“Well, he was good to us too — and he tried to be good to them, where it wouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t sit right with me, executing a man ’cause he’s fair-minded.”
“Naw,” Uk said, “it don’t work like that.”
“How is it supposed to work, then? What do you mean, it don’t work that way?”
“That’s how I thought it worked too, when I first got here,” Uk said. “We’d come into one of these places, hacking up the locals — and I’d think, just like you: it’s like swatting at flies with a swatter. Everyone you hit goes down — dead! This isn’t fair. So one time I started pulling my sword swings, aiming for the arms and legs, rather than the neck or the gut. But then I saw what it looked like later — the ones who didn’t die right off. And that was awful — the time it took and the pain it took for them to die anyway. I was walking around, looking at all these people, not dead — but half dead. Half dead’s a lot worse than dead, when you know you’re gonna die in another three, six days no matter what anyone does. No, if the lieutenant wanted this war business over, the way to end it is to go in there, fight as best you can, as hard as you can, and get it over as fast as you can. That’s how it works. Holding things back, holding things up, slowing things down — that doesn’t do any good for anyone. Not for the villagers — and certainly not for you and me. He was just making it longer and harder for us, and the longer and harder it is for you and me, the more chance you and me got of getting killed. No, I liked the lieutenant. He never did anything to me personally; I’m sorry it worked out this way for him. But if I can understand it, he should’ve been able to figure it out too. He’s an officer.”
“Now that’s common sense speaking there, Uk,” a soldier said from the dark.
“Sometimes I think Uk is the only one in this outfit with any common sense at all,” another said.
“That means I’m talking too much,” Uk said. “Go to sleep now. We have to get up early.”
“You mean we got to go see it, like that other time? Aw — good night!”
“The lieutenant’s really going to be executed?” asked still another, younger, troubled voice.
“That was the order, boy.” Grunts and shushings came as a soldier slid farther down into his bag. “Now go to sleep.”
Rahm sat in the corner, looking over the dark figures who slept, crowded together on the council-cellar floor. A dozen feet away, Gargula was breathing loudly and irregularly; he’d worked on this foundation with Rahm. Old Brumer leaned his shoulders against the wall, head nestled down in his near bushel of a beard: he’d been their foreman. Now all of us, Rahm thought, are prisoners here. At the tiny window, just beneath the ceiling, gray had nudged away a corner of black, enough to silhouette the stems outside. Small leaves shook with a breeze.
Then the door creaked.
Someone looked up. Two turned over without looking. Between two black-caped officers, with a regular soldier behind them, a bearded man stepped in. One officer carried a light box that now he flipped on. A harsh filament glowed white. A fan of light put harsh blacks on the far side of the two dozen sleepers about the floor.
“Well, we have some men in here,” said the bearded Myetran. He wore one brown leather gauntlet. His other hand was bare. From some time that seemed at once impossibly immediate yet long ago, Rahm recognized the man who had ridden his horse on the common, who’d spoken into the silver rod — who had burned down Kern. “For a moment, I thought this was the women’s holding cell. Lord, it stinks in here!” (A depression in the far corner was full of urine and feces; but it had long since overflowed, to wet almost half the floor.) The man took a few steps over some sleeping figures. “I have a job for one of you. For a good and lively dog. A strong dog. You perhaps, or you?
“A bunch of dogs, you are?” The man ran a hand down his beard, to pull it back from morning wildness. “Dogs are vicious; they fight one another, tear at one another over the leavings. What I see here is a bunch of simpering monkeys, crawling maggots without the strength to get up off their bellies. Is there someone here that can do a job that needs a man?” He reached aside for the light box hanging around the black-cloaked officer’s neck to turn its beam toward the floor. “Have you ever killed?”
Eyes squinted; a hand rose to block the glare.
“Why did I waste the question on such a child!” The beam moved on. “Have you, old man, ever taken another’s life?”
The old man, coughing twice, seemed bewildered.
“What about you — you look like a strapping fellow. Have you ever killed?”
In the beam, Rahm did not even lower his eyes.
“Come — give us a yes or a no.”
Rahm breathed out — dropped his head and raised it.
“Well, have you, now? I wouldn’t have thought so, from your eyes. Or then perhaps I would…Get up! Come with me.”
Rahm’s hips ached; Rahm’s knees hurt; his back was stiff — he pushed himself up, one palm behind him on the rough rock — from sitting the night long, almost without movement.
“Come, this way. To the door.”
Rahm came slowly, lumbering really, feet seeking bits of bare stone between the bodies. Once he stepped on the hand of someone who woke, grunted, and jerked away. Toward the ground, Rahm mouthed syllables without sound that, had they had it, would have been an apology.
“That’s right, Çironian. Over here.”
When they were outside in the basement hall, Rahm realized how strong the stench was within, as the door closed behind him. Fresher air struck, hard enough to make him, for a moment, reel.
“I am Prince Nactor. I do not want to know your name, at least not until you have done what it is I need you for. Then when it is time to reward you for doing your work well — I trust you will do it well — then I’ll ask you. And we can celebrate who you are.” Tucking his beard back under his chin, the prince turned to the steps. Starting up, he glanced over his shoulder. “You understand, if you do not do it well, you will be killed. And there will be no need for anyone to know your name ever again. Tell me, Çironian, can you handle an ax?”
Surrounded by soldiers, Rahm followed. “I can swing a quarryman’s pick.”
The prince glanced back again. “Likely that will do.”
In the building’s ground-floor hall, again holding his beard back, the prince stopped to lean close to Rahm. “Aren’t you curious about what this work will be?”
“Thou wilt tell me in thy time.”
Nactor chuckled. “And the time is now.” Faint orange lay along the windowsill, left of the door. “I need an executioner. I wish to show a treasonous man — and I wish to make it the last thing I show him, the last thing that he will ever see — just how gentle and peace-loving you Çironians are.”
Against the far wall sat two women prisoners, one of whom, Rahm realized with a quiet start, was the woman with whom he’d first pursued his earliest, happiest, most single-minded sexual explorations. The other was a woman who, during that same summer, had hated him roundly, loudly, adamantly; for she kept a small set of beautifully tended fruit trees beside her house, which he had taken to pillaging, more for the pleasure of her stuttering outrage than for the fruit. (That, he’d simply handed out among his friends.) It had been only Ienbar’s threat of a switching that had finally moved him on to other mischief. Indeed, for a while he’d wondered why his relation to either of the women — one was asleep now; one looked dully across the room and did not seem to see him — had not netted him more, the start of a family in one case or, in the other, the reputation as a troublemaker that, had it gone far enough and the elders’ council in these very halls received enough complaints, could have gotten him, after a short public trial, turned out of town — at least that was the rumor. In his own memory, he’d never known it to happen….