Take No Prisoners (19 page)

She chuckled – the chuckle made me think of her as a "she," although in a way divorced from the surging sexuality in which her presence bathed me – she chuckled, I say, and eased back in her seat. "More names than your mind will hold," she assured me, unreassuringly.

"My mind is humble," I agreed, "though it will hold more than I've yet tried to put in it."

Again she laughed, though her laughter didn't hurt me. "Your own name is Piggy," she said, "a fact that I know because I know everything there is left to know here in the Dross."

The ale tasted as good as it looked. I had drunk half the tankard down, and still it was full.

"There was much more to know when The World was here," I said.

"So wistful you are, Piggy," she said, reaching forward and taking my free hand in hers; her touch was like the soft underbelly fur of a kitten. It made me tremble. "There's no need to mourn the passing of The World, you know, or to look on the Dross as inferior just because it's been left behind. Both are as real as each other. The Dross's malleability is a quality that The World might envy, if it were so wise."

I found her words oddly unconvincing. It seemed plain to me – still does – that she was not of the Dross, but was saying all this merely to comfort me.

"But let us not talk on such things," she suddenly said, though in truth I had talked very little at all. She released my mitt and folded her fingers neatly, moving them covertly against her palms. "I have brought us together here so that we may play a wagering game – a game that'll determine not only the future of the Dross but also your role in it."

"I've never gambled," I said. "I wouldn't know how to begin."

"It's easy: I'll show you how."

She ceased whatever she had been doing with her fingers and unlaced her hands, spreading them out with their palms towards me.

"Here are the cards we'll play with," she said.

I could see no cards but, as she fanned her hands, I slowly began to realize that there were indeed cards there. Though no rectangles of pasteboard flew from one hand to the other, a flurry of sensations did. She stopped the flow, and deliberately laid out a single empty space on the table between us.

"You observe?" she said negligently.

And I did. The card portrayed a man being crucified. I felt the nails being hammered into my wrists and ankles – just as I'd felt them so long ago in the disordered period of my existence.

"And again?"

A constellation glistened in the night sky, its five main stars like punctures through into some fierier creation.

"And here, a last time."

A home burned as I watched it, the occupants' screams heavier even than the smoky air.

"Give me the cards," I said.

She sorted them quickly and passed the pack to me. My fingers closed around a handful of nothingness – but what nothingness! Here was the stuff of lifetimes. In a tidal wave of emotions, I was being all simultaneously birthed and slaughtered, the latter in several ingenious ways. I knew famine and plenty, gaiety and gloom, triumph and humiliation ... and hatred. There were also some passions that I knew nothing of; one of these was the emotion that had dumbfounded me on my first turning from the bar to espy the being who now sat facing me.

I put the deck down with a shudder. All this from holding merely the cards's
edges
.

"Your cards are too ... strong for me."

She smiled. "Only if you're touching them direct, dear Piggy. If I handle them on your behalf, you'll be all right."

She gestured toward the window beside us. Moments ago it had been mid-afternoon, but now it was just past sunset, the time when the deep-blue twilight seems to make the air thrum.

"The evening's the time for gambling," she said. "Not the day." There was a green eyeshade on her forehead that I'd not noticed before. A cigar curled blue smoke from a stone ashtray by her elbow.

She shuffled the cards and then spread them out rapidly in front of her, in four neat rows. I waved my hands above them to check my first impression – that they were, as it might be, face-down. True enough, no created emotions jangled through me.

"A simple game," she said, taking a draw on her cigar. "As simple as a game could be. All you must do is point at a card, and it becomes yours. I take the card immediately to its right – or from the left-hand end of the next row, should there be none to your card's right on its own row. Those are the rules."

"But what am I trying to achieve?" I said. "How will the winner be determined?" I leaned forward urgently, my elbow almost knocking my alejug over. "What are the stakes?"

"I'll tell you that after we play. Now come on, hurry up: I can't tarry here forever."

"But you could cheat!" I protested.

"D'you think I would?" She raised her eyes, and stared directly into mine. Hers were corridors leading to places I knew I'd never be able to go, yet yearned to. I knew, then, that if she indeed gulled me it would bring me greater delight than if any other adversary had played me fair.

The seconds passed.

"Well, that's settled, then," she said at length. "Now, my friend Piggy, waste no more time, but select your first card."

I pointed one out at random – I don't know how I knew where each one lay, but I did. She flipped it towards me, and it landed between my elbows, face-up.

I am a young woman. The enemies of my husband have pegged me out naked in the desert sand and hacked my breasts away. The biting insects have found the source of the warm sweet smell, and are feasting on the stumps; I can feel the tickling legs of thousands more hurrying up over my belly. The sky is full of men's faces, sweating as they jeer at my screams ...

I raised my head dizzily to look at her face. She smiled lightly. I felt sick. My coarse-haired chest throbbed.

"Whose pain did you feel?" she said.

"Hers. Hers, of course. Only, it's mine, now, as well."

"Only that?"

"Yes."

"Didn't you feel the pain of her tormentors?"

"No!" I slammed my hand on the table, so that my tankard danced. "I hated –
hate
– them."

"They were human beings. The cards tell no fictions. They were in pain. Have you no compassion for them?"

"No!"

She nodded, and picked up her own card. From the far side of the table I could catch only a whiff of it. A child was being ripped from its mother's stomach and dashed against a wall. This time I could not hold back: I turned away and retched. The vomit vanished before it reached the stone floor.

When I looked back at her she was regarding me impassively, squinting through the smoke from her cigar. Putting it down, she blew a couple of perfect smoke-rings.

"Your turn."

"Must I?"

"You must, to stay in the game. Surely you've realized that by now."

"Maybe humans can take this sort of stuff,' I said, 'but I'm not a human. I'm just a lowly beast."

"But your master's beast. He infected you with his humanness. You grow daily more human. It was humans who did these things – not once, but hundreds and thousands of times. Can't you rely on your human part enough to stomach it just the once? Come on, Piggy – give it one more try."

It was true, what she said: though I was merely a beast, a segment of me aspired to the mannishness of my master. I shrugged her my acquiescence.

The next card flittered to the tabletop in front of me.

They manhandle me, screaming and fighting as I am, through the narrow dusty streets to where a priest awaits me beside the leaping flames. I don't know which I dread more, his absolution of my sins or the searing, man-sized griddle they've erected over the fire, the air boiling above it. He doesn't look me in the face, but mumbles his words so low and fast that I can barely hear them through the logs' spits and the breaths of my captors: all I learn from him is that the Creator determined the colors of skins with some good purpose in mind, which it is not my prerogative to question; my love was a dirty and forbidden thing, best scorched from men's memories. Then they throw me on my naked back on the red-hot metal ...

My forehead was resting on my arms. I was weeping. The card had gone, though I had no knowledge of her having taken it away – perhaps, rather, those accursed cards just died when their function had been fulfilled. The still-lingering pain of my frying was a trivial inconvenience compared with the misery I'd felt when at last I'd recognized –
truly
recognized – the inevitability of the fact that these fellow-men of mine, fellows yet self-proclaimed forever-strangers to me, were going to cast me onto the griddle, and watch me cook.

"What do you feel for them?" she hissed at me.

I didn't raise my head. "I hate them with a hatred I didn't know I had," I said. "I want to treat them as they treated me: I want to watch their flesh scorch as black as mine, before the fat runs off and the bones are revealed. And even then I want their agonies to continue. I want their dying memory to be of my pissing on their faces."

"Look at me, Piggy."

I obeyed, my neck creaking in protest. Her face, as pure as a babe's, shone clearly through my smeared vision.

"What of the priest?" she said.

"He most of all. The worst I would reserve for him."

"Didn't you pity him?"

I began to laugh, painfully, through my tears. It was answer enough.

"Piggy," she began, laying her hand on mine again – this time I shook it off.

"Your guise," I said, "is one of virtue, yet what your vile cards reveal of your imaginings shows you to be possessed of a greater evil than I've known exist."

"I told you before, Piggy, those are no imaginings of mine. The cards cannot invent, merely recall. Those are true memories of human deeds."

"They're fantasies!" I said, rearing back from the table. "They're your own nightmares – or, worse, maybe to you they're not nightmares at all."

"Believe what you will," she said blandly. She puffed her dead cigar back alight, then gazed down at the cards in front of her. She picked up the one to the right of the space where my last had been.

Again I was troubled by a leaking vestige from her card. A man was thrown into a bath of acid. Fumes rose angrily. He would take a time to die.

"True stories," she said, looking up after a while. "Human deeds."

"No!" I roared. "Fancies – sick fancies!"

"Can't you find memories like these amid your once-human soulstuff?" She frowned slightly, to show me that her inquiry was a sincere one. "Didn't your master hear of such things? Even witness them? Certainly he did."

I remembered yet again how the priestesses belonging to the golden lady had nailed me to their board. They had shown neither compassion nor compunction. But that was different: I had been only a beast, not a human. Surely they would not have ...

And then I saw, both through my own tangled memories and the clearer traces of my master's, some of the things that humans had inflicted on other humans, back when The World had been with us. But harshness of that kind was not possible in the Dross, not among the ghosts who were its people.

Or so I'd believed before now. Now I saw the potential flaw in my judgement of such matters: the fact that, not being human myself, I was ignorant of the human experience. For a few seconds I felt guilt about those I'd murdered in my sport – but then I thrust the notion away. There was enough of human soulstuff in me to know that my earlier instinct had been the correct one. The Dross, being chaotic, has not attained such cruelties as The World knew – just their enactments, for the human beings peopling the Dross are only wraiths, their sensations of pain and pleasure merely paper thin. Maybe it will change later, but now, while the Dross is still young, you can set a person ablaze and they feel no more agony than if it were a picture of them you'd lit. The passions of humans are dilute. How can there be cruelty when the victim suffers so little? To be sure, the folk in my torture chambers scream lustily – but that is because they adore the drama of it, of occupying center stage. Even their deaths are of little genuine consequence to them, for they're only a fraction alive.

"Those are old sufferings your cards recollect," I said. "Old crimes. The deeds that took place in The World are less than dreams to us here in the Dross."

She smiled skeptically. "That thought will make your next card easier for you," she said, flicking it towards me.

The sounds of blood and excrement and the stench of screaming fill the world. The men came to our village this morning, arriving as if from the sky, they were so sudden. They dragged us all – save the women and girl-children, for whom worse awaited – around the hill to the forest of stakes they'd secretly erected. I'm one of the last to be raised until the sharp wooden point can be slotted into my rectum ...

"No!" I bellowed yet again, standing up, throwing the table and all it bore clean through the window. Beyond anguish now, I was a flame of rage. I reached out a hand to throttle my adversary.

She was no longer before me. Instead, she was over by the bar, straightening the position of the grinning oaf there, as calm as if she were attending to housework.

"You'll not harm me," she said over her shoulder, "so don't waste your effort."

I let out a truly bestial cry.

"A poor loser," she observed. "How human."

Had I had a sharpened stake to hand ...

"You've lost the game. It might have been the other way around."

I merely snarled at her. She placed the mindless figure to her satisfaction. The eyeshade was gone, as was the copper cap of hair – her head was egg-bald. Her eyes were dancing with mirth, as if pain were jest.

"And now it's time to settle up the winnings," she added, materializing a stool and perching on it. "You've lost because even a moderate amount of pain was too much for you to tolerate. I had hoped it would be otherwise."

"What winnings?" I growled. "What losses?"

"Your role in the Dross, of course – did I not intimate as much?"

I shook my head, aware as ever of its clumsiness.

"Come, calm yourself and sit down beside me."