He doubled over then, roaring with laughter. His eyes filled with tears, and still he couldn’t stop. He laughed until he choked.
The soldiers waited until he could breathe again. Then they yanked him upright and double-checked his bonds.
They all four headed down the road.
6
THERE WAS A WINDOW in one wall of his cell. Without it, Hanson later thought, he might have gone insane.
It was a narrow slit window, open to the air but set with stout iron bars, a horizontal slash in the pale stone in the eastern wall of his cell, and although it let the cold wind in, and sometimes snow in winter, Hanson treasured it for the air and light it also let through into the gloomy darkness of his cell. The cell wall bulged inward slightly here, and with a little scrambling, it was possible to reach the window and hook your arms around the bars. Hanson would hang there for a long time, until the muscles in his big arms screamed in protest, relishing the cold wind on his face, drinking in the sight of trees and birds and low rolling hills, sometimes looking out toward the eastern horizon where, just out of sight, waited the shining immensity of the Wall of the City of God. Sometimes at night you could see its sullen glow lighting up the dark underbellies of the clouds.
When his arms could stand the strain no longer, he would slump back into the smothering, claustrophobic darkness of his cell, where he had a hard narrow cot, a few rough blankets, a pot to relieve himself in. They rarely came for him anymore, and most of his days and nights were spent alone, his meals—rough but substantial fare, bread that he could smell baking somewhere on the premises early in the morning, big hunks of new cheese, sometimes an unidentifiable piece of meat or a bit of fruit in the summer—shoved in through a slot in the iron-bound oaken door twice a day; at least they hadn’t tried starving him yet, although they’d tried everything else. He rarely saw his captors anymore, although he could hear them passing in the corridor outside and had learned to recognize the individualities of their gaits, and to identify one guard by his habit of whistling jigs and cheerful little schottisches as he made his rounds. He hadn’t seen any of the other prisoners for months, and never had seen much of them, although occasionally he could hear them screaming, or crying hopelessly in the night, and one evening someone had begun wailing “What is this place? I don’t belong here! Let me out of here! Get me out of here!” over and over again for hours in a hideously wavering high-pitched voice, like a lost soul crying out from some deep pit of Hell, until finally it was cut off in mid-cry, followed by an ominous silence.
Hanson almost—almost—regretted that they didn’t come to take him for questioning anymore.
His first day here, after soldiers quick-marched him from the City of God, which he had been caught coming out of, returning from a place no man had ever successfully entered in who knew how many hundreds or even thousands of years, they had dragged him to the warden’s office. The warden had sat behind his scarred wooden desk and studied him dispassionately, as though he were some curious kind of bug.
“So, you claim to have been inside the City of God?” the warden asked, in a gravelly voice.
“Ai,” Hanson said, and began to tell his story, but the warden, a pale, hulking fat man who reminded Hanson oddly of his long-lost friend Gossard, although a more brutish, corrupted Gossard with a hard face and harder eyes, surged to his feet and waved a fist the size of a ham at him. “Save your lies!” the warden screamed. “We’ll get the truth out of you soon enough!” And when Hanson had started to protest, he’d swarmed into him, hitting him with his rock-hard ham fists, knocking Hanson to the ground, then kicking him twice in the ribs.
As Hanson looked up at him from the floor through a blaze of pain, the guards joined in on the fun, drawing hardwood truncheons from their belts and striking him over and over, smashing his rib cage when he held his arms before his face and then his face when he wrapped his arms about his torso. Two or three times he tried to rise to his feet and was clubbed back down. They worked steadily, methodically, and then, when Hanson honestly believed he was feeling as much pain as a human being could feel without actually dying, they stopped. There was a brief silence and then warm drops of water spattered over his face and body. Hanson’s eyes were swollen shut by then, but he managed to open one just wide enough to see that the warden had unbuttoned his fly and taken out his thick ugly cock, and was calmly and methodically pissing all over him.
When he was done at last, the warden buttoned himself up again and made a flicking, dismissive gesture, like a man shooing a fly, and the guards had pulled Hanson up off the floor and dragged him through a maze of stone corridors for the first time to his cell, where they left him curled into a ball in the dirt, shuddering with nausea and shame, the rank smell of the other man’s urine in his hair and nose, soaking his clothes.
The warden, whose name was Overton, later explained to Hanson, in one of those phases of interrogation where he would become ramblingly conversational, almost chatty, that this was a sound psychological technique, establishing dominance at once and breaking down any image the prisoner might have of himself as brave and noble and heroic by shaming and humiliating him. “No man can think of himself as heroic when his clothes are steaming with another man’s piss, eh? Of course,” Overton said, tapping a pale finger alongside his nose and winking, “the man who came before me would have raped you. Raped you and enjoyed it, too. Old Auxley was a vicious bastard. But the way I see it, there should always be something held in reserve. That’s kinder in the long run, it heads off unwise actions. Just remember: no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.”
They left him alone in his cell for two days in his stiff, stinking clothes, without food or water, and on the third morning they dragged him to a windowless downstairs room whose walls were padded with blankets and straw. While Overton sat motionless and silent on a stool, the other guards “questioned” Hanson with practiced efficiency, making him run over his story again and again while they first beat him bloody with their fists, then put burning slivers under his fingernails, then seared his flesh with red-hot irons, then slowly crushed his foot in an iron vise. Hanson was not even remotely heroic through all this. He had been hurt before in his life, accidents at work, bar fights, had even been stabbed once, but nothing in his experience had prepared him for this kind of methodical torture, his body ripped open, his skin blistered and blackened, his bones crushed. He screamed his throat raw, cried, begged, and, toward the end, pleaded that he’d tell them anything they wanted to hear if they’d just stop. Throughout the procedure, Overton sat in complete silence, sometimes leaning forward intently, sometimes frowning slightly, as if that particular interrogation technique wasn’t being carried out to his complete satisfaction.
Finally, Overton made another of his sharp, dismissive gestures, and the guards dragged Hanson back to his cell, where he huddled on his cot, moaning, oozing blood, shivering with pain and fever.
In the morning, he felt fine. His burns had healed, his skin had reknitted itself, his bruises had vanished, and his foot was once again uncrushed and whole.
The guards looked in on him and then went hurriedly away, and in a few moments, Overton was there, peering puzzledly at him, and then prodding Hanson’s unmarked shoulder where his skin had been burnt and blackened with hot irons the day before. He gestured impatiently, and the guards dragged Hanson away to the basement room, where they did it all again.