Friday, June 12, 2708

          I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: nobody can forage like our Kiril.  She finds things that even the Cumencians overlook.  She carries her skirt lifted up before her, full of roots that no one else knew we could eat, shoots that grew long past their season, woody mushrooms from which a strong jaw can still chew out some calories, grubs the size of a big man’s thumb, bitter herbs from which to boil a nutritious tea.  (I did what I could.  I helped the family the best I knew how.  But nothing could save Mama by then—it had gone too far.) 

          Kief holds back the hungry kids and metes it out fairly.  Every time I think I’m going to get too shaky to stand up anymore, Kiril always comes through.  (So Papa pled my case to the ship’s captain, saying, “Man, this girl can cook!  But we have no food for her to do her magic—give her that chance—why waste a talent like hers?”  So the captain waved me over to the galley cupboard and said, “Show me something”) 

          So far I have not fainted.  I am not the fainting kind.  But I have come close.

          (And then I had to go and ruin everything by fainting.  The smell of kitchen grease was just too much for me, when I hadn’t eaten for so long.  But the captain took a good, hard look at the bones of me, and said, “It doesn’t matter.  We need a scullery maid anyway.  The last one run off.”  That was the last time he ever took pity on me.)

          Our taverness takes pity on us when she can, slipping us whatever potatoes, bread, and beans the soldiers have left, scraps from their meals, even sparing a little of the chaummin-syrup to make sugar for us, and it makes the tea soooo good!  It gives us strength to go about our chores, stitching up belts into bandoliers, cleaning guns that see no action.  But even a small guerilla band needs a lot of fueling.  We’ve caught kids licking up the gun-cleaning oil from the rod, but we don’t need to punish them; they get sick and then the others laugh, and so they try not to do it again.

          (The others laughed at me, though.  They mimicked fainting wherever I went, till the joke bored them. Then they found somebody else to torment for awhile.)

          (The men laugh in the mess-haul, pointing at the ragged book.  “Look at that!” they cry, “He ate some pages!  The big, fat hog ate pages from his cookbook!”  And there I sit, slumped against the bars, mortified and yet too weary just from breathing to show how much I care, how much this indictment sums up all of the indictments of my life, gobbling up what can never satisfy me, mere slick pictures of a world I cannot have—it all looks so sweet, so juicy, so tempting, but it all turns out flat and tasteless in the end.  My belly rumbles audibly, trying to digest reed-pulp and ink, and they laugh again, louder still.

          Sanzio D’Arco smiles evilly on me.  “It won’t take long, now,” he says.  I try not to believe him.)

* * *

Nervously our two recruits pass the pipe back and forth between them as Kief exclaims, "Tobacco--the sacred herb!  Tobacco, the purifying smudge, the breath of change."  The firelight inflames his face and limns out the muscles of his chest and upraised arms, bared this night in defiance of the codes, embracing the wind in a shivering ecstasy.  "Let any who partake inhale deeply of its hunger-vanquishing energy, feel new vigor course through them for the smiting of our enemies."

Bakr's bones outstretch his hungry flesh, taller than Kief and slumped as though ashamed to tower over his officer.  His little brother, Aziz, started on hunger younger and so hasn't grown enough for his years.  Fuzz has barely begun on Bakr's lip, while Aziz has skin smoother than most girls.  But both have the same big, heavy-lidded eyes and largish mouths to mark their kinship.  Which one of these toads does Kief expect me to kiss?  And what might they turn into, really, if I did?

"Let us turn its dark powers against those who strangle the life from our land and our people!"  He speaks so earnestly, you'd think he made up the words himself.  But Kief feels deeply all of the rebel traditions.  With venom he intones, "And may the sacred tobacco choke the life out of any traitors among us, rot them from within, as treachery and cowardice rot the soul within, so that disease of the soul may be made manifest in the flesh!"

He gestures towards a bucket.  "Baptize them, Sister Deirdre."  Oh--am I a nun to him, now?  I soak the boys thoroughly; I hear that rebels all over the country have added this to the rite since hearing the acts of Father Man.  On a night as cold as this, baptism amounts to an ordeal at least as great as fire and blood.

Now he commands them to leap over the flames, one by one.  I hear that only Cyran calls followers to actually walk across the coals; I've heard it stated as fact that no one can safely do this except in Cyran's presence, and I've said no word to contradict it.  Ungainly Bakr becomes unexpectedly graceful in his staglike leap, a sketch of dark against the hot-bright fire.  Smaller Aziz goes back a ways to get a good running start, but he makes it across, too, stumbling breathlessly into his brother's arms, eyes wide and bright with conquered fear.

We all cheer.  Bottles pop open and Damien, who's slipped away for this night's ritual, strikes up the Bailebelde with abandon.  Best chaummin in the whole damn country; our hostess knows her stuff.  Not very much, of course; we must make sure that the soldiers get plenty.  But it takes little, on stomachs as empty as ours, to whirl the trees around into a blissful, dancing blur.  Damien's chin and lip have darkened with the softest brushings of his first, young beard, and he looks good.  I dance to his music, trying to keep warm, hoping to sweat the alcohol out, but I think I just spin it in deeper.

Two new egalitarians--something worth celebrating.  Two more devoted to avenging our ghosts by wits and might of arms.  Two more who may well join the ranks of our protecting ghosts, themselves, before the year turns 'round.  Two more comrades to share the burden of this terrible war.  I'll drink to that.

 

Saturday, June 13, 2708

(The troops drink way too much.  And the civilians only encourage them, of course--I would, too, in their shoes, not that they actually wear shoes.  I've let much slide, allegedly behind my back, brooding, they say, on that gross creature in his cage.  Right there, across the table from me, staring back at me like some nightmare funhouse mirror, as insomniac as I, tonight.

So I won't set too bad an example to join the soldiers in their carousing, just for tonight--or morning, rather; the dawn's not half an hour away.  They're already about as corrupt as they can get, and I don't do this often.  And by “join” I mean figuratively, not keeping company with the beasts, merely doing as they do, just this once.  I sit here in the dining hall, practically alone, just me and my captive.

I feel a smirk come over my face; I raise a toast to deGroot and let him think that I've thought of something particularly nasty to do to him, but really I've got my mind on what dogs serve under me and how they'll inevitably reap what they deserve.

Oh, Layne, but you’re a cunning one!  You saw precisely how to dovetail my plan with your own.  I should never have bared my heart to you.  But who else can I write my letters to?  Why horrify my wife?

I've coddled the men with luxuries, that's the thing, trying to entice a monster that I would rather torture than any prisoner before him.  How dare he flatter himself to think that he, he of all people, could speak for the hungering masses!  Only when abominations like him give up their foreign agitation can we calm the people down, to where we can go easy on them again.  Him and the abomination that leads them all.

Some people should never have been born.

So here's to you, Doctor Malcolm deGroot, and your demoralizing influence on my troops.  You seem to sweat corruption wherever you go.

So?  I've twisted corruption to my purposes before.  That's what makes my job bearable, after all: the worthiness of the victim to suffer, the justice of it all.  And someday my turn will come--some furious rebel will blow my head off or knife me in the gut, or maybe kill me really slowly as I've done to others.  Sooner or later...it's not like I'm any stranger to pain, inside or out, anymore than a stranger to death.  It doesn't scare me.  I'll rain down retribution on more of their wickedness than they can rain down on mine.  I know my soldiers stink as badly as theirs, when it comes right down to it, but at least mine defend something.  What do they propose to replace our law and order with--a few disjointed ideals and a whole lot of chaos in between?

Friday night's always bad.  Saturday'll get worse.  I guess it's Saturday already by now, so I can expect worse.  The soldiers don't have to sneak around to drink when they're off duty--how long can I bear the fools thinking that they’ve pulled one over on me, that I don’t know?  They start in broad daylight, now, just to distinguish Saturday from the rest of the week, and I've watched the laughing women keep their cups filled up for them.  I hear the men singing out there, even now, late as it is, as raucous as crows, and some of the songs they sing smack too much of subversion for my tastes.

Refill the glass.  They don't sound so off-key that way.

I shouldn't indulge foul moods like this.  Armies have always attracted ruffians; maybe I exaggerate their faults.  I look again at the message in my hands and wonder why I feel so frustrated to read it--no news should delight me more. 

Maybe I don't really want to torture Dr. deGroot, not in the traditional way, though I suppose what I do here qualifies.  How much sweeter the victory if he fell to his own disgusting vice, if I could make him hate himself so badly that he'd thank me for any punishment that I might mete out.  And then, instead, I could set him loose to wander like the damned, getting satisfying reports, now and then, on the progress of his self-destruction.  I like nothing better than to rip the pleasing face off of hypocrisy, to torment the self-righteous rebel with the truth about himself.  To let him do all the work while I stand by to watch.

Still, he did eat pages from the cookbook.  Can I spare one more day, to see if he might break all by himself?

Don’t make any decision tonight, Saza.  You’re in no condition.  Knock back what's left in the glass, and fill it up again.  I have to admit that the woman's true to her word--this has got to be the most palatable Chaummin I've ever choked down in the mountain towns.

And that other woman–what a chilling strategy you’ve come up with, Layne Aliso.  Brilliant and horrible, much like your painfully radiant self.  And much like that matron of society who has made a hobby of researching and reconstructing some of the most nightmarish devices of old Earth’s haunted past–this latest one makes even me shudder.  And yes, much like that other, that witch from the Tilián, whom I strongly suspect has more than a little to do with our troubles of late.  (And to think, not so long ago, that I tried to rescue her, at a drunk’s request!)  Oh, I am beset with brilliant, horrible women!  But I follow my orders, Layne, even if you’re too much the lady to mention them to anyone but a torturer.

I don't do this often, drink like this.  Usually only on her birthday--she who was not brilliant at all, poor thing, and had no hand in creating the horror of her life.  Yet I do, on occasion, make an exception, for the rare case like this, for the very specialest of cases, because I do my nastiest work with a hangover giving me an edge, like a grindstone sharpening the hatred in me. Only for the very few prisoners that I really, truly, honestly do hate.

Sometimes you've got to allow for diminishing returns in this business.  The more a subject resists persuasion, the more confident he becomes.  This especially holds true if you're playing him against himself.  It's time to end this, anyway.)

(He looks so boyish when he's drunk.  Childlike, almost, smiling up at me all goggle-eyed, his mustache faint upon his face; it might be a chaummin mustache, from drinking too sloppily.  Just a kid, really, too young for this business.  Is he the best the government could come up with?  Ah, but he knows his trade too well; he doesn't even have to lay a hand on me to weaken me, day by day.  And yet...he reminds me of somebody...)