He tried to become detached, to remember how it once was. He had a vague memory-or was it just what his mother had told him? — of a time when they had been spared the full horror of the Merki occupation of Cartha. She, as the mistress of Tobias Cromwell, was allowed a place to live, decent food, deliverance from the feasts and from the mines.
But then Cromwell had died, and the Merki had sent them into the mines. Even children of two and three had crawled into the narrow seams and retrieved loose rock.
Thus he had lived and grown until the end of the war. He had learned toughness, to look with cold eyes upon unspeakable horror, to watch as others died the most horrible of deaths and to feel nothing.
He wondered how it could be that he was not like so many others who had survived that time; the drifters, the beggars, the drinkers and murderers who had infested the city of Cartha after the war and the coming of the Yankees.
It was his mother’s love that had shielded him from that fate. He could remember her soft touch, her stories of her family, rulers of Cartha before the Great War. Her love had formed a shield around him and somehow kept a kernel within his heart alive and warm.
She had died on the final day the Merki fled from the Yankee gunboats on the coast, the liberation within sight. The Merki had massacred nearly everyone. But even among that dreaded race there could be acts of pity. Their master, ordered to slay everyone, had granted her a clean death, a single blow. Then he had looked down, blade drawn, and hesitated.
“Hide beneath your mother, little one,” he whispered, and left.
So he had hidden, feeling the warmth that covered him growing cold.
A Rus soldier had found him thus, taken him in and raised him. The old man had been kindly enough, a fisherman living alone, who had taught him to sail, to work, to read and write. The old man seldom spoke, for a wound to the throat from a Tugar arrow had made his speech all but unintelligible, but concealed within was a sharp mind and a gentle strength. They would take their small boat out upon the Inland Sea, and often for days not a word would be exchanged, but Richard had, at least with this lonely old man, learned the strength of silence and patience.
He had died when Richard was eighteen, and only then did Richard learn that this quiet, lonely man had been a hero in the Great War, a war of which the old man had never spoken other than to say that his entire family had died in the great siege of Suzdal and that Perm had sent Richard to replace those he had lost.
Several veterans came to the funeral, one of them the Yankee general Hawthorne. He was the one that suggested Richard attend the academy and offered to give a letter of recommendation, never realizing who Richard’s father had really been.
Old Vasiliy had often suggested that Richard take his name, but something within had always stopped him, a defiance toward the world, an unwillingness to concede this one final point. It had caused nothing short of an explosion when he had appeared before the review board to take the exams and placed his true name on the form.
The matter had gone all the way to Andrew Keane, who was not president at the time, but did sit on the Supreme Court. The four years at the academy had been, because of his defiance, less than pleasant. More than one instructor had denounced his father as a traitor and openly mocked his name. And yet his quiet defiance had, in the end, gained him a certain grudging respect.
Vasiliy had taught him never to admit that anything was impossible. Once their net had become tangled in some wreckage, and the old man had told him to dive down and loosen it. The net was too precious to cut away or abandon. He had tried and could not reach it, and Vasiliy simply sat back, lit his pipe and told him they had days if need be, but he would untangle the net.
It had taken a day, he had almost drowned doing it, but he had learned.
And now it is time to die, he thought. I should have died nearly twenty years past. Every day since had been but an extra drawing of breath. At times he half believed in a God, Perm, and Kesus as old Vasiliy called them. At other times, in the face of all the cruelty he had witnessed, it was impossible to believe in any sense or order to the universe, for surely if there was a God he had to be mad to allow such a world as this.
The ship rose on a wave and corkscrewed back down, slamming both of them against the bulkhead. Sean groaned, a shuddering sob racking his body.
“Richard?”
“I’m here.”
Sean looked over at him, face contorted with agony. “I can’t take it again.”
Richard said nothing. He had learned how to block out beatings. In the mines they were the primary way to force children of four and five to work, or simply to amuse a bored Merki master. He had once seen a child slowly beaten to death across an entire day in the same way human children would torment a fly.
The beating of the previous day, however, had not been done for amusement, but for the simple purpose of breaking him down. He understood the method well enough, to push the agony to the limit of endurance, made even more maddening because no questions were asked, nothing demanded as of yet. Pain was simply inflicted, the lash snaking out against their naked bodies until both of them were bloody masses of peeling flesh.
He knew the questioning would come next. They’d be offered yet more torture or a quick release from the pain if they talked.
He looked over again at Sean and saw the terror in his eyes. He wondered if Sean, in turn, could sense the fear within his own soul as well.
“Listen to me,” he gasped, pausing to lick his split and bloodied lips. He swallowed to clear his throat. “Lie to them. We’ll have to talk, but we can lie.” He whispered softly, suspecting that just behind the half closed shutter and porthole a guard was listening. That’s why he spoke in English, doubting that any of their captors knew the language.
“Our ship, the Gettysburg, its an old ship. We have ships three, four times as big. Let’s say, twenty of them. We saw them pulling the wreckage of our flyer in, so tell them the truth about that, but say it’s our smallest aerosteamer. Tell them our army has half a million men under arms and can call up another half million. We have to agree on this now. They most likely will separate us soon.”
Sean, eyes glazed, stared at Richard. “Why?” Sean whispered.
Why? He was so incredulous, he couldn’t respond for a moment.
“It’s our duty, that’s why,” he finally replied.
“Duty? Duty got us into this. I joined because I had to. I was the son of damnable Senator O’Donald. Now look at us.”
A shuddering sob escaped him, and he lowered his head.
“Damn it, Sean, we have to agree on this. It will make it easier for both of us.”
“Easier?”
“I know how these creatures think. They respect strength. Show weakness, and they’ll drag out the agony for their own amusement.
“When they start in again, try to hang on as long as possible. When you simply can’t take it anymore, act as if you’re breaking, then spill it out quickly.”
He looked over at the table where the implements of torture were neatly lined up.
“They get careless sometimes. If you have a chance, throw yourself on one of their blades.”
He had seen that done often enough, and though it was easy to say, he wondered if he would have the courage to do so if the chance should arise.
“Then what?”
If we’re lucky, they just might cut our throats, Richard thought, but looking at Sean, he realized he’d better not say it.
“The moon feast. That’s what they are planning for us, isn’t it?”
Richard shook his head. “They only do that to fresh victims.”
Sean groaned as another wave rolled the boat, swinging them back against the bulkhead.
A burst of light flooded into the room, and, startled, he looked up. The door was open. Two of them were standing there, both in white robes, unlike their tormentors of earlier, who were stripped to the waist and wore black trousers.