Prospero's Half-Life (36 page)

“
Master Adams,” the House Speaker said, and Richard reeled to
hear that the man knew his name. “You have already granted us a
true gift in your man’s demonstration of his abilities with
horseflesh. I have not seen a better display outside of the
Republics own horsemasters, and it brought tears to my eyes to see
the skill – the art – brought to life. Allow me to repay you, and
your kind master. Choose one of my men to fill in as the eighth
fighter in the tournament, so that we may see a full circle of
combat and prolong our entertainment greatly”.

Richard
blinked at this, considered it quickly, and smiled. It was a smile
of such vulpine nature that it nearly set his eyes on fire. He
gestured outwards with open palms.

“
Any
of your men, your Honour?” he
asked, trying to clarify. Karl looked at him sharply, and Richard
though that he could see the hatchet-faced mans vicious mind
devising a punishment for the pertinence that he was perceiving.
Richard swallowed hard but kept with it. The House Speaker looked
at him without expression for a moment before
responding.

“
Any of my men,” he repeated, “any whom take their orders
directly from me. Choose as you will”.

Richard nodded
and immediately held out his hand to point a strident finger at the
Executive Box. He pointed it directly at the sleek, overfed man in
the simple white robe.

“
That man, Your Honour,” he decided. “Let that man join the
others in the ring”.

FOUR

An intense
wave of conversation crashed over the audience and Richard had to
hold his hands up for five minutes to achieve even a rudimentary
silence in them. He kept his eyes on the House Speaker the entire
time. He felt as though he had likely stepped over a line, and
during the five minute interval between noise and silence he had
quite a bit of time to think of how Karl might punish him for this.
He could already feel the augmented whip marks flaming down the
tough muscles of his back.

The House
Speaker’s expression was careful, an educated study in neutrality.
He kept his eyes on Richard in turn and gave nothing away through
them. When the crowd settled down he cleared his throat and
addressed Richard with the sort of tone that he had once been
accustomed to hearing from politicians, and his own sales
staff.

“
Master Adams,” he said, “I told you to pick any of my men and
you have done so; consequently, I will keep to my end of the
offer”. The crowd fired up into conversation again but a quick
gesture from Richard brought them to a quick, interested hush.
“Before I offer up my advisor here to the possible slaughter, I
feel that I must ask – why this man? Surely one of my soldiers
would fit the bill as well?”

Richard’s
thoughts raced for a moment before he responded. Over the course of
countless nights in the past quarter-century, he had had ample time
to think his next words through.

“
Your Honour, I chose that man because I know that man. He was
once one of the ruling apostles of the cult that held Brantford
before His Lordship McAllister brought the city into the Republic.
He was a terrible man, Your Honour, a man who believed that the
best way to keep his own lifestyle was to make sure that others
would maintain it for him, at no cost to himself. He and the others
enslaved the post-plague population and forced them to work
ceaselessly so that they could gorge themselves on food and drink.
They took advantage of people, worked them to death, murdered them
for the slightest of insubordinations, and raped vulnerable members
of the community whenever they got the chance”. He paused here to
let this sink in. “They also put into place a program that
destroyed most of the knowledge of the old world that was contained
in the city. At their hands, countless books were burned, computers
were smashed, and even signs were painted over in an attempt to
erase the past entirely”.

The audience
rose into an uproar once again, and this time it took the
intervention of the House Speaker, rising and facing them with his
arms upraised, to bring them back to silence. Once they did so, he
turned to his ‘advisor’ and crossed his arms.

“
These are heavy accusations,” he told the man in the white
robe. “Many crimes hang over your head now. I have offered you into
the tournament, so you should consider it a chance to clear your
name. If you win, all such crimes will be stricken from your record
and you will be able to carry on with untainted prestige. If you
lose, it will be considered tatamount to an admission of
guilt”.

The
white-robe’s face was a mask of terror. He gaped at his master, and
then turned his whitened face to stare at Richard.

“
You!” he screamed. “How can you do this? Brother Isaiah, I
implore you! Don’t do this! Don’t make me do this! Please!
PLEASE!”

“
ENOUGH!” the House Speaker roared, and the white-robe fell
into a shocked silence. Karl’s eyes widened, and Richard felt a
small smile tug at his lips. “I have heard rumours of these things
for years, enough so that it has made me question my original
decision to buy you”. The House Speaker turned his attention to
Richard, who felt his nerves tighten. “Can you swear to your
accusations? Your veracity will reflect itself on your master, you
understand”.

Richard looked
at Karl and saw that the man was staring at him, a look of pure
poison in his eyes. Richard swallowed, his stomach fluttering. If
this somehow turned out wrong, he did not think that Karl would
hesitate to have him killed, length of competent service
notwithstanding. Such thoughts were fleeting, however; everything
that he had accused the man of was the absolute truth, even
somewhat understated. He steeled himself and faced the House
Speaker with clear eyes.

“
I have seen everything that I have accused this man of with my
own eyes. I was kidnapped and forced to labour for them until the
coming of the Republic. I saw first-hand the predations of these
men, on the health and well-being of my fellows. Two of my friends
were executed on their orders, and I was sent on any number of
missions to destroy the past. We were forced to cover over any
written symbol or we would be considered heretics”.

The House
Speaker took this all in and nodded. He turned to the man in the
white robe.

“
You will be first to fight, tonight,” he proclaimed calmly.
The man in the white robe broke into incomprehensible sobbing; the
audience murmured with disgust. Wanting to hurry the proceedings
along, (and suddenly afraid of what the white-robe might burst out
with in regards to Richard’s own role in the past), Richard clapped
his hands and gestured to the audience.

“
Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned. “Without any further delay,
let us begin tonight’s entertainment”. The audience responded with
deafening applause.

The outcome of
the first fight was a foregone conclusion; the hapless former cult
leader was matched up with Simon through a random draw, and was
dead within the first three minutes. It only took that long,
Richard suspected, because Simon drew the fight out to keep the
crowd happy. The white-robe chose a cudgel but proved himself to be
too weak to swing it effectively; Simon easily sidestepped the
man’s ineffectual swipes and darted at him professionally with a
long, thin blade. After dancing around him for an extended period
of time, Simon grew bored and ran the man through. Marcus and John
entered the ring to drag the white-robe’s still-twitching corpse
out into the fields, and the tournament continued on smoothly.

Richard
watched the remainder of the fights with half-interest; his eyes
went more often to Karl and the House Speaker, who were deep in
conversation and only paying the most basic of attention to the
tournament at hand. He wondered what they were discussing – what
the House Speaker’s purpose in coming to their arena was – but knew
that he would only find out if Karl deemed it necessary for him to
know. Still, they seemed very intent on whatever it was they were
speaking about, and Karl’s face betrayed that the topic of
discussion was an uncomfortable one for him.

The fights
wound their way through to the end; seven people died in combat
that night in various ways, and their bodies were dragged out of
the ring by Marcus and John, whose expressions never changed. Simon
stood proudly in the center of the ring while the audience
applauded him. Karl stood and said something congratulatory;
Richard’s attention usually lapsed during his speeches and this
time was not different. He spent the time going over the
post-battle checklist in his head; first and foremost would be the
cleansing of the ring. A profuse amount of blood had been spilled
and the floor was slick with it, a sour, metallic tang in the air
above it. He would have to start the arena servants on cleaning it,
and then ensure that the stands were swept and cleaned of any
litter. He would have at minimum two more hours at the arena, and
as usual he hoped to minimize the amount of time he had to spend
there. Tonight especially; he had other things he wanted to be
doing in the dead of night.

Simon was
presented with the prize and he accepted gladly; Richard knew that
despite this, the man would be back for the bare-knuckled brawls
that would occur the next week. Richard knew which one of Simon’s
archetypes the man actually was. He watched the man limp out of the
arena with some concern; he had taken a hard strike to the calf
that had nearly cost him his life, and Richard had been shocked
that he’d been able to continue standing on the leg. He hoped that
some townsman or gentleman farmer would take it upon themselves to
give the night’s champion a ride home in their wagon.

After the audience left Richard kicked the cleaning crew into
gear, barking orders and sending the mops to the parts of the rings
that needed the most work. He pushed and harangued, and if several
of the cleaning crew shot him murderous looks he pretended not to
pay it any mind.
Let them hate
me
, he thought sourly,
after all, if it wasn’t for this, it would be for something
else
. The idea did not give him any
comfort, but the effect of his task-mastering upon the assembled
servants did; it was only two hours before Richard was able to
inspect the place and declare it fit to lock up for the night. He
did so after seeing the servants out; he had once lost a number of
weapons to a servant whom had hidden himself in the storage closet
and waited until everyone else had left. The man had been caught
days later and summarily hung, but Richard had been whipped soundly
nonetheless. He did not plan on being whipped like that a second
time.

By the time he
started on the path back to the farmhouse the dark held fast over
the land. The moon would be setting in a few hours and he intended
to be making his way towards the copse in the field as soon as it
did. The farmhouse was lit up with a number of lamps, causing it to
blaze in the midst of miles of dark countryside like a bonfire.
Most of the House Speaker’s contingent of soldiers were drinking on
the front porch, slopping beer and speaking in loud, drunken
voices. He gave them a smile and nod and they clanked glasses
together in his honour. Inside the house, Sandra’s three kitchen
servants had moved from cleaning the kitchen to sweeping out the
other areas of the house. They looked up when he came in but went
back to their tasks in a hurry. This suited Richard just fine, as
he wanted to make sure everything was going according to plan
before he pretended to turn in for the night. He did not see Karl
or the House Speaker anywhere; he assumed that they were occupying
the richly-appointed sitting room on the second floor, continuing
whatever intent conversation they’d been having during the
tournament. After checking the ground floor over (and making sure
that Sandra was too busy to molest him) he headed into the
basement.

The entire
basement had been converted from the root cellar it had been into a
wide, fairly comfortable servant’s quarters, with bunks separated
by cubicle walls that had been scavenged from an old office
building. There was one lamp here but he put it out as he passed
by; the others could find their way through the basement by the
small moonlight coming through from the tiny windows set here and
there in the top of the wall. He settled into his bunk, drew the
thin cover over himself, and began to wait for the moon to set.

The other
servants made their way into the basement and sleep; Richard lay
staring into vague darkness, listening to them fumble and climb
into their beds. Two hours passed and he dozed off at one point;
when he awoke he shook himself and pinched his flesh in several
areas. He concentrated on staying awake and when he saw the
darkness creep across the basement he crept out of his bunk and
began to pad noiselessly across the floor. The basement steps were
the original earthen stairs and were virtually noiseless as he made
his slow, steady way up them. The floor of the farmhouse was
treacherous for creaks but he knew which boards would squeal on him
and which would not; at any rate, he made his way back to the
kitchen and left the house by the back entrance, hoping to avoid
any of the House Speaker’s soldiers that might still be awake.
There was no one outside of the kitchen door and he crept his way
out into the field, cutting away from the house on a diagonal to
avoid catching any attention from the upstairs windows. Those
windows were dark, but Richard did not want to make any
mistakes.

He reached the
grove of trees and got on his hands and knees. After a moment or so
of searching he found the hollow and retrieved the tablet. He found
the power button by tracing his finger along the edge of the device
and held it down until the flare of light splashed out at him. He
looked around nervously as it booted up, worried about the amount
of light it was throwing off, but he decided after a moment’s
consideration that he was far away enough from anywhere that no one
would be able to see his small light source at all.