Down Station (16 page)

‘Me? No.’ She was unsettled by Crows’ gloom, and was glad for the change of subject.

‘Are you scared of water, then? It was said that it was unlucky for a sailor to learn to swim: by who, I do not know, because they were idiots. Swimming is important. Bridges are rare on Down, and lakes and rivers are not.’ He took off his shirt in one fluid motion, and threw it to the ground behind him. She caught the barest glimpse of a series of ridged scars on his otherwise smooth belly, before he turned. He started wading out into the lake, the water enveloping his legs.

‘I haven’t got anything to wear,’ she said.

‘My intentions are wholly honourable, Mary. It does not matter what you do or do not wear, only that you learn.’

She thought about it. She hadn’t washed properly in days – apart from the river crossing, and that didn’t count as being washed.

‘There aren’t any monsters in the lake, are there?’

‘If I said yes, would you learn to swim quicker?’

‘No.’

‘Then no, there are no monsters in the lake.’ Crows was up to his waist. He ducked down and disappeared. After what felt like forever, he reappeared, far off to one side. ‘No monsters but us,’ he called.

He was lying, obviously, but seemed totally unconcerned about being eaten by sea serpents or giant sharks or whatever. She had a vest top on under her boilersuit which, yes, would turn transparent, but it wasn’t like she’d be spending much time with even her head above water.

She sat down and kicked off her boots, dumped her socks in the tops, and pulled at the heavy zip on the boilersuit, listening to the way it growled as she dragged it down. Crows was busy diving down under the surface, emerging elsewhere, spitting water in a tall fountain, then jackknifing under again, all away from her.

Did she dare do this? Crows was sad and alone, but she got the impression that her presence wouldn’t change that, that he didn’t want her to change that, that he simply wasn’t interested in her in that way. He’d never looked her up and down with predatory intent, and she – no: he was too different, too otherworldly and out of time. But they could be friends, and if they were friends, what else mattered?

She shucked the boilersuit and left it on the shore next to her boots, and ran the short distance across the sharp grit into the water.

It was cold like a knife was cold.

‘Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck.’

She was up to her calves, her knees, mid-thighs, wading forward, ice water splashing on her pale brown skin like glitter, goosebumps making her skin puckered.

She tripped, and fell. Her arms came forward to stop her, and she plunged headfirst into the stirred-up silt. The water closed over her, and the shock of it, the way it thieved the heat from her, almost made her gasp. Her lungs strained for breath, and her arms and legs flailed as she tried to find her feet. It didn’t occur to her to close her eyes, and she caught a fleeting glimpse of another kingdom, of weeds and fishes and green sunlight.

Then she came up with a shout, hair coiled like oiled springs behind her and over her shoulders, the sun warm against the chill of the lake. Crows flipped himself under, reappearing wide-eyed and closer, and Mary used her hands to manoeuvre herself towards him, feeling the embrace of the water against every inch of her body.

16

Dalip sat on the stone of the pit, back against the curved wall, facing the door. He’d been told by the guard to wait: he had no reason to give the man a nice name, so he hadn’t, and started thinking of him as Pigface.

He was more Cowface, broad and bovine, but Pigface seemed to sum up his raisin-like eyes and sticky pink complexion. He was casually, almost indifferently, brutal, as if that was the only way to behave and he’d known no other. Perhaps that was true: perhaps he came from a long line of Pigfaces, slave keepers who were little more than slaves themselves.

Then Stanislav appeared, entering the pit cautiously, looking up at the surrounding balconies and the rings of lit candles. Behind him, Pigface was watching.

‘Why are we here?’ asked Stanislav.

‘That’s the question I keep on asking. The answer, for me at least, is to fight.’

Satisfied, Pigface turned away to the guard room, leaving both doors open, and Stanislav toured the circumference of the pit.

‘And you have agreed to such madness?’

‘I didn’t really have much of a choice.’

‘No. You cannot fight. I will go and tell them this instant.’ He clenched his fists and started back up the corridor to find Pigface.

‘Stop. Stop. You don’t understand.’

‘I understand that you are just a boy, a child. If they want someone to fight, they can pick me.’ Stanislav seemed more than ready to start there and then.

‘They have a dragon.’

That stopped him. He put his hand on the door and leant against it. ‘They have a what?’

‘A dragon. They call it a wyvern – snake’s body, bat’s wings, two legs like a bird. We’re stuck halfway up a mountain and it’ll eat anything that goes beyond the wall. I managed to get out, tried to make a run for it. There’s literally nowhere to run to.’

‘We walked here. We can walk out again.’

‘Not with that thing flying around.’

Stanislav came back again. ‘You saw this wyvern, this draco?’

Dalip nodded sourly. ‘We’re in some sort of castle. Buildings surrounded by an outer wall, where there are two gates, at least. They don’t even bother to close or guard the gates, but I guess they don’t need to.’

‘You still do not have to fight. That is barbaric.’

‘I don’t think they care. They’re going to drag me here and give me a weapon, then set … things on me, whether I want them to or not. Either I fight back or I die.’ Dalip looked up at Stanislav. ‘I don’t want to die.’

‘Have they told you how many opponents you will face? What kind? Men? Beasts?’

‘They used a dog for the first time. A fighting dog of some sort. I have to assume it gets harder.’

Stanislav sat down next to him, and rested the back of his head against the same wall as Dalip.

‘This is how you win your freedom?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think it works like that.’

‘To the death?’

‘I’m here to fight. Apparently.’

‘This is, this is …’ Stanislav raised his hands, then let them drop uselessly in his lap. ‘Evil.’

‘I didn’t know what to do. I thought this might buy me some time.’ Dalip shrugged. ‘Something might come up. An opportunity, a rescue. I know I can’t keep going forever, but it’s better than being dead now.’

‘Is it? There are worse things than dying.’

‘I don’t know how to fight. Pigface said one of the guards would train me. I didn’t want that. So I asked for you.’

‘And you think I do?’ Stanislav pressed his chin into his chest. ‘You should not have picked me. Anyone else but me.’

‘I’m sorry. I wanted someone on my side, someone who’ll care enough to give me a chance.’

‘You will die in this ring of cold stone. You have no chance, none at all. By saying yes to them, you have given them control over you. Only by saying no do you keep your honour and your dignity intact.’ He ground his jaw. ‘You have made a mistake, Dalip. If you will not let me go and tell them you will not fight, go yourself, and let them do their worst.’

‘Their worst will be to let some other wild thing in here, and it’ll kill me.’

‘If you want understanding, understand this: you will not hurt them by fighting their animals. You will only hurt them by fighting them. The only way you have of hurting them is by not playing their cruel games.’

‘Stanislav: they’ll kill me. One way or another, they’ll kill me.’

‘This is true. But they will gain pleasure out of seeing you fight, not seeing you win. It is the fighting they want. Deny them that.’

‘I shouldn’t have brought you into this,’ said Dalip. ‘Okay, I do have a choice. Die now, die later. And everything you said is true. I just don’t want to die now. I want to live.’

He got up and dusted himself down and started to prowl.

‘What will you do,’ said Stanislav, ‘when they bring in another man? Or a woman? Or a child? Will you kill them to stay alive?’

‘No. No, I won’t.’

‘You are sure of that? Once you begin to kill, it will become almost impossible not to kill. What if they push this Pigface into the ring with you? He is a prisoner of the geomancer as much as we are.’

Dalip said nothing. He hadn’t thought that far ahead, and he was ashamed that he hadn’t. If it was Pigface facing him, knife in hand, sweat streaming down his forehead and stinging his eyes? The guard would stick a blade in him without a moment’s hesitation. Did that give him the right to do the same?

Killing him could be seen as protecting the others.

‘No,’ he said.

‘So you would be prepared to let Pigface kill you?’

He imagined the knife going in, into his belly, being dragged out sideways, his guts spilling out over the floor. ‘No.’

‘It must be one or the other. Those are the rules of their game. Two go in, one comes out.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘So you must decide whether you will be prepared to end another man’s life for the purposes of entertaining our masters, or whether you will not. What if,’ said Stanislav, ‘it was me?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? We are together through circumstance alone. Neither of us chose the other. If I am just another man you must kill in order to survive that day, then why not?’

‘You’ve not done anything to hurt me. Stanislav, please. I just want to live a little longer.’

‘And you call this living?’ He shook his head. ‘I do not blame you. I would have agreed with you once. You are young, you have experienced mostly kindness and generosity so far. You cannot quite believe what is happening to you, so you choose to
put all that to one side and cling on to the idea that everything will be all right in the end.’

Dalip pressed his hands to his face and blinked back the tears.

‘It will be.’

‘I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen men, and boys not much younger than you, believe until the very last second that everything will be all right in the end. They died with a look of astonishment on their faces, that the world had somehow tricked them into thinking that people were good and kind and fair, only to reveal that underneath, we are all brutes, savages and murderers.’ Stanislav pulled up his legs and hugged his knees. ‘We are prisoners, not of any state that has rules that mean we must be fed and clothed and well-treated, but of people who own us like property, to do with as they wish. Do we cooperate with such people? Only if we want to lose our souls as well as our lives.’

‘But useful slaves—’

‘Are still slaves! Pigface is still a slave. The wolfman is still a slave. Perhaps they want to be slaves, good slaves. I do not, and you should not either. It is not a condition that anyone should become comfortable with.’ He got up, and stood in front of Dalip. ‘What is it that you want? Do you want to fight? Is that it? To show you are a man? To kill and kill again because that is what men do?’

‘No, I don’t want to fight. But they’re going to make me fight anyway, so I may as well not die at the first attempt.’

‘You know of the Christian martyrs, yes? The ones that the emperors put into the arena with the wild animals? They did not fight, but prayed as they died.’

‘I’m not a Christian.’

Stanislav took a step closer, and pressed his extended forefinger into Dalip’s chest. ‘What is it that you want? What do you really want?’

‘I want them to let me go. I want to make them let me go. I
want to make them give me back my turban, my kangha, my kara, my kirpan. I want to make them glad to see the back of me. I can’t do any of that if I’m dead.’

‘That is true,’ he conceded. ‘Will you fight to make them let you go?’

‘Yes.’ Dalip looked away, then back. ‘I think so.’

‘You have to more than think. You have to know. And you have to fight them, every second of every day until you are either free or dead. Can you do that?’

‘Yes. Yes I can.’

‘If this is ultimately futile, and the geomancer and her men are too powerful for us, then we might only make them pay in some small way for what they have done. Would you be content with that?’

Dalip stared at his hands and wondered if he could do it. He was a student, a son, a brother. Not a fighter. Why was he here? He was here because he was being held against his will by people who wanted to feed him to dogs. That was why. That was the answer: not ‘fight’. So they were wrong, and he’d show them they were wrong, one way or another. If that meant pretending to become what they wanted, then he’d do that, only for as long as it took to work out a way of escaping.

‘Yes.’

It was Stanislav’s turn to come to a decision. His gaze wandered up to the first balcony, where the geomancer had sat. He pursed his lips and looked pensive.

‘Yes, then. I will attempt to train you. I know the basics. If nothing else, you will leave a better-looking corpse.’ He checked that Pigface wasn’t in sight. ‘Strip,’ he said.

‘Sorry, what?’

‘Strip. Let me see what I have to work with.’

Dalip kept his kachera on. Otherwise, he was naked, and felt utterly uncomfortable as Stanislav circled him, sizing him up as if he was a joint of meat. The air chilled his skin, and what hair he had rose up.

‘I have seen worse. You do a lot of sport?’

‘Cricket, mainly.’ Dalip looked straight ahead.

‘Cricket. How very … English. Can you run, throw, catch?’

‘I’m not bad, I suppose.’

‘The ball is small and hard. Are you scared of it?’

‘I know it’s going to hurt sometimes, and more if I get it wrong. But no, not really.’

‘This mark here.’ Stanislav pointed to Dalip’s arm. ‘This is where the dog bit you?’

‘That’s where I let the dog bite me. Then I stabbed it in the back and neck.’

‘We want to avoid that. A bigger creature will break your arm, even if they do not break your skin. A dog has blunt claws, made for running. A cat – a big cat – is sharp at every corner and will slice you like one of your Sunday roasts.’ Stanislav sized up the floor space. ‘This is small. Speed will only count for so much. Once you have made contact, ending it quickly will be your only option. Do you know any judo, or karate, or wrestling or boxing?’

‘No. I never really got into fights at all.’

‘Not even with racists or neo-Nazis?’

‘I got thumped a couple of times, but I was always able to run away.’ He shifted awkwardly. ‘Can I put the boilersuit back on? I’m cold and …’

‘Embarrassed? You will not die of embarrassment.’ Stanislav kicked Dalip’s boilersuit further away. ‘No. You cannot run away in here. Against animals, predators who will be used to killing for food and for dominance, there can be no running. You must dodge, close and strike, use your mind as a weapon as much as a knife. The longer a fight goes on, the more likely you are to lose. When you are tired, you will make mistakes. Out there, you have the chance to do it again. In here, it will kill you.’

Despite the cold, Dalip found his hands damp with sweat. Of course he was nervous. He’d be a fool not to be.

‘So how do we start?’

Stanislav weighed up the options. ‘You know what this is?’

He dropped to the ground and balanced his straight body on his fingers and toes. His elbows bent, his body dipped, then he straightened them again.

‘A press up,’ said Dalip.

‘You need more strength in your back and shoulders. Your arms are like sticks. One hundred. Start now, and I will find some weapons to practise with.’

Dalip assumed the position. He was quite light, and the first twenty weren’t too difficult. He could hear voices off, away down the corridor. He raised his head enough to see Stanislav and Pigface engage in, at first, an animated conversation with a lot of gesturing, and then it escalated to a full-throated shouting match. Pigface turned to walk away: a brief struggle ensued, ending up with the guard’s head squashed against the stone wall by Stanislav’s meaty hand, while the other relieved him of his knife. It had happened so quickly, almost effortlessly, that Dalip had no idea of the order of events.

Pigface slid down the wall when released, and Stanislav re-entered the pit. He stooped to put the knife on the floor and acted as if nothing had happened.

‘How many have you done?’

‘Twenty-six.’

Pigface was picking himself up off the ground, pressing his palm to the side of his head, staring narrow-eyed at Stanislav.

‘More, then,’ said Stanislav. ‘And faster. This is not meant to be easy. While you are doing that, tell me what you saw outside: tell me about the buildings, how far away they are, how many soldiers you saw.’

He gave the details as best he could, and then talked about what he presumed was the geomancer’s stronghold.

‘There’s a tower attached to this one, by a bridge that links the first floors. If that’s where she lives, then she can just walk from there to here without going down to the ground. But the only way out of here for us is through the guard room.’

‘How high is that balcony? Three and a half metres? Four? If one of us could climb that, then there is another way out.’

Dalip’s arms were beginning to burn. ‘It’s smooth stone. I don’t think anyone could climb that.’

‘No? I will show you how it can be done. Not today, though. Let them get used to us being here, then they will take less notice of us. How many now?’