CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Prisoners of War
The pit was ten feet deep and covered by a screen of wooden bars. Looking up from its filthy earthen floor, the sky was a circle of brilliance that held aloft the occasional bird, tilting its wings in a wind they couldn’t feel. The men craned their necks to watch that circle. There was nothing else for them to see down there, save for each other; sad battered reminders of where they were, and how they suffered.
It was their third day of captivity. Each wore a grubby one-piece suit of yellow finely woven cotton, with buttoned flaps they could release when they needed to relieve themselves. They were shackled hand and foot. All of them bore bruises, cuts, internal injuries.
Bull had just spat a mouthful of water onto the floor, and was staring at a rotten tooth he had just plucked from his jaw.
‘Here,’ he whispered, and passed the skin of water to his old comrade in arms.
Bahn failed to respond at first. He was staring at the opposite wall of earth and far beyond it, his face a filthy smear but for his reddened eyes, and the purplish swelling of his cheek where a gash had inflamed the skin. He had a hand resting on his outstretched leg, and it was trembling badly. His other hand was pressed against his growling stomach. They were all underfed and hungry.
Bahn had complained of not being able to hear in his right ear, so Bull nudged him, and the man turned his head slowly, and looked at the waterskin, then looked at Bull. He returned to staring through the wall.
Weakness rode through Bull like nausea. He tossed the water-skin to the staff sergeant, Chilanos, instead, who refused to speak either, only offered a flicker of gratitude with his eyes. The next man along took it from him when he was done with it. This tepid water was all they had by way of luxury; they each sipped it like fine wine.
For three days now, the small group had been deprived in every way that mattered. They weren’t permitted to talk, though they did so anyway, surreptitiously, when boredom finally dulled the edges of their fears. Neither were they left alone to sleep. Their guards would drop small stones on those who had their eyes closed. At night, men would come to urinate on them as they huddled down in exhaustion.
For a while, Bull had searched amongst the soldiers that often stood above them, trying to spot the giant tribesman who had saved him. He wanted to shout up at him, ‘ Look – look what you saved me for !’ but there was sign of the man, and he knew he must have died of his wounds.
Every so often, a squad of imperial hard-men would descend on a ladder into the pit, and would chose one of them seemingly on a whim, and would lay into him with their wooden staves. At first they had tried to protest these actions. But each time they did so they were beaten just as brutally, until even Bull could take no more of it, and it made more sense for them to simply sit there, and listen.
Humour was what Bull used in the bleakest of times to help them through it; when one of them was crawling across the floor after a beating; when one of them was standing over the bucket pissing blood.
After three days of this the world had begun to take on a strange sheen of transparency, as though Bull could poke his fingers through into something other and unreal. The smell of the pit had become unbearable, for they shared a single bucket to relieve themselves, and it was only emptied every morning. Bull handled it better than the other men. He was, after all, long inured to the privations of captivity. In a tangible way he became their rock in a storm-tossed sea.
Even now, as a rattle over their heads made Bull squint up at the dark crisscrossing of wood across the pit, dirty faces turned towards him for assurance.
The guards were untying the door to the pit. They flung it open and dropped the ladder down.
He would make a fight of it this time, he decided, if they chose him for a hiding.
Four soldiers climbed down with their heavy staves and studied the men blinking up at them from the floor. The oldest saw Bahn staring at the wall. He pointed his stick at him. ‘Up!’ he snapped.
Bahn paid him no heed.
The other soldiers grabbed Bahn and forced him to his feet, his shackles rattling. With his eyes blinking rapidly, they shoved a sack over his head and tugged him towards the ladder.
Bull struggled to his own two feet, sliding his back up against the earth wall. ‘Where are you taking him?’ he rasped.
‘No talking!’ shouted the older soldier, and he lashed into Bull with his stave. Bull grabbed him with his shackled hands, managed to strike his face with his forehead. He was content enough with that, seeing the blood flowing, and he rode the rest of it through in his usual manner as they lashed out at him, Bull listening to the thud of the blows, refusing to go down as though it somehow mattered, as though he was back in his pit-fighting days, forced against the wall without even a decent defence left to him.
He did go down, though, eventually. He fell to the ground and bared his bloody grin at them, while they bundled Bahn up the ladder, the man making no effort himself as he was manhandled through the opening like a sack of potatoes.
Chilanos opened his mouth and began to sing as they closed and locked the pit after them. It was The Song of the Forgotten, the familiar words loud and stirring in the depths of the pit.
Bull scrabbled up onto his knees with his shackles clinking. ‘Tell them what they want!’ he shouted. ‘You hear me, Bahn? Tell them anything they ask you!’
Sparus was an unhappy man as he descended the spiral steps that wound down through the rock of the island upon which the citadel stood.
Creed had escaped, there was no doubting that now. The Princi-pari of Tume had said as much, taunting him with the news even as the Michine lay dying of his wounds.
And now this latest news, that the Matriarch’s condition was worsening.
Sparus could feel it all begin to unravel around him, this crazyfool invasion inspired by the plans of his predecessor Mokabi. Even the fall of Tume meant little to him in terms of success. Unless they pushed hard for Bar-Khos now, it could still turn disastrously wrong for them – for him.
More than ever, he wished he had refused the command of this expedition. All those years on dusty foreign campaigns, climbing the slippery rungs of promotion to achieve what he had once thought impossible, the position of Archgeneral of Mann. And now this chancy mess that was the invasion of Khos, with the reputation of a lifetime staked on its outcome. How would he be remembered in the records and the history books if it all went wrong here?
It made him rage just to think of it.
Deep beneath the citadel, the Sunken Palace was a complex of large chambers, brightly illuminated by crystal lanterns hanging from countless candelabra. It was walled on the outer edges by great sweeping windows of thick glass, where Sasheen’s honour guards stood at attention. Past them shimmered the clear waters of the lake, shadowed by the overhanging weed-raft of the city, where fans of light spilled through the open canals. From any window, shoals of distant fish could be seen darting in and out of the daylight. Bubbles rose up from the gloomy lake bottom, some bursting on the surface above, others rolling and bobbing along the underside of the lakeweed itself.
‘Ah, Archgeneral. A word with you, if you please.’ It was Klint, coming to stand before him.
‘What is it, physician?’ he asked the man, without patience.
Klint beckoned him to an empty chamber, a lounge with reclining seats and old portraits on the walls. The man licked his lips and looked around to see if anyone was listening.
In a hurried hush: ‘I believe the Holy Matriarch has been poisoned.’
‘Poisoned? How?’
‘Her wound. I believe the shot was coated in a toxin.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘You can smell it in the wound, if you have the nose for these things. And her symptoms – at first I thought it was blood poisoning. Now,’ he shook his head, ‘I can see it’s more than that. It looks like black-foot spore.’
Sparus closed his eye for a long moment. So here it is, he thought. The disaster you’ve been waiting to happen.
‘I didn’t think the Khosians used such things,’ he said, and smelled the man’s sickly perfume as Klint drew closer.
