Bone Ash Sky (33 page)

He quashed the instinct to flee, gulped and tried again.

‘I beg you, I need to find him.’

Somewhere in the far corner, he heard a fretful voice.

‘I think you’re looking for me.’

He stumbled over bodies in the dark, all the while being prodded at and kicked in the shins. He knelt down so close he could smell the boy’s breath, feel the tickle of those damp curls on his forehead. Anxiety and the fear of being found out made him garble and cough and spit out his words.

‘Come outside with me. I need to ask you something – in private.’

The moon glinted through the tent flaps. The boy hesitated, flung his hair back. It seemed an affectation.

‘You’re not—you don’t want me, do you? Because you know it will cost. In food.’

Minas breathed out, exasperated already.

‘Just come outside.’

He yanked the boy up by the arm and pulled him through the tent and outside where they both crouched on the ground, shivering in the night air. The boy was gasping with what seemed outraged pride and fright. Minas tried to look into his face.

‘Listen to me. I don’t know you well but feel you’re in the same mind as I am. I need to speak to you about—escaping from here.’

The boy stood up.

‘You’ve got to be joking.’

He seemed recovered now, his tone and stance familiar.

‘We can do it together. I’ve been thinking about it for months.’

‘Why me?’

Minas decided to lie.

‘I trust you.’

He felt rather than saw the boy nod his quick assent.

‘But how do I know I can trust you?’

‘Listen to me now and make up your mind. I’m putting my life on the line just by telling you, aren’t I? I have a plan and need you with me. Will you listen? Just sit down again. Tomorrow we hide in the kitchens after the evening meal – you must know a good place – and when the back gates are opened next morning for the provisions to arrive—’

‘They only come on Wednesdays.’

‘All right then, the day after tomorrow.’

‘I’ll be serving Tuesday night; it will be easy for me to hide. As for you …’ ‘I’ll think of something, if you tell me where you’ll be.’

The boy seemed to be lost in contemplation, silent in the dark. Minas looked around him, acutely conscious of the time passing.

‘Anyway,’ the boy finally said. ‘What’s in it for me?’

‘We can help each other in the desert. And when we reach Van. You are a Vanetzi, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. So far I’m helping you, but I don’t see how—’

‘We’ll stick together. If we get out of here alive, I’ll look after you. I promise.’

He felt the boy’s thin hand on his leg. The high voice throbbed in his ear.

‘You promise?’

‘Yes.’ Minas was becoming exasperated again. ‘I promise. So, the delivery comes the next morning, and as they’re unloading we make a run for it.’

‘In broad daylight? They’ll shoot us before we can run ten metres.’ ‘There’s no other way.’

They were squashed hard against each other in the kitchen storeroom. It was little more than a cupboard, so crammed with jars and sacks there was barely room for the rats that scurried over their feet and faces, let alone two grown boys. It had been more difficult than Minas first thought, evading the guards at the evening meal and managing to hide. A new Turk had been on duty, a younger man who seemed to feel the need to be vigilant, counting prisoners as they filed into the tent for their evening meal and then out again. But Minas had created a diversion by spilling his scalding broth on the bare feet of another inmate, and in the commotion had been able to slip to the side in the shadows and join the boy.

Now, as he sat twisted up against the boy’s heaving chest, he remembered that he still didn’t know his name. He couldn’t ask him now; any sound or movement could give them away. The Kurdish cooks were still in the kitchen scouring the huge pots that held every meal, morning gruel or evening broth, each day. Some inmates were busy sweeping the dirt floors, wiping down the thick slab of stone that passed for chopping board and serving counter. He could hear their whimpers and groans as the cooks kicked them in the kidneys to urge them to work faster. He moved his knee back an inch, and felt the boy flex his muscles in gratitude for the extra space.

They tried not to breathe too loudly, although the air was becoming staler. He felt the stolen knife dig into his thigh, but there was no way he could move again to ease his discomfort. The boy seemed to be gasping, then in a terrible moment, ceased to make any sound at all. He pressed his lips to the boy’s ear.

‘All right?’

A slight twitch was the answer. He let himself drift into reverie then, and the pimpled girl’s face swam at his side in reproach. This morning he told her he was going to try to escape tonight. He saw in her careful expression she was hurt. Although she insisted she was too weak to come, his obvious hesitancy to take her now was unforgivable. Yet she still nestled into him to say goodbye and he moved away from her stink with a squeamishness he had never been aware of before. He was leaving her now, his body shrinking from contact before his brain even severed the bond.

Fastidious, after everything he had touched and seen. The rats stirred at his feet. Not as fastidious as this boy at his side. He saw him avoid certain inmates as if afraid to be infected by them. He saw how the boy cultivated the guards in the hope of favours. He pinched him to make sure he hadn’t suffocated, and felt a flicker of response. He must have dozed then, or slipped into unconsciousness, because the next he knew there were shouts and sweeping shadows cast by lanterns held aloft, and thick Turkish voices in an uproar. He heard the commander’s fractured voice over the loudspeakers.

‘Two men missing! Search the entire camp.’

He could hear the sirens now, and dogs snuffling at the storeroom door, and his bowels turned to water. He felt the boy stir beside him, and try to stretch out. He held him fast in his grip. He manoeuvred his arm painfully to the side and clamped his hand over the boy’s mouth. The boy struggled and flailed, and Minas knew they would soon be discovered. Still he nursed some faint hope, if he could only hold the boy still long enough.

He felt the warm stench of vomit seep through his fingers. He tightened them on the boy’s face, resisting the urge to let go. More liquid bubbling out of the boy’s mouth – it seemed to never end. He felt his fingers relax their grip somewhat; the boy’s face was slippery now, unmanageable. In an instant he wrenched out of Minas’s grasp and yelled.

‘He’s in here, my lords! He took me hostage against my will.’

While Minas was in solitary confinement he wondered why the Turks hadn’t just killed him on the spot. He supposed they needed labour, and he and the boy were two of the very few inmates at this point healthy enough to work so hard. There hadn’t been new convoys for many weeks now. He had also seen some of the older guards stepping forward and pleading for leniency on their behalf, the very same guards who had propositioned him by the mass graves.

Both boys had been bundled out of the storeroom, landing at the feet of the assembled company. Minas would have laughed if he hadn’t been so terrified. The knife had skidded across the floor in a wide, shining arc, evidence of his guilt and the boy’s betrayal. Although the Turks had only half-believed his babbled story, the boy had been whipped and left out in the sun for a day and a night as an example to other prisoners. Minas was spared the sight of his oozing, blackened body at assembly and taken to solitary for three weeks.

Thank God they hadn’t stripped him before throwing him into prison. His mother’s earrings still pressed into the flesh of his nipples, all but healed now, and growing over the piercing. A voice he learnt to rely upon soothed him in these confined quarters, his cage of steel wire. Sometimes it came to him in the guise of his mother at bedtime, her black hair redolent of bergamot and her temples damp from the bath, an open window at his head to let in the lake’s summer breezes.
My darling,
my love, your suffering and joys will be many.
At other times it mimicked the voice of Lilit, hissing and swaying and not allowing him to forget.
There is hope
, she said,
hope means everything will be all right someday
, and the familiar girlish voice echoed somewhere deep down in his gut.

He couldn’t lie down or stretch out, only crouch with his head tucked into his chest and his knees buckled up to his ears. The sun beat down on him constantly during the day, and in the chill of the desert night rats, lizards and scorpions sought some warmth in the recesses of his body. He killed the smallest lizards with the flat of his hand, watched their pale bodies blacken and shrivel as he waited until he was brave enough, or starving enough, to partake of them.

He felt he was slowly dying, moment by moment. Yet the voice lulled him to sleep, sang him lullabies.

He busied himself with more escape plans. They became ever more elaborate and improbable, yet they helped him brave the buckets of camel dung thrown over him by jocular guards, the clump of dry gruel flung at him once every two days, the incessant evening chatter of the younger soldiers on duty. At three-hour intervals the guards kicked him awake so that he never enjoyed a full night’s sleep. Five days into his confinement, after a surprise meal of mouldy bread, he thought of the Bedouin. Perhaps the extra nutrients jolted his brain into some semblance of logic.

Before the failed escape, he’d seen some of the younger Bedouin from nearby tribes loiter around the periphery of the camp in the mornings, looking for some work, a handful of liras in exchange for an hour’s menial labour. The guards sometimes used them and their camels to transport prisoners out to the middle of the desert to be shot and buried on the spot. He would have to befriend a Bedouin when they let him out.

In the meantime, he tried to exercise, but there was no room to move. He wriggled his fingers and toes at strict intervals, kept himself from total boredom by tightening each individual muscle he could detect then relaxing it again. After the first week, this began to tire him. After the second, the most he could do was wake throughout the day and night from longer and longer periods of unconsciousness and open his mouth –
yes, I am still alive, because my jaw hurts
– then close it again. This in itself was an achievement. At the end of his third week, he was hardly aware of his body at all. He floated above the cage, borne along by the ear-splitting, painful accents of his mother’s voice.
My darling, my
love, your sufferings and joys will be many.

His first morning back at dawn assembly, he was so weak he could hardly keep from falling down. His arms and legs would not obey him: his impotent brain confusing signals. His torso was bent double. He tried to straighten up a little and gasped with the pain. The other inmates stood apart and watched, waiting for him to fall so they could jeer at him. He tried to walk, but found he couldn’t. He leaned against another man, who elbowed him in the side and glared. He stumbled and managed to right himself, panting and clutching at his chest. He felt as if he’d run for days, lifted the weight of worlds, been stretched out on a rack. Every inch of his body, every muscle, rasped and burned and screamed for relief.