Prospero's Half-Life (28 page)

“
Would you really have tried that?” Richard asked mildly. The
woman’s eyes went wild.

“
No, your honour,” she implored. “I would never...I would not
dream of,”

He dismissed
her with a wave of his hand. “I am the same person I always was,”
he said and her eyes widened. “Where is she?”

“
Who, your honour?” the scraggily man asked craftily. Richard
stared at him levelly until his face flushed a deep red.

“
She’s upstairs,” the woman muttered. Richard nodded, smiling
in conscious imitation of Brother Bentley. The people in the living
room turned their faces from him, refusing to look at him as he
crossed the room and mounted the stairs.

At the top
there was a cozy, dusty hallway lined with three doors. The second
door on the right was open slightly. Richard crept along the wall,
trying to keep his sound to a minimum. He reached the door, placed
his palm on it, and then leapt through.

He landed on
the other side, instantly confused. There was no one in the room.
He had a brief moment to turn this over in his mind before he was
piled into from behind with great force. He found himself driven
forward onto a dirty mattress with tangled sheets, face-first. He
twisted around, trying to wrestle with his assailant, and found
himself grabbed by the wrists and driven even further into the
mattress. He struggled for breath, heaving upward to try to buck
the person off of his back. Finally the pressure on him lifted and
the person left the bed. He slowly turned around so that he was
lying on his back. He moved slowly, so as not to excite his
assailant into further action. He saw, with only slight surprise,
that it was Carolyn. There was a long, serrated hunting knife in
her hand and her pretty round face was screwed up into a
rage-filled sneer.

“
Well isn’t this ironic,” she spat. “The murderer of helpless
men finds himself helpless and about to die”.

Richard lifted
his hands slowly with the palms facing outward.

“
There’s no need for the knife, Carolyn,” he pleaded with her.
“Put it down and let’s discuss this”.

“
There’s nothing to discuss,” she said, her voice lethal.
“You’re a cheap opportunist and a murderer”.

Richard exploded into rage. “
I AM NOT
A MURDERER!
” he seethed. “You think that I
KNEW what was going to happen? You think that I PLANNED all of
that? Carolyn, one moment I was walking through the Keep wondering
when I would be arrested and the next moment I’m being kidnapped
and dragged up onto the roof of some building. When they threw
Jacob off of the side I was
tied
up
, Carolyn. Chris tied me up along with
Jacob
and I don’t know
why
!”.

Carolyn stared
at him without speaking for some time, working through what he was
saying in her mind. She opened her mouth a few times, only to cut
off what she was about to say. She searched every inch of his face,
looking for deceit, but could not find it. Her demeanour changed;
the tension flowed out of her shoulders, she lowered the knife, and
she sat heavily down upon the mattress beside him.

“
He wanted it to be you, right from the start,” she said dully.
“He’d found out how highly Bentley held you in his regard and
concocted this plan. He said we’d finally have a man on the inner
council, someone who could actually effect things and not just
gather information”. She said this somewhat bitterly, and Richard
chose not to respond to it. “He was so shocked when Bentley
announced that it was Jacob. We all were. Jacob had been playing us
right from the start. He’d learned about us – we still don’t know
how – and he’d set out to win our confidence. We know that now.
With one little ploy he smashed us all apart”.

“
Well, it obviously still exists,” Richard remarked. “I mean,
you aren’t coming out here for nothing, right?”

Carolyn
blinked, and then chuckled ruefully. “I suppose not,” she admitted.
“We didn’t think that any of the white-robes would notice, and the
black robes have their hands full just dealing with the huge
population boom”.

“
None of them would have noticed,” Richard told her, “they’re
all far too busy preening themselves and making noise about how
unconcerned they are about things that should be concerning them
greatly”. This hung in the air for a moment, and Carolyn slowly
turned her head to look at him evenly.

“
How much
do
you know?” she asked. Richard looked at her silently for a
minute before responding.

“
Not all that much,” he replied, “not really much more than I
did before I put on this white robe. I know the rumours, but I
don’t know any facts”.

Carolyn
laughed, and it was like tiny silver bells filling the small, dingy
room. She slid her small, warm hand over his and smiled at him. Her
smile seemed to make the room appear far larger than it really was,
and his heart picked up a rhythm that he might have considered
dangerous if he’d been inclined to care.

“
Well, we’ll have to bring you up to speed, then,” she said,
and moved her lips to his, severing him from all thought and
function with the swiftness of her razor-sharp knife.

ELEVEN

The inner
council of apostles, as it turned out, spent a great deal of time
disagreeing with each other, when they weren’t busy freezing
Richard out of information and discussion. The real reason that no
preparations had been made for the coming of the force that had
badly frightened the refugees was that none of the leaders could
agree on what to do about them. None of them believed the stories
that the refugees brought with them; Carolyn related that each one
of them seemed convinced that they had the strongest army anywhere,
and that any attack on them would be foolish, at best. Each of them
seemed to believe that the black robes were their own personal
armed force, and that making any sort of deal or accommodation in
order to defend against a coming attack would leave them open to
the machinations of one of their fellows. Richard shook his head as
Carolyn related all of this to him. It was utterly stupid, he raged
both silently and aloud. There were so many things that could be
done, but none of them were willing to step outside of themselves
to do it.

Carolyn nodded
along with his rantings; she agreed with him whole-heartedly. She
had also been moving amongst the refugees from the west, listening
to their stories and trying to comfort their wounds, both physical
and psychological. She had heard the stories, internalized them,
and had begun living in fear of the eventual day that these
implacable foes from London would sweep over them, enslaving those
they could and brutally murdering those that they could not.

They met in
secret for weeks, and the scattered members of the old conspiracy
would meet with them from time to time. There was little that could
be done about the iron rule of Bentley and Richard’s fellow
white-robes; the chaos and confusion that the refugees had brought
made it impossible to gather together any sort of real secret
rebellion against them. Some of the conspirators suggested
undertaking a sort of guerrilla campaign of sabotage against the
ruling elite; Richard considered it but ultimately ruled against
it.

“
Violence and destruction will only cause the apostles to rally
an even tighter climate of fear from the black robes, and the
community is scared and paranoid enough to close ranks against us
if we try such a thing,” Richard noted one night, as the idea was
brought up for the third time. “We need to figure out a way to
bring about their loss of power, in such a way that does not
alienate the entire community against us”. Richard had already
thought of one such way, but he had been holding off on suggesting
it, hoping that someone else would make the connections and suggest
it for him. Due to his particular status as a white-robe, he had
been thrust into the role of leader of the conspiracy. The stress
of being a leader in both the ruling elite and the movement to
displace them was wearing on him, and he was hoping that someone
else would take up the reins eventually. It did not happen on that
night; no one made any further suggestions in line with what
Richard had suggested, and as the members of the conspiracy
filtered out in a slow, paranoid fashion, he turned to Carolyn with
real despair in his eyes.

“
I don’t think that there’s any real way of bringing this whole
thing down from the inside,” he said, his voice defeated. Carolyn
studied him closely.

“
You’re not giving up, though...” she said, uncertain. Richard
shook his head emphatically.

“
Never. These people need to live in a place without fear
constantly over them. They survived a plague, Carolyn, a real
world-ending, kill-em-all plague, and they deserve something more
than to toil and die under some backwards theology that just serves
to keep a madman happy. No, I think we need to seek outside
help”.

He walked
across the living room of that last little house to have been
occupied and stared out of the window. The night was pitch black
and alive with the sound of cicadas. Their symphonies grew louder
by the night, or so it seemed to Richard. Carolyn followed after
him a moment later, and stole in beside him with a grace that
Richard felt he could never have attempted.

“
You’re not talking about, about
them
, are you?” she asked, her voice
crawling with revulsion. None of them had settled on a real name
for that grave, unnamed force pushing its inevitable way east.
There were refugees filtering in for the past week from towns that,
in the world that had been, were only a half-hour away by car. They
had pored over the maps endlessly, and decided that it would only
be a week before the black-robes began encountering them at the
edge of Brantford. A week, if they were lucky.

“
I
AM
talking
about them!” Richard yelled, pounding his fist into the wall beside
the window with sudden, vicious force. “We need to send them an
emissary! Not from these cult idiots that pretend to rule here, but
from us!” His voice faded to a near whisper. “The real voice of the
community”.

“
What do you think would even happen?” Carolyn asked, her voice
dangerous. “After all the stories you’ve heard. The atrocities
they’ve committed. The way they’ve treated every town before us.
What makes you think they would even want to try to talk with
us?”

Richard stared
at her with frustrated rage dancing through his expression. He
wanted to scream but he made himself breathe.

“
From what we’ve been told, none of those other places could
have even tried to put up a resistance. You’ve heard them: “Oh, we
were trying to get our crops planted and we were building fences to
keep the bandits out when all of a sudden there’s an army demanding
we surrender. So we grab our rusted old guns and our makeshift
farming equipment and get ourselves killed”. We’re not like any of
those other places. Bentley actually has an army here. They might
roll through us, but we’d put up such a fight that they’d never
forget. If we spell out the situation to them, show them the
advantages to helping us and treating us diplomatically, they might
be persuaded to strike a deal with us”.

“
I’m sure they would,” Carolyn bit back acidly. “It would be
“join us or die”. I’m pretty sure we’re already expecting
that”.

Richard hit
the wall again, with even greater force this time. Carolyn stepped
back, her eyes blazing.

“
I’m sending someone to deliver my message to them,” Richard
said, and his voice said that the idea was definitive, and not up
for debate. Carolyn glared at him and walked away.

“
I guess we’ll see an answer one way or another soon enough,”
she said as she left the room. Richard scowled. She always had to
get the last word in. He thought about hitting the wall one more
time, for the sake of catharsis, but in the end he realized that he
was too exhausted to even try.

They got their
answer within a week. Richard was attending the weekly meeting of
the apostles, held without fail in the former teacher’s lounge of
the Keep. “Attending”, of course, was an apropos word; he sat back
and listened to the others jabber on self-importantly. As usual, he
sat back, contributed nothing (unless Brother Bentley called on
him) and watched their reactions to each other’s words. The petty
political gamesmanship was amusing, in a black, desperate way.
Eventually he grew bored of it, and began devising neat little
daydream escapes in his head. During this particular meeting, he
had been trying to remember all of the words to “Running Up That
Hill” and blanking on the second verse; he furrowed his brow,
looked up, and saw that their meeting had been invaded by three
people: two scared-looking black-robes and a tall, proud looking
man in a thick black leather jacket. At first, Richard had no
reaction; he stared blankly at the stranger and tried in vain to
figure out what was going on. The strange man had a large, purple
Crown Royal bag in his hand, filled with something heavy.

“
Who the hell are you?” one of the apostles exploded, and
several of them got to their feet. They were unarmed, so the
gesture was meaningless; the black robes shifted their feet and
stared at each other uncomfortably.

“
Gentlemen, please,” the stranger said smoothly, his voice
rough and bassy but also oddly cultured. “Take your seats, this
will not take long”. He smiled and it seemed to Richard that he had
seen that sort of smile before, in a shark documentary. It chilled
him and he saw with black humour that the faces of those apostles
slowly lowering themselves back into their seats held the same base
fear that their so-called protectors wore while guarding this
stranger. Richard raised his hand to his mouth, wanting to cover up
any stray reactions that he might give.