Captivity (21 page)

“I want to go back to my mama,” Jana said.
She whined like any lost five-year-old, no longer the precocious
solider. “Please, I want my mama.”

Reynaldo had not expected such an ordinary,
childish wish. “Your mama?” His mind was blank; I was already as
good as dead to him. “No,” he said, chuckling. “You have no mother
anymore. Your father will look after you now.” He pointed to
himself as he said the word “father,” puffing up his chest and
preening his red hair.

Jana gaped at the absurd statements. “I do so
have a mama,” she said. Tears of rage and fear filled her eyes. She
stamped a booted foot and the swollen eye from her fight
overflowed, leaking a pink stream down her cheek. “I want to go
back to my mama.”

Reynaldo squatted down so that his face was
on a level with hers. “Listen to me, little lass,” he said, stern
but with rough affection. “Your mama is dead. I don’t want to hear
you speak of her again. Best to forget all that.” He spoke as if
recalling something painful, giving advice he thought helpful.

Jana’s face crumpled with shock at the man’s
words. She rushed at Reynaldo, punching and kicking at him as she
had thrown herself at the older boy in her fight, but Reynaldo was
an adult and he simply caught her hands and squeezed, subduing her
with the pressure. Jana was soon immobilized. She continued to cry
with a child’s loud unashamed howls, but she stood docile as her
sobs tapered off into whimpers.

“That’s better,” Reynaldo said. “Now listen
carefully. You’re a fighter. That’s good. I’m a fighter, too.
Tomorrow I am going to fight and win. I will become Margrave
Aranyi, and you will be my daughter. When you’re of age, I will
make you my wife. We will rule in Aranyi, and our children will
follow after us.” He watched, his face a little to one side like a
bird’s, to see her response.

Jana was still weeping, but silently. “That’s
nothing to cry about,” Reynaldo said. “Better than being married
off to some castrated whore like that faggot who—”

Jana’s reaction surprised everybody. She was
held fast, couldn’t move her arms, but she spat in Reynaldo’s face
and kicked at him. “You are not my papa!” she said, her voice
rising to shriek. “You are not Margrave Aranyi. My papa is Margrave
Aranyi! And he is going to kill you. My papa is going to kill you
for what you did!” When Reynaldo drew back from Jana’s outburst she
freed her hands and stared at the silent crowd. “My papa’s going to
kill all of you. All of you.” Her shouts went on, interspersed with
sobs.

Finally Reynaldo could take no more of it. He
ordered two men to hold her, one on each side, as Niall had been
restrained earlier, and he squatted in front of her. “Shut up,” he
said in his quiet, menacing voice. “I’m your papa now and you must
obey me.” He used his
crypta
crudely but effectively. My
daughter and I both felt it—the sensation of a slap on the face.
Jana gasped in surprise and stopped her threats.

My heart bled so much for her it felt as if I
did physical damage to a crucial part of my anatomy. Forty years
later and more, as I write these words, the pain is as strong as
ever, a wound that went too deep to heal. I could not answer Jana’s
cries, nor succumb to my fury and strike back at Reynaldo. I was
unable to comfort my daughter in any way, as I dared not betray the
fact of my survival. To do so would have brought death on us all. I
lay passive in Jana’s mind, an abject self-hating spectator, and
felt within her the stirrings of her Aranyi self, the essence of
her that owes so much to Dominic and his alien genetic heritage, so
little to me.

Jana lifted her tear-stained face. She took a
deep, rattling breath, gulped and swallowed, then fixed her cold
gray eyes on her enemy. “I owe you a death,” she said, speaking
formally, using a ritual phrase of vengeance. “As you have done to
me, so I will do to you. I swear it for all to hear.” She had heard
these words in after-supper poems and bedtime stories, even perhaps
from Dominic himself, telling of something that had happened at
court, years ago. The words rolled out smoothly, with no stumbling
or mispronunciations, her voice low and determined.

The effect was chilling. I think everybody in
the room believed her. Down in my cell, weak and despairing, I
received the words directly from her mind to mine, and was in some
mysterious way strengthened. Reynaldo flinched visibly as if
struck, almost losing his balance as he stood up hurriedly. He said
nothing.

The two men holding Jana dropped her arms as
if an electric current had gone through them and sidled away from
her. Whispers and murmurs disturbed the tense silence as people
recited half-forgotten rhymes, folk charms against ‘Graven magic.
Fingers and hands moved in the firelight, making the sign against
evil. Jana stood alone at the side of the room, her warlike stare
at Reynaldo slowly fading, returning to the vulnerable, defeated
posture of a motherless child.

Reynaldo tried to break the spell. He scanned
the large room, observing the interrupted evening activity. Women
had been preparing supper, children crouching at their mothers’
sides for a bit of food. “Eat up!” Reynaldo said with the required
false heartiness of the leader. “It’s war at dawn. Death to
Aranyi!” He waited for cheers or some sign of enthusiasm, but the
silence remained absolute.

The women resumed their cooking with tired,
hopeless resignation. Michaela, as ordered, gave Jana a bowl of nut
porridge. Jana, squatting on the floor, clutched the bowl in
shaking hands, unable to eat. Michaela’s daughter crept up silently
and snatched the bowl of food. “If you’re not hungry,” she said,
“there’s plenty who are.”

Without warning Reynaldo bore down on her.
The girl leapt back with a cry; the bowl fell and overturned.
Reynaldo reached to grab the girl but she ducked and scurried,
slipping in and out between groups of people who laughed from fear
and pushed her away, wanting only to steer clear of Reynaldo’s
wrath. The girl ran clumsily, with the awkward motion of someone in
pain, her fright making her move her legs when she had rather sit
still.

Reynaldo soon tired of the undignified chase.
He shrugged his shoulders, ordered another bowl for Jana. Michaela
protested—there was little left for her and the others—but ladled
the gluey mess out, pushing the bowl in Jana’s direction. Some of
the hot liquid spilled out onto my daughter’s hands but she hardly
felt it. This time she began to eat, automatically, unthinking,
putting food in her mouth and swallowing while her tears flowed
steadily.

“This is my daughter,” Reynaldo said. “You
will all treat her as such. She eats first, with me. Whoever denies
her or steals from her insults me and answers to me. From tomorrow
I am Margrave Aranyi. Remember who you fight for, and who you
serve.”

The meal continued in glum silence and was
quickly over. They were in over their heads, they knew it now,
tricked by a mad, ambitious telepath into a war they didn’t
want.

As the bandits prepared for sleep and an
early rising, I took my mind out of Jana’s, brought it back to
myself and my hateful thoughts. Val stirred in my arms. He was not
quite as hot as before; perhaps his fever had broken. “I want to go
home,” he said. “I’m the air.”

I dragged myself to the water skin that
Niall’s kindness had supplied, let Val drink his fill, wiped his
face, and drained what was left. There would be no need ever again
to ingest anything provided by my captors. “Tomorrow, sweetheart,”
I said. “But now it’s time to sleep.”

Reynaldo’s cruel words to Jana had given me a
solution. If I kept my head there might be a chance I could warn
Dominic in time and yet save my life and my children’s.
Yes
,
I thought, with a faint gleam of hope,
I will be dead soon, and
so will Val
. I had been lying still for so long, eating and
drinking very little, breathing shallowly, I was halfway there. All
it needed was a few careful
crypta
-induced changes to
complete the journey.

I went over the steps in my head. Our hearts
would slow, and our breathing, our blood barely circulating. We
would hibernate, enter a kind of suspended animation, still alive,
but our vital signs imperceptible to unamplified human senses. The
descent must be gradual, the body adjusting to the lowered
metabolism like sinking into a deep sleep. My telepathic sense
would be the last to leave and the first to return.

I had learned this procedure in La Sapienza
seminary, although I had never actually done it. None of us had,
not even Matilda Stranyak who was training to be the new sibyl. It
was a skill from the distant past, when prisms were rare, even
among ‘Graven, and situations like mine must have been common. But
it was an interesting application of
crypta
, and Edwige
Ertegun, the old sibyl, had required us to study it.

Using the last of my telepathic electricity,
I made the inner flame and started in. There was no margin for
error; I was not in school. Failure would lead to real death. I
held my left arm above and to the side, angling its greenish light
into my eyes, slowing Val down until his heartbeat and breathing
became imperceptible. They would register only on a Terran
instrument, or to a trained telepathic healer. His temperature fell
until he was cold to the touch—dead for the purpose of any
inspection he would get here. He slackened his hold on me, lay
inert in the crook of my arm.

Now me. Reynaldo would be onto me as soon as
he picked up my conversation with Dominic. He must think they were
my last words. When I was down as far as I could go and still
communicate, I began the search for my husband. There was a
physical aspect to it, a feeling that I was scanning the horizon,
running along paths, even boring through rock underground. Luckily
I found him almost at once. He was closer than I had thought. It
was late, the middle of the night. It had taken me hours to bring
Val and myself to this imitation death.

Dominic
. I sighed with relief when the
familiar mind was with me.
Listen carefully, my love, I have no
time
. I thought in the form of Terran speech. For a telepath,
foreign languages are not a complete barrier to comprehension, but
they add a level of difficulty.

Amalie
, Dominic said,
what is
it?
He thought in Terran also, following my lead.

As I had feared, Reynaldo was alerted
immediately. I doubted he had slept at all this night, watching
through the small hours in fear that something would go wrong to
spoil his great plan. Now his vigilance was rewarded. He heard the
strange words and interjected himself into the conversation.
What is that gibberish?
He screamed into my head.
Speak
Eclipsian or—
He went quiet as he realized that, although he
had forgotten me, I had not obligingly disappeared after all.

Amalie!
Dominic shouted in terror at
the silence. Then in Eclipsian, to Reynaldo,
If she is dead, or
hurt, you will live a lifetime of regret. I will keep you alive and
you will die by inches every day
.

Reynaldo was up, heading for the stairs.
Dominic
, I thought, formulating the Terran words distinctly
as pure sounds, avoiding any modulation that might assist
interpretation,
you must fear him, all of them, as you would
Apollo
.

From outside the door, I felt Reynaldo’s
mind. He had broken through the mental barrier of Terran, but was
hit with a meaningless name.
What is that?
Ah po—

Nothing
, I said.
A god of the
Terrans. I was praying to him for help
. To Dominic I repeated
my warning.
All of them. Like Apollo, Lord of the
Silver—

Reynaldo turned the key, burst into the room.
There was silence, both physical and telepathic. Dominic and I had
severed our connection, and what was left in the room did not stir
the fetid air with so much as a sigh. Two pale white bodies, a
mother and her child, lay still in death, on a pile of straw. The
muted blue-green glow of the inner flame, proof of continued life,
did not register to Reynaldo’s darting eyes. The flame had
diminished to the gleam of a firefly, the wink of a distant star.
It was concealed within the woman’s closed fist, lowered to her
side and covered by a fold of her ragged dress, invisible in the
illumination from the corridor’s torch. Reynaldo blinked and turned
his head from side to side, wondering what, if anything, he had
overheard.

The bandit put a greasy hand on me, then on
Val. Cold, as cold as the grave. The woman must have called out to
her husband as she felt her life drain away. He drew his dagger
from his belt. Best to be certain. He stood over the pathetic
bodies, the weapon clutched in a strangely shaky fist. The woman
had died with her eyes wide open; the inner eyelids stared up at
him, shining silver in the flickering torchlight. Death had
smoothed the lines of sickness and worry from her face. She was
pretty again, as he remembered her, from the capture on the trail,
or was it earlier…

Reynaldo wiped his clammy palm on his
breeches and gripped the dagger more firmly. Angry at his surrender
to weakness, he knelt to his task a second time. Again the tableau
stopped his arm. His empty right hand touched the boy’s bright
hair, the same color as his own. The boy, too, lay staring up with
blind, white inner eyelids, the mark of status that had filled
Reynaldo with such pride, yet always demanded so high a price.
Mama
, the word was in his mind without warning. He saw
clearly the memory he had thought safely buried, the young woman,
prematurely aged by harsh circumstances, who had ended her own life
when she could bear it no longer.
Mama, don’t leave me
.

“Fuck!” he shouted, his face livid in the
blackness. He stood up in terror, kicked at the woman’s body as if
it threatened to disarm him. It did not react, only gave back the
lifeless thud of insensate flesh. Once again he nudged the woman’s
body with the toe of a boot. Emboldened by the continuing inertia,
he poked at the child. That had always roused her before. This time
there was nothing. Silly to be so superstitious about a skinny
little woman, hardly bigger than a child herself, and her puking,
whining, spoiled lordling.