Breathe for Me

by Edward W. Robertson

  ~

  For six weeks Dormun found peace. He woke in the morning when the dew was cool and for five hours they dug ditches and chopped stumps and hoisted stones until he thought his muscles would weep right out his skin, and then they rested and ate and rose and worked to the day's brink. Except when he was too sick from labor to eat, his stomach bubbled like a cauldron, but he caught bugs and chewed grass and grew leaner. They were allowed to converse while they worked and he remembered how much he'd missed his friends when for two years he'd secluded himself in the woods. By nights, before they were chained down till the morning, he sat and breathed stories for a growing crowd of slaves and guards. They made enough requests to fill five years and in the patch of earth they cleared for him in the camp's center he made his tiny figures duel and dance and love and war. Most nights he told as they asked—the guards didn't try to scare him when he put their requests in the same queue as the slaves'—but sometimes he showed stories he had seen from other spiros like him, or told tales of his own, and was secretly stung if these didn't receive the loudest applause of all. Then he laughed at himself and remembered if he had to urinate during the chained-down night he had to piss his own shorts. Aker's cough refused to leave, but the one-eyed boy who'd stamped on his hand that first day left the bald men and followed Mackervan everywhere he went, which Mackervan pretended to hate. Dormun's body ached less by the week. He spoke to the others when he felt like it and didn't when he didn't: they pegged it up to spiros eccentricity. To himself, he confessed he was happy.

  Then he was called in to see Pagg Warren.

  Warren ran the camp like the post it was—an insulting one—and kept himself sequestered for days at a time in his bamboo housing, a sad little palace that had to be taken down and reconstructed on a monthly basis as work on the aqueduct inched through the jungle toward the waiting city. Warren kept bowls of shelled nuts on his table but was lean as a scout. The bushy-browed guard who'd escorted him to the lord's home had bound his hands just outside the door and when Dormun tried to sit on the chair across from Warren he fell down hard, laughing as the guard hauled him up to plant him in the wobbly chair. Warren stared at him with the unswerving patience of a man who had spent the last three and a half years sweating in a jungle to think on whatever failure had earned him his polite exile from the courts.

  "You will stop your nightly performances," Warren said at last.

  Dormun put on a frightened face. "With all honor, lord, that is impossible. A spiros is guided by the gods, and if a mortal man—"

  "Shut up. I've known spiroi and I know you're not worth half a damn. If the gods put you here, they care more about that aqueduct than they do for your games."

  "That's all they are," he admitted, and disarmed of that weapon he turned to the words that were his other. "The others fight less now I'm here."

  "So?"

  "As good a question as any, I suppose."

  "What do you think you're doing here?"

  "Passing time."

  "We're building an aqueduct that is going to wash the disease out of the capital. Restore water to the wells of the poor." Warren stared at Dormun for a length of time he would have resented if not for the fact he was supposed to be digging clay just then. "We aren't out here to punish people. This is a job that needs doing. You're distracting from it."

  Dormun ran his tongue along a crack in his molar. "They're working harder than when I got here."

  "A riot would set us back further than whatever you think you've contributed. What happens if you get hurt? Or killed?"

  "The same thing that'll happen if you make me stop, I imagine."

  Warren shook his head. "If they behave, we'll see about a weekly show. For now, you're done."

  The guard raised his bushy brows on the way out, but Dormun shrugged. To disobey tempted him like a kneeling woman: Warren's rule was false, as all rules were, including the ones he constantly invented for himself or blathered at Mackervan and everyone else in earshot, and it was worth reminding the camp that if they stayed in their place, it was only by their own acquiescence.

  But Dormun knew rules stayed rules because they were enforced by madness. By definition, opposing and exposing them was madness, too. He would miss his performances, but they were no longer crucial, as they had been when he arrived, to prevent him from getting mauled and clobbered by the other slaves. So what if life was duller without them? Life was always dull. The struggle to escape that dullness was a skill—perhaps the skill—and in doing all the heavy lifting for the others, so to speak, he caused their own muscles to atrophy.

  Besides which, if he tried to go on performing, Warren would simply have him beaten. The lord seemed reasonable, but reason had a habit of disappearing when a man whiffed a threat to his power.

  Sixteen months, then. A year-and-a-third chained down by night, sledging stones and digging pits by day, the sun and the stink, pinned down by the gaze of armed and bored men, disease, accident, malice. He wedged his spade into the clay, bearing down with his heel. Aker coughed to his left, a spit-spraying, doubled-over cough that always made Dormun want to vomit and then made him feel bad for being sickened by his friend's sickness. The one-eyed boy who'd left the other bald men dropped his shovel and held a grimy rag under Aker's mouth.

  "I was in town for the first time in two years when I was arrested," Dormun said to no one in particular. The others raised their eyes and lowered their shovels. Aker coughed into the rag. Dormun wiped the back of his hand across his temple, removing the sweat and covering it in grit instead. "A place called Kimbold. Dirt streets and reed roofs, horrible. I had a better home in the jungle, but I missed looking at strange women and eating food prepared by anyone else but me, so I cleaned myself up as best as I could, walked through their gate, and was arrested for vagrancy." He scowled at his hands where the blisters had worn down as hard and smooth as driftwood. "This did not surprise me in the slightest."

  "Aker volunteered," Mackervan laughed. Aker coughed, smiled, held a palm in front of his face until he could speak.

  "My town had a quota."

  Mackervan had already told Dormun a half-dozen times he'd been too drunk to remember how he got here, and the one-eyed boy spoke so little Dormun couldn't recall his name, so Dormun leaned into his shovel and thought how he could explain how he'd agreed to stop playing out their history and legend with hand-high figures in the hour before they were chained down to dream. He'd never even been a good spiros, a wasted talent no one would teach after he stalled for three years on illusions; in frustration, his mentor Lapper had conjured the wooden panther out of pure nothing. All he knew was stage-tricks, Lapper had barked, and despite his failure Dormun could have made his living from that if it hadn't seemed, in his youth, so fleeting and vulgar. He let himself imagine that life, unloading wagons by day and crouched behind a curtain by night, a dark audience laughing and clapping, until Aker's coughing stirred him. Difficult to tell whether Aker would die. Some who took the bad air coughed for seasons, lodging up blood and pink chunks until they were so thin you thought one more cough and they would disappear completely, then in the span of days their skin returned from gray to brown and they ate until you thought you would burst from watching.

  "Things change without reason," Dormun declared into the silence. "Best to accept it, or go crazy trying to sew a gator's head to a goat's body."

  That night he waited until the jungle swallowed the sun but still the slaves gathered outside his tent. Dormun breathed and the small pool of not-water formed into a tiny duplicate of himself. He breathed again and a monstrous hand congealed above his six-inch double, then squashed it into the dirt.

  "What are you doing in here?" Mackervan's head stuck through the flap of the tent like a mounted panther's. "Exploring yourself?"

  "I have bad news," Dormun said.

  "That happens when you get old. It'll get up another night."

  Dormun laughed through his nose. "Promise you'll protect me when they try to str
ing me up."

  Mackervan cocked his braided head and Dormun stooped and emerged into the clearing where a hundred slaves waited to watch him breathe. Their murmurs paused as he stood and for a long moment he listened to the snapping of the fires, the whooping of the night-birds, the chuckles of the guards out on the fringe. He balled his fists into his eyes.

  "Last night's performance was my last," he said, but he breathed a boom into his voice that would carry through every nook of the clearing, as if he could absolve himself through sheer authority. In the long days after, he would recognize this for weakness. He should have lied and eaten their hate: better that than sparking them with the truth, fanning their flames for a man they hated already. "Not because I want to, but because I've been asked, if you want to call it that, to stop. We've been distracted from important business by pretty pictures. It's time to remember why we're here."

  "Because Warren is a son of a bitch," Mackervan guessed at once, and was temporarily babbled out by the cursing of the men around him. "When he called you in to his little palace."

  Voices Dormun couldn't place belted out from the crowd. "What did he threaten you with?"

  "I thought this was our time?"

  "Let him come out and tell us to our faces!"

  "Calm down," Dormun called, skin prickling with that same hot charge he got when the jungle slipped into a mood, when the leaves waved their bellies before a storm or the birds muted in the presence of a tiger. "There's nothing we can do but prove him wrong."

  Mackervan raised his fist. "Get Warren out here!"

  The crowd furrowed around the spears of the guards arriving in knots of three and four. Men hollered taunts, held their fists high.

  "Get to your tents!" a guard in blue lacquered armor shouted, and Dormun watched, dumbstruck, as Mackervan shouldered forward and straightened an accusing finger into the man's face.

  "Right after you get Warren out here to explain this horseshit for himself."

  The tip of the guard's spear flashed. "Sit down and shut up before I straighten the kinks from your guts."

  Amid the jostling and the shouting and the darkness, Dormun heard a grunt and a blunt thump. The speartip dipped from sight and Mackervan screamed like a cavern nightmare, black braids flipping, and then slaves scrambled past Dormun, corralled on the other side by two wedges of guards bearing unblinking spears. Others jogged in with axes and chains and Dormun's breath rushed from his lungs as he was tackled into the trampled grass. Ten feet from his nose, a glistening point of steel hovered against the stars, its shaft invisible in the night air, then plunged into Mackervan's silent body.