At the thought of returning to the City of God, of plunging again into those shining, alien, bewildering, incomprehensible spaces, Hanson felt such a wave of terror that the blood drained from behind his eyes and he almost passed out. He feared the torture chamber, yes, but he feared that more, feared it on a deep instinctual level that was almost cellular, that filled him with such dread that he thought his lungs would stop working.
“I—can’t,” he managed to choke out at last, not daring to look at Delgardo. “I can’t ever go back there! Don’t ask me to! You don’t know, you don’t know what it’s like! I can’t do it, I can’t go back there again! I just—can’t.”
Delgardo smiled sadly. “That was the wrong answer,” he said, and rapped sharply on his desk. The whistling guard came in and hit Hanson behind his ear with a truncheon, and they dragged him away, only partially conscious, and locked him back in his cell again in the dark. He could hear Delgardo sighing regretfully behind him as he went.
Early the next morning, just after dawn, the guards filed silently into Hanson’s cell and shoved a leather bag over his head and down over his chest. Then they shackled his hands behind his back. Without a word being spoken, they dragged him from his cell and off through the long maze of corridors, Hanson stumbling blindly along, struggling to breathe through the thick, stifling enclosure of the leather bag, struggling to fight back the rising tide of panic.
He was about to die. It seemed impossible that he could still care after all he’d already been through. But he did.
Could they kill him? Hanson didn’t know, but they could certainly try—cut him completely to pieces maybe, or douse him with oil and set him on fire. There must be limits to his “immortality.” Maybe they’d succeed in killing him, maybe not, but he didn’t want to find out which it was. Suppose he was still alive after they’d cut him to bits, or burned him black in the fire? Suppose he lived like that forever, in unending agony? Even if it did succeed in killing him, just the thought of going through that kind of ordeal, enduring that kind of pain, far, far worse than anything he’d suffered to date, loosened his bowels and made them rumble.
At last they came to a stop. Hanson waited inside the smothering darkness of the bag for several endless moments, choking and gasping, and then the bag was yanked abruptly from his head.
They were outside the prison, on the stone steps that led down to the forecourt. Cool air touched his face in the instant that the leather hood was whisked away, and light filled Hanson’s eyes. He stood blinking, feeling wind ruffle his hair, feeling sunlight on his skin, smelling the turned-earth smell as the world began to warm toward spring. There were green buds just beginning on the trees, and birds were singing. Involuntarily, Hanson began to cry. He knew that he should be ashamed of the tears running down his cheeks, ashamed at having been unmanned, but he couldn’t stop himself.
At his elbow, Delgardo said, “Maybe I can’t kill you, although we could make it very unpleasant for you trying, but Hanson, my boy, we can certainly keep you here. Keep you here, and lock you away in the deepest dungeon so that you never see the sun again, ever, or feel the wind on your face. Keep you here forever, or as long as it takes you to finally die, even if it’s a hundred years. Even if it’s a thousand years! A thousand years of darkness and misery! Of nothingness! Locked away from the world! Or—” He paused. “—you can be brave enough to go back to the City of God, no matter how terrible a place it is, and be free. Free! Be given the world again! Be alive and out and about in the world again! Part of life, not sunk in darkness and enclosure, but really and truly living again!”
He lowered his voice to a whisper, his breath a soft tickle in Hanson’s ear. “I can undo the shackles and you can walk down these steps and be part of the world again. Or you can turn around and go back inside. Back to four stone walls and a darkness that never ends. The choice is yours.”
Hanson looked out across the meadow, watching the breeze ruffle the tall grass. He could see his tree from here, the one growing in a cramped niche on the side of a ruined wall, and it seemed to him that no matter how stunted and sickly it was, it was still alive, still surviving, and that therefore, as long as it did still live, there was still hope for it. And that the same applied to him, and maybe to the whole damned human race.
Or was he just rationalizing, taking the easy way out, refusing to make the hard right choice? Taking instead a way that he and maybe the whole world would come to bitterly regret? Because they’d broken him, because he’d reached his limits and just couldn’t take it anymore, be damned to the consequences?
If so, well… So be it, then.
“All right, Delgardo, you incredible bastard,” Hanson said, “let’s go back to the City.”
7
THERE WERE TEN HEAVILY armed mounted soldiers, plus Delgardo. They had brought an extra horse for Hanson, and laughed openly at him when he failed at his first two attempts to mount it, sliding to the ground while the horse snorted and moved about uneasily, as if it didn’t like his smell. At last, painfully, he hauled himself into the saddle. The beast rolled an eye back at him and snorted again, but then settled down resignedly. Hanson had only had a couple of occasions to ride a horse in his entire life, and he’d forgotten the strange feeling of all that breathing, moving muscle under him that he was somehow supposed to control; it took him a few tries to get the horse moving in the right direction, eliciting more laughter all around, but at last they set off.
It was strange, very strange, to be riding across the meadow he’d studied from his window for so long, watching the little marmoset-like creatures scatter and dive into their holes in the rocks to hide at their approach, and Hanson experienced a wave of dizziness and unreality that almost made him fall from his horse, and it took him a moment to convince himself that this wasn’t a dream, that it was really happening, that he was outside, and let the world settle again around him.
At the bottom of the meadow, they turned onto the road where the firefight had happened, and which the refugees from some battle somewhere had streamed down, and he turned in his saddle to watch until the grim bulk of the prison disappeared from sight. As it did, he felt another wave of unreality, and then, the last thing he’d ever expected to feel, a surge of hope, and he prayed that he’d never see that place again in his life. The thought of returning and being interned again in its airless depths filled him with horror. He realized that Delgardo was right—better to take his chances with whatever destiny had in store for him in the City. Even if it killed him, maybe it would at least be a quick death. Better that than going back to where he’d rotted for so long.