perhaps there is a lesson there somewhere.
I pushed one of my Villeins forward. My tutors had been emphatic that the secret of the game was in these unassuming little pieces, simple squares of wood. They had never elaborated on this and all my lowly little chessmen seemed to do was get in each other’s way whilst Peter’s Soldiers butchered mine. I think my problem was that I was thinking too far ahead. Also I have a very bad face for strategy. My eyebrows are especial giveaways.
It was a cold game, because of our circumstances and because we had known each other for all of half an hour. From the start the matching of wills across the board was all we had in common save our surroundings. Even as Peter pondered his next move, the water bullied our craft a little and the whole room tilted, making us clutch the table, which someone had seen fit to bolt to the floor. One of my Nobles, being the tallest pieces, skittered from its place and rolled away.
“That’s lost,” Peter declared.
“Excuse me?”
“If a piece falls off the board it’s counted as lost,” he explained.
“That’s news to me.” It had never come up in the tutorials.
“It represents random death due to disease,” Peter told me, mimicking my speech. “Or, seeing as it was a Noble, inbreeding.”
You must not think me a coward, but he was bigger than me, and I did not know him. Later I would understand that I could challenge him quite freely, and that he would think the better of me for it. At the time I let him have the point. I was so close to losing the game that it would make little difference. He eliminated my remaining Nobles in three moves and sat back, satisfied.
“You’re a fine player,” he said, and took a flask from somewhere within his shirt. It was copper and embossed with the figure of a woman.
“I’ve lost six games,” I pointed out.
“That’s my favourite kind of player,” he said easily. “If only you’d bet something, I’d be rich.”
“If only I had something to bet,” I pointed out.
“Well that goes the same for me,” he promised. I looked at his clothes and wondered, but he failed to go into details. It was a long time before Peter Drachmar let any of his past out of the bag.
“Another game,” he offered, adding, “You nearly had me that time.” It was so big a lie that even he could lend little credibility to it.
I considered the options and began replacing the pieces in their starting positions. “Anything in that flask for me?” I asked, emboldened by the stifling room. The heat from the engine mixed with the heat of the outside made the air sticky and thick.
Peter, generous in victory, handed the flask over without a second thought. The liquid inside was decidedly inferior Maiden’s Kiss, but it was enough for a thirsty man, and I took a decent sized swig before surrendering the flask. By then Peter had completed setting the board. As loser, I began, and shuffled a doomed Villein forward to start.
This time round I gave up playing to win and just stalled him for as long as possible. By this I found out a useful thing about Peter Drachmar: he got bored quickly and then started taking chances. I still maintain that I would have won that game had we driven it to its conclusion. We were some thirty moves into that tedious match, however, when the timbre of the engines changed subtly. Peter noticed it before I did, looking up sharply, one finger poised on a Villein.
“Is that your move, then?” I pressed, because by then I was getting bolder. A moment later I had caught up, and knew the engine had choked once more. I was in instant terror. Surely he had tired of me. Surely he would return me to the hold – or to that new work party even now being assembled. You cannot know, if you have not been in such a place, how it is to have your entire life suspended by the threads of other people’s whims.
“Captain can deal with it,” he said, waving away the fact that we were drifting towards an alien shore yet again. Casually, he upset the board with his elbow as he turned back, destroying all my hard work. “New game?” he offered brightly.
*
The third time that the engines choked and died, Peter and I went up on deck again. The sky was darkening by then, and the men on the platform worked faster, wanting even less to be near the water with night drawing on. As we watched, something caught my eye at the water’s edge. It was a dwelling, or something like it. A little domed construction of wicker that actually sat in the water, and perhaps could only be entered from beneath. There were other poles and struts standing out in the river, and I now know that these were fish traps. At the time all I could do was stare. Peter noticed too, and frowned, and I saw that he had no idea either.
“They call them web-children,” the captain told us shortly.
“Who calls what web-children?” Peter asked.
“Them things that built that,” the captain explained. “They live out here.”
“People live in this jungle?” Peter wondered.
“Ain’t people.” There was something in the captain’s voice that made it clear that he was not just being prejudiced against some race of mankind. At that moment I saw something moving between the trees, half-hidden and watching the boat. There was a manlike quality in the way it moved but it was not human. I wanted very much to go below again, after that, and Peter must have felt the same. I was no stranger to horror, even then, but I knew that this place would test me beyond all bearing, and I really did not think that I could survive it. There are so many deaths in the jungles, after all.
I lost the next three games to Peter. It didn’t make things better. I slept, packed into another man’s armpit in the hold, and when I awoke, we had arrived.
2
An Undesirable Residence
They dragged us all out into the morning to look at it, because it was a vital part of breaking our spirits. Here was our new home, and our mass grave.
To a citizen of Shadrapar, the Island was nothing but an idea. It was where criminals go, and most people thought that this was a good thing. I had thought so myself, before I began to hold opinions unpopular with the state. The details were not known to the general populace. The understanding that the Island was a long way away in the jungles of the east; that no escapee has ever made it back to trouble the law-abiding; that it killed off prisoners as fast as it received them, and was thus never full, these facts were as much as anyone wanted to know. I had never speculated how such a place might work before my fall from grace. Even when I hid in the blighted Underworld, companion to beggars and beasts, I gave it little thought. On the boat, when they had finally caught me, I tried to envisage my destination and found that, after such a long period of avoiding the question, my imagination failed me. I would never have been able to hit upon the truth.
The jungle was more of a swamp now, and the water spread on all sides, a glistening wetland choked with reeds and knotted trees. The air was rank with flies. The boat moved slowly through what must have been the only channel deep enough to take its draft, and ahead of us the water broadened out into a lake. It was half mud, and strange plants thrust out from its shallows at intervals like the hands of drowning men. At the heart of this lake was the Island.
Everyone’s first glance at the Island was the same: one took it for its namesake. In the middle of this lake, you assumed, there is a hill, and the hill has been covered by the structure. The Island was roughly square, with the top two floors of decreasing size and the lower three all of the same dimensions. It was made of wood and cane, as though the entire building was a barred cell. The higher levels had a few spaces of solid wall, so that the staff could steal a little privacy. The lower levels were all of reinforced slats, cane bars and a vast webwork of rope that held it all together. It was possible to see clean through the Island, if one picked the correct opening. The eye’s path took you through a dozen intervening slatted walls and out to the foul waterscape on the other side, past a hundred sullen inmates. As the boat approached we could see a few of those inmates, shadowed figures behind the bars. They gave us a sense of scale. The lake was larger than we thought. The Island was far larger than we thought. It was larger than any castle, and the prisoners within must have numbered over a thousand. We would vanish in that mass of the deprived and the lawless, and never surface. Our faces would be lost to the powerless mob.
I pride myself in thinking that I was one of the first to make out the last demoralising thing about the Island. I saw that it was misnamed. As the boat chugged closer, finally breaking onto the open waters, we bobbed in the swell that troubled the lake. I watched as we rose and fell against the line of trees, and saw that the Island, too, rose and fell. It was a moment before I could separate real movement from the illusion caused by our own, but then I knew. The Island was afloat, however impossible that might be. Either there was some great portion of it below the water, and the lake was far deeper than I had guessed, or… I knew the truth, I think, even before we pulled closer and heard the dull and muffled thumping of machinery from the nearest corner. Some constant effort was keeping the whole construction afloat, and I could foresee even then how that would shape the lives of those aboard. It was not an island at all, but the most perilous of boats.
Some of my fellow prisoners swore, and some cursed, but most just stared. From this moment, so we all saw, there would be no privacy, no dignity, no escape from the flies or from each other. The hold of the prison boat would be like a palace to us. There were about twenty-five of us when the voyage began. Now one was dead, another with a wound that would kill him. Before the year was out there would be less than twelve of us left. The Island was a living thing worse than the jungle, and it ate humanity. It roasted men in its furnaces, sweated them in its machines, digested them in the swamp waters and ground up their bones.
The rivermen themselves were oblivious. Their attention was on the prisoners not the prison. All this was some part of their obligation to their employers. The new arrivals must be allowed to see their destination from the outside. It was an effective lesson for us to learn. Beyond the crew’s impassive faces and levelled weapons, I saw Peter. He was standing aloof from us, of course. From his bearing and his clothes he could almost have been the ship’s owner. I saw his expression, though, and it was not the face of a happy man. He might not be going under lock and key but he would be a prisoner of this godforsaken place as much as we.
There was a small boat coming round the side of the Island, a wide-beamed dinghy without oars or sail, but I heard nothing of the engine. At first I assumed that it was hidden beneath the sullen growl of our own but, as the craft drew nearer, I saw that there were crooked arms that reached into the water at sides and rear. A constant play of droplets hung in a mist about these devices, and every so often a fish would leap up out of the water and away from them. It stirred vague memories in me of things learned once and long forgotten, but by then my attention was taken with the craft’s occupants. There were three, including the steersman. They were all in black: jackets with grotesquely high collars rising almost to the level of their ears at the back; trousers belted with a club and a knife; boots and gloves of shiny rubber or plastic. Their hair was shaved close to the skull. The man at the prow also wore a headband that marked him out as a leader of men. Beneath it, he was almost bald, without even the stubble of the others. He had narrow eyes and a face that defied expression. In all the time I knew the Marshal – for it was he – I never saw any real flicker of thought betray itself on his face.
“How many?” His voice was very sharp and thin, a good fit for his slot of a mouth. The captain told him our number and never mentioned the dead man that the river creature had taken. Perhaps nobody mentioned him, and the Island went unaware that it was one life short. I feel sure that the Marshal would not have cared. He made his feelings about the prisoners quite clear from the start.
Our prison boat cut its engines a hundred yards or so from the Island and coasted most of the rest of the way. When it was close enough, a few men in convict grey threw ropes to the crew, who made them fast. We watched our fellows on the Island haul with aching arms to drag us the last few feet until the blunt nose of the boat touched the splintered timber. There was a kind of dock there, a wooden platform ringed with cane, with another handful of black-clad Wardens watching suspiciously. One of them was armed with some kind of gun that I did not recognise.
“Get your worthless hides off the boat!” the Marshal screamed at us, and the captain backed him up with, “You heard him, bastards! Move!” After a few blows from the clubs of the rivermen we began heading forward in a reluctant, uncooperative mass.
Although the boat had been secured, there was still a gap between it and the Island that changed size constantly as the swell rocked us. We were forced to jump across, with the water to catch us if we fell. I nearly did, but the man behind me caught my shoulder, so that I was able to make it across with a long step. The simple, wordless act of kindness surprised me. I had looked upon my fellow inmates with the horror of a well-bred Academy man. Joining the growing huddle of criminals in the square, I examined them with new eyes. They were not just a mass of grey-clad malice now, but individuals as nervous and scared as I. I took a good look at the man who had helped me as he joined us, dark and unassuming save for the mark that ran from one ear almost to the point of his chin. I thought it was a birthmark but later I discovered that it had been scored in by an energy blade during a fight. Whether he was lucky to have survived, given his current position, was an interesting philosophical point.
“Stefan,” I told him.
“Shon,” he replied. His eyes were on the guards and I could see that he, like Peter, was a man of action. He never tensed enough to make me think that he was going to try something, though. Where would he go? Aside from a dive into the water or onto the hostile boat, there was only one exit, a narrow, dark doorway that led into the body of the Island. We would go there soon enough without any fighting. There was no need to hurry matters.
I saw Peter get off the boat with a graceful little step and stand away from us, at the water’s edge. One of the guards went over to him and inspected his papers. The inmates who had tied the prison boat fast were now reappearing, carrying heavy sacks that they handed down to the rivermen.
“What do they make here? What can you export from a prison?” I whispered, but Shon just waved me silent with a hand that was missing most of its little finger.
The morning sun was rising from behind the trees like a bloated red mushroom. The mists that hung about the jungle were the colour of blood. I have heard that the sun is dying by degrees, swelling up with some illness and parching the land into the lifeless deserts you find to the west of the city. For the first time, in those jungles, I looked up and saw that it was true. In that disease-ridden place even the sky looked unhealthy.
We were kept waiting for some time beneath that relentless sun. A few tried to sit down but guards came with black, dense clubs and struck them until they staggered to their feet. I was beginning to feel slightly faint by then. The mounting heat of the morning was beginning to tell on me. I glanced again at Peter and saw him waiting still, standing as we were. He had no baggage, nothing but those slightly fancy clothes he stood up in.
There was a thump from behind me, and I turned to see that one of my fellows had fainted. There was a bruise on his temple that a riverman or a Warden had put there. I expected him to be kicked into either wakefulness or concussion, but the guards were ignoring him. They had other things to watch for. The Marshal had disembarked from his boat and was coming up to us. I learned later that he always escorted the new arrivals in: he was a man for whom control was an absolute and realisable dream, and it manifested itself even to such absurd lengths.
