The Kingdom on the Edge of Reality (30 page)

What next? I sat on the plank and tried to think of another project, but nothing came to mind. There was nothing in the dungeon but straw and dirt and rats and darkness. What came to mind instead were the questions that had plagued me before. What had happened to my friends? What would happen to my hand? Was I ever going to get out of there alive? How could I have been so stupid, so blind? Around and around went those maddening thoughts.

My time sense was also collapsing again, and instead of time to use, I had time to fear. Without water I would last several days, a week at most. If I found a water source, even moisture oozing through the rocks, I could last longer. Naturally I would do everything I could to stay alive as long as I could, even if life was painful and pointless and hope was reduced to shreds. That was the human way.

I had read once about a prisoner in solitary confinement, literally for years, who was able to transport himself mentally out of his prison in flights of totally lifelike fantasy. He did it by walking and turning, walking back the other way and turning again, over and over, until the motion and the rhythm became hypnotic.

I tried to imitate his method without success. The movement unsettled the straw and it rustled and itched and scratched until eventually it began to fall out. Repairing my insulation gave me something to do, but soon I was back where I had started. If anything, the failure of the experiment made me more afraid.

"God," I said, "I am very, very afraid, and if you don't help me, I don't think I can get through this." And just like that, I had an idea. Marya Mage had given me a meditation technique that consisted of counting my breaths up to ten.
One . . . Two . . . Three .
. . I could feel right away that it was better than nothing. The fear, though still close, still hungry, was held just at bay.
Nine . . . Ten
. . . Begin again.

How long did it take to count ten breaths? How many cycles in an hour? In a day? Best not to think about that. One breath at a time.
Six. . . Seven . . . Eight
. . . Keep the fear and the desperation at bay. I would have to settle for that.
One . . . Two
. . . Rats pestered me. Pain came and went. Lashings of fear burst my concentration. How long I could endure, I didn't know, but for the moment I was managing.

There was a scraping sound, and the door opened wide enough to show me the gleam of a torch before slamming shut. Something had been set inside. Making my way over in the darkness, I found a wooden pot filled with some kind of soup, still warm. My fingers continued to search until they felt a wooden spoon lying on top of a folded blanket. No child at Christmas was ever so happy and excited as I was to find all that bounty. I took my treasure back to my plank, draped the blanket around my shoulders, and began to eat.

One reads about prisons that serve all kinds of nauseating fare, but there was nothing wrong with that soup. It tasted like boiled grain with potatoes and salt and herbs, and it raised my spirits considerably. Eating food gave me something to do and it also made me feel less doomed.

When I had eaten everything I could with the spoon, I tipped the pot up and drank what was left. I would have licked the inside if I had been able to get my face into it. Instead, I ran my fingers around the edges and licked them until the pot was dry. Afterwards, I sucked on the spoon, reluctant to let go of the experience.

What to do with the pot and spoon? Some ancient, ancestral memory shared by all prisoners told me that I had better put it by the door, so that was what I did. Then I wrapped myself in my blanket, and enjoyed having something new to think about.

Hélène had cooked that soup. Who else? There was no prison kitchen because there were usually no prisoners. The dungeon had been designed so people would want to spend as little time there as possible. All right, let's say Hélène did cook that soup. Knowing Hélène, she would have preferred to send me a leg of lamb, carrots and potatoes with gravy, mint jelly, and a first class bottle of wine. But she hadn't, and that meant she was following orders: warm gruel, period! Maybe she had taken a chance by adding the potatoes.

Then I had a thought that made the darkness and the fear close in suddenly. Albert hadn't bothered to feed me because I was only in for twenty-four hours. Did the fact that I was getting fed now mean that I was in for a real stretch? He couldn't be thinking about keeping me in there for a week, could he?
I'm not going to have you killed, because that would be too easy.
Sure, he could.

What about a month? I had to draw back from that idea very quickly. Whether or not it was a possibility, I had to stuff it way down where the most alarming thoughts were, the ones I couldn't begin to face. No way, I said to myself, could he possibly leave me in here for a month.

Another day passed. I say another day, but what I mean is that after an interminable time, during which I endured my suffering and somehow managed to keep from going insane, I was fed again. The door scraped open and banged shut, and my pot had disappeared when I went to investigate, though I found the spoon on the ground. After a long interval the door opened and closed and there again was my pot with my portion of boiled grain and potatoes.

This time when I sat to eat I was still grateful for the food and for having something to do, but it lacked the holiday happiness of the previous meal. It had been a very difficult day or night, whichever you like. Physically I was leaner, I believe, because there was a little more room to stuff straw inside my clothes. Mentally I was also leaner, as if another day in the dungeon had taken something from me that I was not capable of replacing. There were needs that were not being fulfilled, like the need for light and activity and freedom. Being shut up underground was starving me and draining me on a whole lot of levels.

By repeating assurances to myself and by counting my breaths, I could keep myself from bashing my head against the stones, but I was weaker and more fragile, and that's what I was thinking about as I ate my soup. In order to let every bit of nourishment soak into my system, I ate very slowly; but I knew there were many things I needed that I could never get from soup.

Another day passed between feedings. There were periods of something that was a little bit like sleep, but I was sleeping with one eye open, so to speak, for the rats. That, combined with my physical discomfort, prevented me from ever escaping completely into sleep, and that was also draining me. The acuteness of my physical pain seemed to have diminished slightly, but my whole body, it seemed, was stiffening up in a way that was almost as frightening as the pain. I felt like a man who had been made rather carelessly out of bits of wood.

Sometime during the next interval, which I called a day because it lasted so long it couldn't have been any less than a day, I experienced a storm of hate that was incredibly intense and virulent. I had killed Guy Hawke already many times in my imagination, but now I went after the rest and no one escaped: Jenna, the Dugdales, all the rest of the nobility including Renny and the Bennett boys, Marsha Bennett: everyone. Then the rest of the valley went down: Marya, Gordon, Émile and Hélène, Mora and all the rest of the peasants. My plague of hate wiped them all out. When it was over I was standing in my imagination on a mountain peak overlooking the ruined, burned and obliterated valley where there were no survivors, human or otherwise. It was all gone. The animals, the birds; everything was dead.

Horrible as it was, there was some aspect of recreation about the experience. It was something to do. It finally passed the way a storm in nature passes, gradually clearing up and then disappearing altogether. And when it was over it left me still weaker and more frightened than ever, because I seemed to be finally losing control of my mind.

I slept for a long time after that storm. At least it seemed like a long time. It was a very deep sleep without dreams, without any awareness of rats or cold or pain. When I awoke I felt depressed and hopeless, but not so acutely afraid. Something had snapped. Something had given way. There was a blank, empty space in my mind that seemed well suited to just enduring. It was a half-alive, uncaring lack of feeling that was closer to death, but which was pleasant in a way for being less painful.

When my meal was delivered, I didn't go immediately to get it. I wasn't particularly hungry, and moving my body to the other side of the cell seemed like a lot of trouble. It was not until I heard the rats scrambling in it that I jerked myself up, yelling hoarsely at them, and clunked across the floor, stiff-legged in my straw padding, to fight them for what was mine.

I'm not in very good shape,
I said to myself as I ate mechanically, putting the food safely away in my belly.
A person could die in this state just from not being interested enough to stay alive.

Yes, I know,
I replied,
but I am past caring. If I live, I live; if I don't, I don't. I am tired of worrying about it. What difference does it make?

Not much difference in here,
I replied in turn,
but there may be something outside that is worth holding on for.

I am holding on. Some of my circuits are unplugged, that's all. It will not kill me. Leave me alone.

Very well, but I am going to count my breaths for awhile. I think that is better than giving in totally to this death-ness.

Do what you want. What difference does it make?

So I counted my breaths as much as I could, and that was an affirmation of life for me, and a counterbalance against the bargain with dying and death that another part of me had made.

Time fell apart. Intervals of so-called days lost their meaning. I suffered pain, but pain was not important either, and it held no more terror for me. I had already met death more than half way, and when you are more than half dead, going all the way doesn't seem like such a big deal. The part of me that wanted to stay alive ate the food that was left for me, kept the blanket secured around my shoulders, and shooed the rats away, but without energy or optimism. Life and death had merged and become almost the same thing.

Then the door opened, two soldiers marched in, grabbed me, and hustled me upstairs. I couldn't possibly have walked as fast as they wanted me to go, so they held me roughly between them and whisked me along, while my feet did their best to do some of the walking. "Whew, does he ever stink!" said one to the other.

The torchlight was bright enough to hurt my eyes, and when we reached the ground floor, with the daylight streaming through the casements, I had to shut my eyes tight. The soldiers marched me along level ground, around a few turns, and came to an abrupt halt. One of them released his grip but the other continued to hold on tight.

"He stinks like a hog pen," complained the soldier who was holding me.

"Enough of that!" snapped the voice of Lord Hawke, and the soldier froze. Squinting between my eyelids, I could just make out shapes, and the shape that looked like the duke was sitting behind a shape that looked like a big table. Cranking open my eyelids a little at a time against the smarting of the light, I finally made him out. There was a quill pen in his hand and an inkwell in front of him, and around the table top there were rolls of parchment. Finally I could see his eyes.

I had lost my blanket while the soldiers were dragging me upstairs, and I must have been quite a rare sight in my straw snowsuit, but the duke didn't look amused. Actually, my impression was that he looked tired and old and sick, though I was in no shape even to wonder why that was so. I remember that it surprised me in a vague way, just as everything at that time was vague, because mentally I was taking no chances.

My mind had found a refuge in a limbo of not caring, where the unendurable could be endured. I wasn't going to give up that refuge just because two goons had dragged me upstairs to see the duke. In another two minutes I might be back in that black hole, so I didn't fantasize about being released into that sunlight, into the wide world that I had lost. It was all the same to me what happened; it didn't matter.

At the same time, on a saner level, I was open to clues as to how to behave so that I wouldn't have to go back into the darkness. Far from not caring, I was willing to do anything, no matter how self-abasing, to be allowed to go free. But so far no one had told me what they wanted.

The duke stared at me for a time, and the feather in his hand flicked back and forth like the tip of a cat's tail. Finally he looked away and dipped his quill in the inkwell. He wrote something on the parchment in front of him, and considered it for a few moments. Then he looked up as though he was mildly surprised to see me still standing there, and gave his head a little jerk.

Both soldiers grabbed me and whisked me away between them, my feet barely touching the ground, until we were outside the castle. Before I knew what was happening they had pushed me up against the flank of a horse.

"Get on, commoner," said one of them. They muscled me aboard, for I couldn't possibly have gotten up myself, there being no saddle or stirrup. Then they mounted up and rode away, leading my horse by a rope halter. Over the drawbridge and down the road we went. It was everything I could do to keep from falling off. With no strength in my legs and nothing to hold onto, I wound up leaning along the horse's neck and hanging onto the mane with my good hand.

Where were they taking me? There seemed to be only one answer: somewhere to get rid of me once and for all. And what was I supposed to do? Yank the halter free and make a dash for it on a horse I could hardly stay on? The horse was a skinny nag—it could never run fast enough anyway. It hit me with a terrible jolt in the pit of my stomach that if they meant to do away with me, I couldn't give them much trouble at all.

My eyes were more or less accustomed to the sunlight now, though it seemed extraordinarily bright, brighter than any sunshine I'd ever seen before. Such a lovely day it was too, with a riot of colors in the autumn leaves. It would be sad to have to die on such a beautiful day, sadder than if it was rainy and cold and miserable. Maybe Hawke had waited for the nicest possible weather to have me taken out to be hanged or stabbed or whatever they planned to do to me. Well, he had certainly gotten his licks in. I was sorry I'd tangled with him. I had been a fool, and now I was going to collect a fool's wages, paid in full.