One message remains, p.8
One Message Remains, page 8
“People are dying,” Calamuk replied, shaking his head. “No, people are being killed. It’s been going on since the first camp. The Treotan administration is murdering people. But they don’t see it that way, because murder is for human beings, and my people aren’t people. They’re...” He stared up at the glittering roof, studying their many tiny reflections, as if searching out the correct word. “Productive hours.”
“Calamuk...”
“I have no one left for them to threaten now,” he said. “No one left to kill. Thanks to Treotan. I thought it couldn’t be true. But too many people have told me the same thing—too many people have seen it, fled it, tried to warn others.”
“So that’s why you took us?” Tzajos said. “Revenge? You want everyone to know that, what, your people refute the non-aggression pact we signed at the end of the war, that you still want a fight?”
“No, we don’t want a fight.” He sighed again. “I am so tired, Tzajos. I didn’t want any of this. You know, it’s funny that the young soldiers called you cockroaches? It’s not strictly about hostility—about hating a roach, about personally wanting it to die at your hand. It’s also because roaches are low to the ground. They barely see a world bigger than themselves. That’s like you, like all of Treotan, not just the soldiers.”
“That’s completely untrue,” Tzajos said, offended. “We’re exceedingly cosmopolitan. We see the entire world, we see more of the world than anyone.”
“No you don’t. You only see what you put your name on—that’s all that’s real to you, that’s all that has meaning. Everything else is mists and shadows, it’s not unexplored or unfamiliar to you, it’s simply...unclaimed. That’s the only word you have to describe everything that’s not yours. Nothing else. Not until you own it do you care.”
Calamuk put his hands on his thighs and rose slowly, handing the lantern off to one of the fighters—the expressionless boy with the curly, brindle-striped hair who had hit the village elder.
“What happens now?” Tzajos said, hating the whine in his voice, hating that the men could hear it.
“We are waiting for someone to come to us,” Calamuk said, turning away; the cloak made him all but invisible from the back. “Then we will have a talk about why you are here, and why you are alive for now.”
Tzajos was not sure how much time passed after that conversation; the voices within him were quiet, seething, but seemed content to watch rather than act up for the time being. He and his soldiers were fed twice, he was not sure how many hours apart—a slice of thick black bread and a rock-hard lump of salty sheep’s cheese the first time, only bread the second. They were given water from a communal wooden bucket that one of the younger fighters walked with down the line of captives, allowing a sip or two per man. The Dastians drank tea and ate the army rations seized from the captured convoy, heated up on the portable stove and eaten from stolen mess kits, further incensing Tzajos.
He did nothing. He could do nothing. He kept imagining the sounds his legs would make as they broke them; he tried to stop and could not. It turned his stomach in a neverending revolution, like the rubber-and-steel treads of a steam-track. He had never heard a bone break. Not for the first time he thought perhaps he had lived too sheltered a life. It was a pity that would never change now.
Sheer exhaustion let him sleep a few times, despite his bonds and the noise, the hard floor, the cold wind blowing constantly through the entrance tunnel. Sleep was a relief; he wished he could spend all his time there. If only Rothkard could have gotten those pills made up! He could have, perhaps, surreptitiously taken them all now—slept forever—escaped whatever was coming next, which could not be good, and he feared it all the more for Calamuk’s vagueness about it. But no—he did not think he could kill himself. Even now, in this hopeless place. It wasn’t that he thought he could out-think them, out-negotiate them, escape even. Only that he had nothing but his life, as shameful and small as it was, and he could not give up the only thing he had.
The newcomer came several hours after the second piece of bread, announced by the grating rasp of the ropes in the pulley, dragging Tzajos out of another uneasy half-sleep. A boot thumped into his ribs, not hard.
The curly-haired boy. Holding a sword easily at his side—no, something cruder, a machete, sharp and chipped. “Get up,” the boy said.
Was this it? His death? Were they waiting only for the visitor to witness his execution? Or complete it? Tzajos rose clumsily, and now all he could think of was the boy’s heavy machete-blade going through the back of his neck. Crunch! Would one blow be enough? He hoped so. Maybe it would not even hurt too badly. Considerate of them, actually, to allow him such a swift death. Unless they wanted to torture him first. Perhaps that’s who they had invited—a torturer!
The visitor was a middle-aged woman, tall, almost as tall as Yather, swathed in an elaborate shawl embroidered in blues and greens over a long black dress. Her black hair was scraped back severely from her high, noble forehead and long, thin nose. Eyes dark blue, like Calamuk’s, but flecked with paler specks—like a dusk sky full of stars.
“This is it?” she said in Dastian, a regional accent Tzajos did not recognize. “The abomination? Him, this little one?”
“Yes,” said the boy with the machete, stepping aside to let Calamuk through.
The woman snorted. “Can he understand us?”
“His Dastian has been improving greatly of late,” Calamuk said.
Tzajos looked between them, panicked. The woman carried no weapons in her hands, which were powerful, adorned with a half-dozen rings each—gems, brass, silver, wood. But she also had a big leather satchel. Maybe the torture instruments were in there? “How do you do, madam,” he croaked in his best Dastian. “Major Lyell Tzajos, at your service.”
She did not smile. “At my service, Tzajos? Good. My name is Alyea. The others here have false names, war names. Not me. I am not fighting. I am here to do a job. You should make it easy for me. You understood all that?”
Tzajos nodded, mouth dry. Training. Interrogation. Something. Supposed to resist until you were rescued, or provoke until they killed you (which they might do accidentally anyway, as the torture escalated). Say nothing. No betrayal. Enough traitors here. Stay strong. What was in the satchel? No, don’t look at it. One thing they suggested was to name all the animals starting with a certain letter, to occupy the mind, keep it off the pain. Pick a letter at random. G...Grasshopper. Giraffe. Grass-snake. G...g...
A thick, waiting hush, as of a theater before the curtains went up. For no reason he thought of the capital back home, where it was said the highest officers and government officials had a ceremony they did in a theater with prisoners of war. Like him, like now. But the Dastians wouldn’t know about that. They wanted something from him and on principle, whatever it was, he must not let them have it.
Goldfinch. Gecko.
Grave-beetle.
She opened the satchel and withdrew not the screws and blades of a torturer, but a sheaf of paper, quite ordinary paper, like any school loose-leaf you would buy in a shop. Plain white paper with blue lines. At her gesture, two of the fighters brought empty wooden crates—one for her to sit on, one for Tzajos (he obeyed her every gesture), and one between them, on which she placed the paper and a lantern.
“What has happened to you should not have been allowed to happen,” she said quietly. From the corner of his eye, Tzajos could see the others straining to listen, leaning forward but not daring to move. Who was this woman, what hold did she have over them, Treotan and Dastian alike?
“The elder in Khuverban would have killed you simply for being what you are,” Alyea said. “For no other reason. Later, it would be considered a mercy—your men would say, Thank the gods he did not continue to suffer. But the villagers did not wish to bestow mercy on you. And you deserve none anyway. We took you away not to kill you—yet—but because you are a weapon.”
“I...what? No, I’m not. I’m...”
“You already know you are. You are filled not only with knowledge of your own forces, but ours—and you know where fighting happened, where men died, what they left behind, everything at the moment of death that we have no other ways of knowing. Because you are filled with the spirits of the dead men. They are in you. They can answer questions you do not even know the answers to, they can dig into you and find out. You stole them, and you tried to put them into little glass boxes—but you couldn’t control them.”
Oh, it’s not glass, actually, Tzajos almost said. It’s a type of synthetic material, and— He shook his head sharply. “You are asking me for military intelligence?” he said formally. “I can’t. I am under orders to die first.”
Alyea looked at him for a long time, and Tzajos felt something approaching a swell of pride, cutting through his terror and shame—pride that he had stood up to her, that he had done something his men could respect. The code of silence: they all knew about that. None of them would have talked, in his position. They would have all said the same thing as him.
No signal seemed to pass between them, but the curly-haired boy went to the wall, returned dragging one of Tzajos’s men—Vzeath, the youngster who had helped pull him from the stream. The boy’s face was stark white beneath its moonscape of freckles and spots, his gingery eyebrows standing out like two stripes of red ink. No one protested.
“Valens,” Alyea said. “Just a little. Ear, finger, toe. All right?”
“Foot? It would be easier. Then I don’t have to take off the boot,” the curly-haired boy—Valens—said.
“No, that’s too much. He’ll die.”
“You can survive losing one foot,” Valens said, annoyed. “If it’s a clean cut, it’s no problem.”
Vzeath stared up at them in what seemed like genuine disbelief. “What are they saying, sir?” he whispered.
“Leave the boy alone,” Tzajos said, and switched languages with a grunt of effort. “It’s all right. It’s just a threat—they want me to inform on our military and they have taken,” he added, raising his voice, “the coward’s way out, by threatening one of my men instead of me.”
Calamuk shook his head. “They are doing that because there are more of your men,” he explained. “If they kill one—on purpose or by accident—then there is another. And the others will hate you more. Please cooperate with her, major. She will have the boy do whatever it takes. And he will not hesitate.”
“Leave him alone! Why not put the blade to me instead?” Tzajos said, his voice trembling as Valens forced Vzeath to the floor, knelt on his back, and held the boy’s arm out—his left, which was some small blessing anyway, Tzajos’s mind bleated thoughtlessly, unless the boy’s a leftie, which I’ve never paid attention to, Yather would know, where’s Yather? Why is he not at my side? Why don’t they just rise up and kill them, kill these boys and girls, these peasants? Why will no one speak up?
“Sir!” quavered Vzeath, his face pressed to the floor.
They will do it now. They will all rise up to save him. Maybe they would do it for me—maybe not. But they will rise up for him. Even if some of them die, the others will...will...must...
“Change your mind,” Alyea said.
Tzajos shook his head mutely, seeking out the faces of his men against the wall. But it was too dark, and he could see only the ranks of their dark green jackets, lighter blurs above them.
Valens shrugged. The machete rose, glinting dully in the lantern-light.
“Lieutenant Calamuk!” said Tzajos. “Tell them to see reason! I order you to talk to them. This is not the way a civilized people—”
The blade descended, and there was a startled silence, longer than Tzajos would have thought credible, before Vzeath began to scream. Two fingers rolled a little way on the stone floor, then stopped, stuck in the pool of blood forming beneath the boy’s hand. He rolled and bucked, trying to get out from under Valens, but could not escape, could only lie flat and scream into the floor.
“I’ll do it!” Tzajos shouted. “I’ll do it! Anything you want! Leave him alone, leave them all alone!”
Alyea smiled at last, showing sharp white teeth. “I am glad,” she said. “There are ways to compel you to do it—so the old wisdom says. But it takes so long. This is easier for everyone. Don’t you think?”
Tzajos barely heard her; he realized he was panting for breath, as if he had been running. Vzeath was dragged away again, into the darkness, presumably so they could bind his wound—or maybe not, who knew what these people would do—leaving only the blood shining on the floor, the red invisible against the black, so that it seemed as if motor oil had spilled, not blood at all. And the two fingers, inexplicably curled now, like quotation marks. Showing that something had been spoken.
Now time truly became a blur; he fell into a trance, only infrequently permitted to leave it to attend to the needs of his body, rushing in these brief lucid periods to obey the instructions of his captors, who would have preferred him to stay under and tell everything he knew. Everything the spirits knew too, he realized dimly. At first he could only watch and listen as they spoke, and could understand very little unless he looked down at the page where he was writing down their answers. Their spoken Dastian—rapid, fluent, usually peppered with words in local dialects—was beyond him, and they did not always wish to speak through his mouth.
Here was where we
Give me the pencil, I will draw a map for you
The temple is here, see, and then to the northeast
My leg blood bleeding blood it won’t stop it won’t stop! It won’t stop! I thought it was going to stop but it’s still bleeding!
Don’t listen to him
Their big vehicles were lined up just here, they cannot move farther
Yes, the marsh
Mama! Mama, where am I? They said I was hit, but
Shut up!
Some of the voices seemed well aware they were dead; others did not. Infrequently he recognized names of villages from his sector map, or dead soldiers to whom he had paid particular attention in the records, tracking an unusual spelling or distinguishing two similar names. His right hand cramped and flamed, and was sometimes immersed in a bucket of icy water; he howled at the pain, but it helped for a few hours afterward.
Why, why had they fought so hard? Why had the entire country mobilized at once—like a bar fight spilling into the street, every man operating as one, a single mind. Annexing should have been a bloodless business. It had been the case for other Treotan provinces. If East Seudast had simply agreed to the initial terms after that first skirmish at the border, then none of this would have happened. Just...just paperwork. And the lines on the map meant nothing, did they? Why fight so hard to defend it? And to lose, as they must have known they would.
Gunfire like stars in the darkness
Treotan had not invaded. They were hardly ancient barbarians galloping with bows and arrows and plague to the gates of some opulent fortified city. They had asked nicely and Seudast had said Never, never, never, never. And never was a long time. Much longer than a short war.
“They’ll send someone for us,” Tzajos said when he had a short break, some indefinable time later. Forty or fifty written pages lay on one side of the wooden crate; his mouth was so dry that his tongue was beginning to swell, his lips to crack. He licked greedily at the droplets of blood they produced, unable to stop himself.
Calamuk appeared silently, took a canteen out of his cloak; Tzajos hefted it in his palm for only a moment before putting it to his mouth. Less than a quarter full. Beggars, choosers. He emptied it quickly, feeling that he had swallowed nothing, that it had soaked into his tongue.
“Thank you,” he said. He looked around, dazed. Alyea was gone, presumably asleep or otherwise occupied; the other fighters were sleeping or sitting on the ground in silence, watching the captured soldiers.
“They might send someone for you,” Calamuk said. “You’ve told us the protocol.”
“Have I.”
“It would take them a long time to find us, I think.” The interpreter took the canteen out of Tzajos’s limp fingers. “A long, long time. Anything could happen between now and then.”
“That lady, Alyea. Who is she? How did you get her to come here?”
“I suppose you would call her...a wizard? A sorcerer? A witch?” Calamuk rolled all the unfamiliar Treotan words in his mouth like olive stones. “She can talk to the spirits more easily than most. They trust her, they respect her. In their past lives they knew her or knew of her.”
“Calamuk, you don’t really believe that,” Tzajos said, exhausted. “This is all...”
“Would you have believed anything that’s happening to you?”
“I’d believe that I lost my mind from overwork and from reading too many journals written by dead men.”
“But you won’t believe us when we say that’s not what’s happening,” Calamuk said.
“It’s unscientific.”
“So is life. You know, there was a time, Tzajos, when I thought to myself, I could be friends with this man, maybe. Even though his people have killed my people and he treats me like a dog. You know why? It was because when we met back at headquarters, before we shipped out, I heard you talk in one of your language classes—you brought up Blikust tur Medusk, Darc tur Kotor Coskim. The Tale of the Basilisk and Kotor Coskim, King Coskim, the king of the fairies. Officially that is not our national poem, but unofficially, everybody knows it.”
