Then in mid-afternoon the key scrapes in the lock and the door opens. "What do you want?" says my warder. "Why have you been banging on the door?" How he must detest me! To spend days of one's life keeping watch on a closed door and attending to the animal needs of another man! He has been robbed of his freedom too, and thinks of me as the robber.
"Are you not letting me out today? I haven't had anything to eat."
"Is that what you called me for? You'll get your food. Learn some patience. You're too fat anyway."
"Wait. I have to empty my bucket. It stinks in here. I want to wash the floor. I want to wash my clothes too. I can't appear in front of the Colonel in clothes that smell like this. It will only bring disgrace on my warders. I need hot water and soap and a rag. Let me quickly empty my bucket and fetch hot water from the kitchen."
My guess about the Colonel must be right, for he does not contradict me. He opens the door wider and stands aside. "Hurry up!" he says.
There is only a scullery maid in the kitchen. She gives a start when the two of us walk in, in fact even seems about to run away. What stories have people been telling about me?
"Give him some hot water," the guard orders. She ducks her head and turns to the stove where there is always a great cauldron of steaming water.
Over my shoulder I say to the guard, "A bucket-I will fetch a bucket for the water." In a few strides I am across the kitchen to the dim recess where, along with sacks of flour and salt and crushed millet and dried peas and beans, the mops and brooms are kept. On a nail at head-height is the key to the cellar where the sides of mutton are hung. In an instant I have pocketed it. When I turn I have a wooden bucket in my hand. I hold it up while the girl ladles boiling water in. "How are you?" I say. Her hand trembles so much that I have to take the ladle from her. "Can I have a little soap and an old rag, please?"
Back in my cell I strip and wash in the luxuriously warm water. I wash my one spare pair of drawers, which smells like rotten onions, wring it out, hang it on the nail behind the door, and empty the bucket on the paved floor. Then I lie down to wait for nightfall.
The key turns smoothly in the lock. How many people besides myself know that the cellar key unlocks the door to my prison-room as well as the large cupboard in the main barracks-hall, that the key to the suite of rooms over the kitchen duplicates the key to the armoury door, that the key to the north-west tower stairway also opens the north-east tower stairway, the smaller cupboard in the hall, and the hatch over the waterpipe in the courtyard? One does not spend thirty years immersed in the minutiae of the life of a tiny settlement for nothing.
The stars twinkle out of a clear black sky. Through the bars of the yard gate comes the gleam of a fire on the square beyond. Beside the gate, if I strain my eyes, I can make out a dark shape, a man sitting against the wall or curled up in sleep. Does he see me in the doorway of my cell? For minutes I stand alert. He does not stir. Then I begin to edge along the wall, my bare feet making whispering noises on the patches of gravel.
I turn the corner and pass the kitchen door. The next door leads to my old apartment upstairs. It is locked. The third and last door stands open. It is the door of the little room sometimes used as a sickbay, sometimes simply to quarter men in. At a crouch, feeling with my hand before me, I creep towards the dim blue square of the barred window, fearful of stumbling over the bodies whose breathing I hear all about me.
One strand begins to separate from the skein: the sleeper at my feet breathes fast, at each exhalation giving a little moan. Is he dreaming? I pause while a few inches from me, like a machine, he continues to pant and moan in the dark. Then I creep past.
I stand at the window and look out across the town square, half expecting campfires, lines of tethered horses and stacked arms, rows of tents. But there is almost nothing to see: the embers of a single dying fire, and perhaps the gleam of two white tents far away under the trees. So the expeditionary force is not back! Or is it possible that these few souls here are all that is left of it? My heart stops at the thought. But that is not possible! These men have not been to war: at worst they have been roaming the up-river country, hunting down unarmed sheep-herders, raping their women, pillaging their homes, scattering their flocks; at best they have met no one at all-certainly not the gathered barbarian clans from whose fury the Third Bureau is engaged in protecting us.
Fingers as light as a butterfly's wing touch my ankle. I drop to my knees. "I am thirsty," confides a voice. It is the man who was panting. So he was not asleep.
"Quietly, my son," I whisper. Staring, I can make out the whites of his upturned eyeballs. I touch his forehead: he is feverish. His hand comes up and grips mine. "I have been so thirsty!" he says.
"I will bring you water," I whisper in his ear, "but then you must promise to be quiet. There are sick men here, they must sleep."
The shadow beside the gate has not moved. Perhaps there is nothing there, perhaps only an old sack or a stack of firewood. I tiptoe across the gravel to the trough where the soldiers wash. The water is not clean but I cannot afford to unstop the pipe. A battered pot hangs at the side of the trough. I scoop it full and tiptoe back.
The boy tries to sit up but is too weak. I support him while he drinks.
"What happened?" I whisper. One of the other sleepers stirs. "Are you hurt or are you sick?"
"I'm so hot!" he groans. He wants to throw his blanket aside but I restrain him. "You must sweat the fever out," I whisper. He shakes his head slowly from side to side. I hold his wrist till he sinks back into sleep.
There are three bars set in a wooden frame: all the downstairs windows of the barracks block are barred. I brace my foot against the frame, grip the middle bar, and heave. I sweat and strain, there is a stab of pain in my back, but the bar does not budge. Then all of a sudden the frame cracks and I have to cling to prevent myself from falling backwards. The boy begins moaning again, another sleeper clears his throat. I almost shout with surprise at the pain that comes when I put my weight on my right leg.
The window itself is open. Forcing the bars to one side, I push my head and shoulders through the gap, work my way out, and tumble to earth at last behind the row of cropped bushes that runs along the north wall of the barracks. All I can think of is the pain, all that I desire is to be left to lie in the easiest position I can find, on my side with my knees raised toward my chin. For an hour at least, while I could be pursuing my escape, I lie there, hearing through the open window the sighs of the sleepers, the voice of the boy mumbling to himself. The last embers of the fire on the square die. Man and beast are asleep. It is the hour before dawn, the coldest hour. I feel the chill of the earth enter my bones. If I lie here longer I will freeze and be trundled back to my cell in the morning in a barrow. Like a wounded snail I begin to creep along the wall towards the dark mouth of the first street leading off the square.
The gate to the little area behind the inn lies back rotten on its hinges. The area itself smells of decay. Peelings, bones, slops, ash are hurled out here from the kitchen to be forked into the ground; but the earth has grown tired, the fork that buries this week's refuse turns up last week's. During the day the air is alive with flies; at dusk the black-beetle and cockroach wake.
Beneath the wooden stairway that leads up to the balcony and servants' quarters is a recess where wood is stored and where the cats retire when it rains. I crawl in and curl up on an old bag. It smells of urine, it is certainly full of fleas, I am so cold that my teeth chatter; but at this moment all that occupies me is the palliation of the pain in my back.