Prospero's Half-Life (45 page)

Behind Karl,
who was tottering slowly towards him, he saw that the struggle and
fighting in the crowd had ceased. The servants were now moving
quickly away from him, and replacing them were a large number of
denim legs marching on black boots. He rolled over onto his back to
get a better view of the situation, and saw that Karl was
practically standing overtop of him now. The man’s face was a
shattered monstrosity; he saw nothing of Karl Tiegert in that
bloody, mangled horror.

“
Garl,” Richard said, his voice clogged and broken. “Garl, give
up. Led id go. You gan live. You gan save yourself”. If Karl heard
him, or understood him, he did not acknowledge it. He issued a low,
scraping growl, and lurched forward with his arms outstretched, as
though to fall to his knees and strangle Richard. Before he could
get the chance, an arm that terminated with a slender, strong hand
holding a large-caliber pistol appeared next to his head. A
quarter-second later there was a shockingly loud report, and Karl’s
brains exited the right side of his head. His face drooped into
slackness and his body collapsed beside Richard, one loose arm
flopping outward to come within touching distance of Richard’s ear.
He looked at Karl’s body with growing regret, and when he turned
back to look up into the sky Samantha was standing overtop of
him.

The woman
standing above him had aged considerably, and her face had gone
hard, but it was still that pretty Dutch face that he remembered so
well. The hint of those classic curves still haunted this face, but
the jawline was more pronounced now, as though she had been making
a habit of clenching it for a quarter-century. Her hair had been
chopped short, only an inch long and her eyes had become like
diamond chips, unbreakable orbs that seemed to hold no pity at all.
She pointed the muzzle of the gun at his shattered face and for a
moment Richard thought that she was going to fire; in that same
moment, Richard felt himself welcome it. She did not fire, however;
she spun the gun downward and sheathed it in a black leather
holster that was secured snugly on her shapely denim jeans.

“
It
is
you,”
she murmured, and Richard thought he heard a trickle of tenderness
in the gruff voice that had replaced the tone he had once drunk
himself into a stupor to forget. He continued breathing with some
difficulty, not knowing what to say, if there was in fact anything
at all that could be said in this situation. She thrust her hand
down and offered assistance; he grabbed onto her forearm and hauled
himself to his feet, admiring the taut musculature of that arm. He
brushed his clothing off and stood awkwardly, very aware of the
blood smearing his face and trickling down onto his shirt. Around
them, a cry arose from the servants; they were celebrating,
cheering on the soldiers that had blown a hole in their defensive
wall. The soldiers raised their weapons and cheered along with
them, seemingly relieved that the fighting and dying seemed to be
over for the day.

Two figures
appeared on either side of him: Sandra to his left, and Carolyn to
his right. Sandra had his shoulder-bag slung over her own shoulder
and was brandishing a knife, as Tyler had done just moments before.
Carolyn was unarmed but she held up her fists, unsure of whether
the strange figure in front of them was friend or foe but unwilling
to take chances. Richard shook his head and felt it swing wildly
back and forth on his neck.

“
No, no,” he muttered, and gestured shakily at Samantha.
“Sandra, Garolyn, I’d like you to meet Samantha. She’s, uh...an ode
friend. Very ode”. It was an effort to speak, especially through
his clogged breathing apparatus, so he left it at that. Samantha
crossed her arms across the chest of her thick-looking black
leather jacket and stared at all three of them. Richard felt
somewhat intimidated; she was every inch a hardened soldier. To
break the tension, he reached into the bag hanging on Sandra’s
shoulder and withdrew the tablet. He stepped forward and offered it
to Samantha as though it were an ancient artefact that he was
superstitious of. Her eyes went wide with shock. She took it
wonderingly out of his hands and looked at it for a moment before
turning her surprised visage to Richard. Richard
shrugged.

“
It needs a charge,” he warned her. Samantha laughed and in
that instant twenty-five years seemed to strip away, and it was as
though they had, for the briefest of seconds, managed to reclaim
the past. She shook it pointedly in her hand.

“
I told you this would come in handy,” she said archly, and
Richard laughed a harsh, choking laugh. It was all he could
manage.

Satisfied that
the fighting was over for the time being, Sandra went to help Tyler
to his feet. The man was unsteady and his limbs seem to shudder
like rubber, but he managed to stand after a fashion, leaning on
Sandra and blinking a lot. Carolyn reached out and took his hand,
and when he squeezed her hand in return it felt as though it were
for the first time again. He kissed her on the forehead and caught
Karl’s sprawled corpse out of the corner of his eye. He knelt to
look over him, making himself remember every inch of the man in his
last instant. When he arose, Samantha was looking at him with an
unreadable expression in her shatterproof eyes.

“
If he was a friend of yours, I’m sorry,” she said warmly. “It
looked like he was trying to kill you, so I took
action”.

Richard
laughed shortly. “No,” he replied sadly, “he was trying to kill me.
He wasn’t such a bad person, though. He was a slave owner, sure,
and he had me whipped a few times, but he was a fair man. Fairer
than some”. He looked to the collapsing structure that had once
upon a time been Stratford’s city hall. “Fairer than a lot of
people I’ve known”. He put his arm around Carolyn and took stock of
the disintegrating scene around them. The servants were being
rounded up into one area, massed into an open spot away from the
collapsing walls. Their expressions were shocked, and blank; the
kind of face a person puts on when they are unsure of their own
immediate destiny. The dead lay where they had fallen, their
corpses merely obstacles for the soldiers now attempting to impose
order on the gibbering chaos they had burst in upon. Richard spit a
rivulet of blood onto the pavement.

“
Fairer than the world can be, that’s for sure”.

EPILOGUE

At the end of it all
Richard and Carolyn found themselves homeless. It was homelessness
by design, but knowing that did not significantly diminish the
feeling of being cut loose that accompanied it.

After
ascertaining that the situation was more or less stable, Samantha’s
soldiers marched the servants outside of the walls and into a park
that lay amidst a sprawl of former middle-class housing. The
constructed walls of the town square collapsed in on themselves as
they watched, and to Richard there was an air of finality about it.
As he watched the burning wreckage smoulder down into rubble, he
knew he was watching his life end. He had spent twenty-five of his
fifty-seven years in that life, and an emptiness seemed to settle
into him as he realized that it was over. He had Carolyn, though,
and it prevented him from feeling completely alone.

At first there was enough distraction to keep him from
thinking about it. His reunion with Samantha was an awkward one;
they had certainly not parted on very good terms, although they
both kept up the polite fiction in public. When the other servants
found out that he knew the battle commander of the armies battering
at the Republic, they looked at him with the sort of awed reverence
one would give to a folk hero. As the days passed he began to hear
rumours that he had actually orchestrated the entire invasion as a
sort of secret agent, directing the armies from the relative
backwater of Karl Tiegert’s arena. At Samantha’s request he did not
deny these rumours, although he refused to come out and give any
credence to them either.
Let the people
think what they will
he told
himself.
They always will
anyway
.

His reunion
with Troy Larkson was much more triumphant; there was
back-slapping, hearty greetings, and a great deal of drinking
involved. He felt a certain cool distance from Samantha, so he
asked Troy if he knew the story. Troy told him what he could;
Samantha and a group of other women had been slaves at one point
just after the plague. They rebelled against their slave-masters
and put them all to death, and from there forged a nation in which
the concept of slavery was considered to be a natural abhorrence.
Samantha, who had lead the rebellion, had become the leader of this
new nation, and the principal leaders under her command were for
the most part women as well, the women that had been enslaved
alongside her. Richard wondered if this had all happened after she
had abandoned him, or if her rescue operation had failed and she
had been forced into sexual slavery for a time; Troy did not know
the answer to this and Richard no longer felt that he knew Samantha
well enough to ask.

The invasion
was in response to the Republic’s slave trade, of this much Troy
was certain. It came about, then, that in time the others were no
longer servants. Samantha gathered them together approximately a
week after the collapse of the Republic’s defences and told them
that they were no longer the purchased property of other men but
were their own people. They cheered her loudly and for quite a long
time, but Richard saw on more than one face a look of
consternation, as though contemplating this newfound freedom for
what it really meant. The assistants that had arrived with Samantha
did not waste time in explaining in detail what this proclamation
meant, from a legal standpoint. They were officially citizens
without a country. The assistants were fond of pointing out that
the Niagara Confederation had no legal obligation to any of them;
all of them were free to seek citizenship in the Confederation,
although they were warned that the path to such citizenship was
arduous. Others were invited to join with the army and continue on
the bloody path to London. Samantha intended to conquer the entire
peninsula that was southern Ontario; she had already been centered
around Stratford far longer than she liked. Simon joined up, as
Richard had suspected he would, and to his surprise so did
Tyler.

“
They need people to help maintain and train the horses,” he
told Richard one night over well-travelled army beer. “It’s the
only thing I’ve ever done. I don’t think I would be able to do
anything else. So I’ll follow her to London and to wherever else we
go”.

Most of the
others made the decision to follow the army’s backtrail to Niagara;
the petty chiefs that had brought their hordes from the Horseshoe
had told them that they were under no circumstances to try to
immigrate to their lands, so Niagara was the only place they had
open to them. It was a long journey – several weeks at the very
least, probably months – and many of them were vocal about their
concerns with the dangers of the trip. Sandra was one of these;
Richard spoke with her the night before the majority of them left
and her thoughts echoed Tyler.

“
People always need to eat,” she said sadly, “and I can run a
kitchen. I honestly already miss my old life. I don’t miss the
beatings, and the enforced poverty, but I do miss the way I was the
woman in charge”.

“
I’m sure it won’t take you long over there,” Richard replied.
Sandra shrugged and agreed, but he detected a hint of fear in her
reply that was uncharacteristic of her. Most of the others
emigrating to Niagara had the same look in their faces. Richard
wished them well, but he had no interest in following them.
Samantha had invited he and Carolyn along on the road to London as
well, but he had declined this offer also. He and Carolyn had
talked for a long time about it, after the fall of the Stratford
fortifications, and they had both agreed that they wanted to get
away from all of it. They were fifty-seven and forty-six,
respectively, and both of them wanted silence, peace, and a world
without anyone else. Richard, more than anything else, wanted to be
alone with the woman he loved, hopefully for the rest of their
lives.

They had pored
over a map for hours, and discussed various places where they might
make a home for themselves away from the world. They settled
eventually on the coast of Lake Huron; there were old cottages
there, many said, and they thought that they might be able to fix
one up without too much trouble. They waited until their people
left for Niagara, and the armies left for London. They then
travelled west, dragging the possessions that they had been able to
barter for along behind them in a large red wagon. They journeyed
by night, hiding out in crumbling edifices that smelled of wet
decay during the daylight. The Republic had fallen into chaos, and
they wanted to take no chances.

It took them
two weeks to travel in slow fashion to the lands along the edge of
Lake Huron. By car, once upon a time, such a trip would only have
taken forty-five minutes on a slow day; now, by trundling
starlight, it seemed to take an eternity. The further they
travelled west, though, the emptier the land became. As more time
passed between sightings of people, they began to relax. Once in a
while they would see caravans of people, their wagons looking
tattered and their faces hopeless; they were obviously fleeing the
violence that Samantha was bringing to the heart of the Republic.
Whenever one of these caravans came into view they would hide until
hours after they had passed; such people, they told themselves,
were likely to be desperate, and desperate people were likely to do
almost anything to get what they wanted.