Prisoner of Conscience (6 page)

Robis Darmon was one of the lucky ones; he could run as well as the next man, even older as he was. He did not lose his footing. They tried to help the ones being dragged up to get their footing and run, to avoid injury, but the Pyana would just as soon drag a Nurail in the dust as spit on them, and drove them away from the backs of the cars with the shockrods turned as high as they would go.

One of Darmon’s companions, trying to get a young boy back on his feet, was struck by a shockrod, and he went down as well. They were out of the town by then. The Pyana didn’t bother to tie his hands, they tied his feet, and dragged him headlong in the dirt all the way up to the Domitt Prison before they stopped to cut his body free.

He was not dead; Darmon saw him breathe. They threw him on a cart full of limp bodies, and the cart went away into the corner of the courtyard, and rising high above the wall in that corner were the steam-vents of a furnace.

They couldn’t burn the body.

The man wasn’t dead yet.

Darmon raised his voice to protest, but was only clubbed for his pains; and began to understand.

They didn’t care that the man wasn’t dead.

They were more than willing to burn him alive.

They were Pyana; and Darmon and his fellow prisoners were in their power.

As beaten down as Darmon was by everything they had suffered, this final shock was too much to comprehend. He let himself be gathered with the rest and pushed into the darkness of the cellars beneath the wall, packed into store-room spaces almost too many to a room to turn around. The bolts were shot, the locks engaged, the lights turned off; the jailers left.

It was as silent as a tomb.

He heard somebody start to shout or scream, as though one or two cells removed from this. He understood. They were hungry. They were thirsty. And they did not believe the Bench would treat them like animals, not even though the Bench was their enemy.

He heard the shouting, and the lights came back on in the hall. He could see the thin edge of light shining in underneath the bottom of the cell door. The sound of heavy booted feet, Pyana jailers. Voices raised in angry obscenities, going away, as if into a room, coming out as though from a room, the sound of blows. And screams. And cries for help, and finally no cries, but only blows out in the corridor on the other side of the cell door.

Then the lights went off again.

And it was quiet.

Young Farnim beside Darmon began to weep, and Darmon put his arms around him to comfort him. And keep him quiet.

This was too horribly unreal.

As terrible as it was to have been taken, as terrible as it was to lose their freedom, they had thought that they were to be bound over to a Bench relocation camp. Not to Pyana.

Robis Darmon was a war-leader, though defeated; there was no dishonor in defeat against superior numbers with superior force of arms. If he had known that refugees were given to Pyana, he would have fought to the death. An honorable death in battle was to be preferred to a Pyana prison; but there had been no talk of the Domitt. They hadn’t known.

He was too stunned to think.

He held to young Farnim beside him and stared into the darkness, trying to make sense of what was happening.

###

They stood there in the dark for untold eons before the lights came on and the door was flung open on its hinges. After so long in silence, the sound itself was almost like a blow. There were armed men outside, and some with shockrods, and they were prodded with shockrods and threatened with blows until they filed meekly from the cell and down the hall. It was hard to see. The lights were blinding, after having been held so long in the dark.

There were toilets there, and a trestle-table, with food set out. They hadn’t so much as smelled food since the Fleet had signed them over to the Domitt Prison and gone away; they found their places eagerly and fell upon the food, and it wasn’t till Darmon had consumed the portion on his plate that he noticed that there were more prisoners than portions.

Limited space, well, he could understand that. He should be sure to drink all that he could, thirst could be a worse enemy than hunger, but once he had drained his cup — and the one the man across from him had already abandoned, in his hurry to get to the toilet — Darmon stood up from his place so that the next man could sit down and have his portion.

They didn’t put out any more portions.

The men who hadn’t found a place were left to stand and stare, and were not fed, not even when the tables had been cleared of any food, not even when they had been pushed at the toilets one by one, not even when they were gathered up at the door to be taken back to the cell once again.

Not even then.

The rage among the prisoners was palpable, and there was a movement, a surge toward the Pyana who surrounded them. But there were too many Pyana. And they had the weapons; and one round served to stop more than one Nurail, fired at close range. Some were shot and some were clubbed, and one who seemed to have gained their attention was pinned to the floor by Pyana standing on his arms and legs and head and punished with shockrods until he stopped responding to the stimulus, bleeding at the mouth. And nose. And ears.

Then they were all run back into the cell.

There were fewer of them.

Would that mean more would be fed next time?

Or would the Pyana take away the food as their numbers dwindled, in order to maintain their suffering?

Darmon sought Farnim in the dark, whispering his name.

There was no answer.

Things couldn’t go on this way, Darmon promised himself, fiercely. The Bench would demand an accounting. Surely.

He could not silence the dread in his heart.

And what about his family?

His son?

The survivors had all dispersed under assumed names, knowing the Bench was eager for blood and would destroy all of the fighting men that they could find. It was all the more important that his child escape. They had lost this war, here and now. There would be other wars. The Bench’s cause was unjust. It would not prevail.

The verdict of history was on their side, but history would be silent unless the weaves survived to bring their story to the world. He had been the war-leader. His name was a rallying cry and a watchword to his people. To destroy the Darmon would be to destroy a piece of the Nurail identity forever.

Where was his son?

He had to survive this prison, if he could.

It was his duty to live and cry the crimes of the Pyana to the Bench.

###

It was a long time before anyone came for them again. They heard movement in the corridors as the other rooms full of Nurail were moved in and out for whatever reason; but once it was quiet it stayed quiet. It seemed to be forever.

It was only a matter of hours, Darmon knew that by the fact that he was hungry and not thirsty.

They took them to the feeding room again, and everybody ran to the tables as quickly as they could. Darmon held back until he could see that there were to be enough portions before he found a place, but his restraint was rewarded, because the place he found was by an empty place and he could share the extra ration with the others if they all ate quickly enough. There was only barely enough time to eat, and they were gathered up into a herd again, but not back to the cell this time — no, up the stairs, prodded by shockrods as they went. Up to the surface.

It was morning, but which morning? How long had they been here?

Morning, and the fog lay heavy in the courtyard. They were formed up into a company, four rows, with eight people in each, staring at the wall of a building in the courtyard. They could smell food. There were people all around, rows of people dimly glimpsed passing between buildings, shouts and curses and cries of pain and rage.

Things quieted down.

The sun cleared the wall of the Domitt Prison and burned off the fog.

They were in a great open central courtyard with the prison all around. One great building faced to the gate, three stories tall; and two other buildings faced each other from opposite sides of the courtyard, at right angles to the gate. They had their backs to the corner where the furnace’s stacks were. Far above it all at the opposite wall Darmon could just barely see what seemed to be a roof-house of some sort, perched atop a flattened place on the roof of the Domitt Prison, six levels high.

The day grew warmer, and the light and the warmth of the sun was welcome to Darmon after so long a period in the dark.

They stood there.

One of them fainted as they stood, and the Pyana guard dragged him out of formation and hit him with an oiled whip until he revived and struggled to his place.

It started to get hot.

A transport came around the comer of the building, headed for them, passing them. Darmon was on the end of the formation; he could see into the back of the transport as it slowed toward the back wall. There were limp bodies there. The transport went around behind them, and Darmon knew as certainly as though he had been told that they were taking the bodies to be burned. Nurail bodies. He prayed that they were dead.

The transport came around the other side of the formation, as though it had barely paused to offload its cargo. Dump the trash. A Pyana prison-guard hopped down from the tail-gate and started to move Nurail from the formation into the back, where the bodies had been; two, three, five Nurail.

Then they left.

Their guards formed their company up into new rows. Darmon didn’t see; maybe they brought replacements from the other cellar rooms.

They stood all day.

The transport came up two more times, and twice or three times one of the prison guards came down their rows with a pail of water and let them have two dippers-full each. It wasn’t enough. But it was better than nothing.

The sun fell below the back wall of the Domitt Prison and work-crews began to return, Nurail work-crews, some on foot and some in transports. The people who had been taken out of formation during the day were not returned to formation. Where had they gone?

When they were taken back down to the cellar, Darmon concentrated on getting as much to drink as he could. There was enough food. Their jailers didn’t seem to be too bothered by the existence of extra portions, but they got restless before there was time to eat all that there was, so Darmon and the others stuffed what they could into their clothing surreptitiously.

Back into the cell.

There was room to lie down, now, and Darmon even slept. When he woke up, the extra portion of bread he had hidden away was gone; but he didn’t mind so much. Someone had been hungrier than he was. That was all.

He was to blame for all of this.

He had been the war-leader.

If he hadn’t failed his people they would still be free to herd the grazing animals on home slopes, and argue about weaves. Free to kill each other over squabbles that ran uncounted generations back, without the interference of Pyana. It was his fault, and their right to demand whatever surplus he might have to offer any of them here.

But next time he would eat the food himself, before he slept.

###

On the second or third day, they came to him as he stood in formation and made him get into the transport with two others. So now at least he’d find out what had happened to the rest of the people who had been taken away.

He wasn’t entirely certain that he wanted to know, but he was too tired to really care about what might be about to happen to him.

The transport took him out to a great earthwork; he was prodded into a line, to pick up a tool that lay where it had been dropped. By one of the bodies in the back of the transport?

They were packing dirt into buckets to be carried up the slope, and further along the earthwork he could see the foundation of a dike taking form in the ditch below them. The dirt was heavy with moisture, at the bottom of the ditch, and he could smell the river from time to time. Land reclamation. Some Pyana would profit from slave labor, clearly enough; but he couldn’t spare the energy to think about it.

It took all the strength he could command to fill his bucket before it was jerked up and away by the conveyer and an empty one moved up to fill its place. People were beaten for not filling their buckets, he could see examples enough. But the overseers brought water.

No food, no, but water, and Darmon was grateful enough for the water after however many days of being kept dry that he was almost eager to work for a water reward. Survival meant doing whatever it took to conserve strength, to avoid punishment, to get as much to eat and drink as possible.

He filled bucket upon bucket with damp heavy earth as the sun crossed the sky and his hands blistered.

But when they were driven back to the prison, he didn’t go back into the cellar. He stood in work formation instead, and the overseer called off names one by one, and people went forward into the mess building as their names were called.

Shelps. Finnie. Allo. Burice. Ettuck. Ban.

One by one the people to his right turned away and hurried to the mess building. When Darmon was next in line the overseer called a name, and Darmon went; and the overseer nodded at him with what might have been approval of the cleverness of an otherwise dumb animal.

From that time forward, Darmon was Marne Cittrops to the Domitt Prison.

And he understood.

He would be Marne Cittrops till it was his turn to drop his shovel in exhaustion and be hauled back to the furnaces, dead or alive.

Then the next in line from the cellar would become Marne Cittrops.

How many Marne Cittropses had there been?

Whoever Cittrops was, he had a sleep-rack in a cell with his workmates assigned, and better rations, and enough to drink.

He would be Marne Cittrops.

Maybe he’d survive.

He could be grateful to Marne Cittrops for dying, for failing at his work, because this was a better chance at life than he had had shut up in the cellar, constantly short of food and sleeping with one eye open on the floor.

He slept better that night than he had since he’d been brought to the Domitt Prison.