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CHAPTER 21

"Still living?" That was Huey.

"Still living," Clark answered.

Greyesar was also there. In response to Huey's question he groaned, muttered, then finally snapped, "I'm not dead."

Clark noticed shadows. There was a window with green beyond it. Wool scratched his skin. "We're on Paffir Haretz."

"The next best thing, I trust," Huey said.

Clark strained round to look. Instead of a woolen tunic like Clark's, Huey still had his jacket. The sleeves of explosive suit peeped out at the cuffs--Huey must have pulled it on in the last seconds before capture. They had left it on him because he had activated it. Clark experienced a moment of selfish fear that Huey might kill him by dying. "It sounds as though you're both OK," he said.

"Quite," answered Greyesar. But if one of them were hurt, he would surely lie.

A door opened. Clark's muscles cramped in anticipation of release. Twisting round again, he saw the guard enter backwards. First came a full-sized, muscular back and shoulder, one arm pulling something, then a small pair of legs and last a big head with dark hair cut short, face slack and beardless. The guard was dragging an iron pot. They won't even put it on wheels for him, Clark thought. Was the man only timid or could he really not lift it? Clark imagined him dragging it through streets and forests, wide-eyed and careful, staring at everything as he stared now, trying to guess how they would hurt him.

The guard scrutinized Huey and Greyesar, stepped toward Huey, backed away, sighed and stepped forward again. He went to the pot to ladle soup into a bowl that hung from the rim, set it down by Huey and backed away so fast he nearly tipped it over.

They would not be unchained. Clark stretched his limbs one at a time, moving slowly, glad no one could see his face. When the guard came near, he said hello to him in high and low Paffir and then in all the languages he knew how to say hello in, but got no answer. Greyesar clapped his hands, but the guard did not turn.

"I imagine he's deaf," Huey said. "Wasn't there a sign language..."

Clark shook his head. "Nobody's deaf any more. They cured that." The pain in his muscles eased. He let himself go limp. Humanity had scattered itself too thinly. Having won so much and lost it and won it back again, having in various worlds at times abolished war and abolished poverty, forged triumphs of universal love, the human race fell to half-forgotten diseases. When he opened his eyes again it was night.

The massive boredom of imprisonment had always frightened him most, but Clark found that the time passed, if not easily, without driving him absolutely mad. It was true that his dreams grew more vivid, and sometimes he found himself watching scenes of the farm of his childhood, of Reshebora, of his dead brother. Sometimes they all traded memories. He grew familiar with Huey's wild youth in the Outland and Greyesar's demanding education among the Uchide. At times they argued and demolished each other with sarcasm. Constant as breathing, their intimacy came to seem as necessary as air, and knowing their captors might separate them at any moment they teetered between dependence and mutual hatred. By the end of a week Clark could say, "The first thing I'll do when they unchain me is hug you both," and instead of just snorting, Greyesar was frightened.

"Do you know why they're keeping us together?" he asked. "So they can be sure that if they torture one of us, the others will talk."

Clark did not answer. He had made Greyesar love him against his will; he had already betrayed him. But then he remembered that Greyesar had committed his share of intimacies, and twisted round to say so. Huey must have guessed what Clark was thinking, because he intervened quietly, "Don't talk about what you'll do when they let you stand up, Clark. That's prisoner thinking. Think about getting out of here."

Clark knew he should appreciate this attempt to cheer him, but instead he felt more ashamed. He was becoming depressed, becoming the one they had to encourage. Weakest of the three, he would go crazy first. He thought of taking his life. Birth and death are the walls to our prison, Akiva had remarked. Looking at the earthwall to which his chain was bolted, Clark considered digging himself free, until he remembered the guard.

A thick hand pushed his soup into view. Clark pushed it away. It would just add to the stench around him if he continued to eat. Life makes filth, he thought. The guard's face, close to his, reflected sorrow. The guard was afraid. That was all. Most likely, no one had ordered that Clark be chained. No one wished it. The guard, a simple man probably bullied all his life, was just afraid to let them get up and Clark was caught in the machinery of fear. Shutting his eyes, he expected to die in silence.

The guard unlocked his chain.

After that, each of them walked freely for a few minutes every day, and when they were strong enough to reach the door, the jailor took each one outside to relieve himself in luxurious seclusion in the steep fenced-in meadow that surrounded their cave. Now they began to haggle in earnest over a plan of escape.

The fence was made of tubes through which a deadly poison ran. Now and then small animals brushed against it and the prisoners heard their cries. For days they calculated the difficulty of digging under it, of devising an arch to climb over it, of burrowing into the hillside or somehow convincing the guard to let them through the gate by which he entered. For a while they debated whether the man were really deaf or only mute or shamming. Clark, who only weeks before had been scheming to free a world, studied this one man acutely and burned with sympathetic rage. The Ketries had imprisoned him from childhood, neglecting him day by day. Most likely they had raised him to be a jailor. His awkward steps and timorous glances were as deliberately forged as chains and almost as effective. Slouching from pot to prisoner with his dripping bowl, stiffening when they smiled and judging all things by the fear they caused him, the guard was a symbol of the Ketries' ruthlessness and power. A prayer bell in reverse, he dragged their loftiest plans in the mud. He doesn't speak but we hear, Clark thought.

Huey lay singing to himself in the Outlander dialect. The guard grunted inharmoniously. Huey paused, then began again. The guard made another throaty sound.

"So he does hear," Clark said.

"Hear?" cried Huey. "He sings!"

All day Clark and Greyesar heard them pacing in the frosty grass, singing what sounded like nursery rhymes, then Huey returned and announced that the guard's name was Pre.

Pre could not remember his parents. He lived in a city with other men who fed and punished him, but that was as much of life as he could explain. When he brought the evening soup, he shared a bowl, and the next day he unchained them all together.

The three prisoners embraced. Human bodies so suddenly close excited them and they laughed and turned away, shrugging, then sat down together with Pre and ate. From then on they shared all their meals and Pre often spent whole days with them in the meadow. They surveyed the mesas interlaced by gulleys full of conifers and rangy finger-leaved trees beyond which, far to the north, a narrow road passed along a hillside and disappeared. Ox-drawn wagons were crawling south.

"They must take another route home, by the law of conservation of wagons," Huey said.

"Good," Pre remarked in Outlander.

Clark was startled. Could Pre have been taught Huey's archaic cosmology, too? He imagined lost races of Pres struggling on abandoned planets to fit reality to rules of balance, conservation and decay, until Huey explained that "good" was the Outlander word for physical things, and Pre had meant this road was the tax artery.

A few days after the first snow fell, they saw a black line like the entrails of Lir mud-fish creeping along the road. At first Clark hoped they were Daybreakers, so he would know he was near the capital and might hope for rescue, but then he made out the horses and knew the mob must be Pahid's. Now the desire to escape became passion, even though weeks of thin soup left them barely strong enough to weave winter mats from the straw Pre brought them.

Winter came suddenly. A cold wind moaned in the gorges, and the next morning icy snow capped all the peaks and mesas, filled the lattices of the fence and blew up through the window. They shivered while they waited for Pre. He did not come that day.

The next was colder. Pre still did not come.

The wind reminded them of unhappy voices. Hunched in the straw, they sang to each other all night. Singly or together when two knew the words, they went through anthems, hymns, love songs and children's rhymes. Sometimes when Clark's voice failed and Greyesar's thickened and choked, only Huey kept booming along with nonsense, tavern ditties and long ridiculous ballads about mating and drugs. At other times Huey trailed off in stentorian rasping and Clark heard his own voice come through, in the two or three notes still working, thin as a child's and pure. At last they had to stop and then, when night seemed to have taken hold completely, a chorus of birdsong heralded dawn. They waited for light, hardly breathing, and then fell to digging in the earth for worms and insects as though the morning song welcomed them into the avian kingdom.

Clark's fingers thrust unexpectedly into loosened dirt. He wondered if other prisoners had burrowed here. Little finger-trails led nowhere, then he found a small hole and at the bottom a metal ring. He yanked and it came free. The metal shone and then glistened and gleamed in the swelling light as he strained it toward the window, until he could almost read an inscription.

He managed to toss it to Greyesar, who said, "What luck. Maybe we can sell this." They fell to giggling. After a while Greyesar calmed himself, held up the ring and read, "Efirr Nije."

"Dead Mama take us," Huey remarked.

"What?" Clark was twisting his neck to see.

"It's a Shira ring. Sevit and Efirr were Shira. He must have taken it off and buried it when he realized what happened."

"Or when he found out Efirr was dead."

This idea was received in silence. Clark began to doze.

"We know where we are," Greyesar proclaimed suddenly, as though he had just remembered the map.

Huey yawned. "Time to escape." There was a clinking noise as he rubbed the links of his chain together, and in less than an hour acrid smoke crept over Clark's back toward the window and flew out like a living thing, heedless of its past. Clark and Greyesar scraped at their own bonds without success, cursing when their hands slipped on the dewey iron. Around noontime, Huey stood up.

"I heated a link of the accessories until it was amenable to suasion," he explained, showing Clark the twisted piece. He gathered up straw and made two little fires for them. After more cursing, pinching and cutting of fingers they got their chains off and climbed out the window.

Huey went off to a corner of the yard to stand with his index fingers pressed together before his face, so their shadow fell just between his eyes. Clark and Greyesar knew he was staring into the sun. Unwilling to see the mark between his eyes or to reproach him, they busied themselves finding worms and bugs in the dirt. Only when, after sunset, ignoring the food they offered, Huey heated a piece of chain in the fire and began striking it with a cold one, did Greyesar ask him what he was doing.

"I'm sharpening a blade to cut a hole in the fence," Huey replied, looking up with such finality that Greyesar, reaching out to touch him, nearly put his own hand in the fire. "Then I will lay my arm across the toxin supply line outside. You two will wait, and climb over."

"You will hurt," Greyesar protested stupidly.

"Just for a minute, until I'm done with. I'll stop feeling a long time before the shirt goes off."

Greyesar said nothing. Huey went on with his work. They listened to the wind and the clank of iron. "Do you see an alternative?" he asked.

"No," Greyesar whispered. "When will you do it?"

"When the blade is sharp."

"How sharp?"

Huey shrugged. "Sharp enough to cut straw."

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CONTINUE.....................

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