by D Des Anges
Ferdinand howled, “You’re lying!” with little conviction and a great deal of what must have been anguish. He sounded ever more like the unfortunate Ruad.
“Ben, what treatment did you give him?” she muttered, aghast, as she hauled Ferdinand’s arm as hard as she could. Despite his might and the ineffectual nature of her attempts to restrain him, it was increasingly clear that Ferdinand would not smite Benjon.
His arm trembled in her grip, and his voice trembled in his throat.
“You’re lying,” he repeated, even less certain, and as Benjon stood statue in a field of broken glass beside his felled stool. Hajar found herself patting weakly the arm she had endeavoured to hold back.
“No, he is assuredly dead,” Benjon said with a ghastly cheerfulness.
Hajar frowned. This glib unconcern was most unlike Benjon. It was as if someone wore a mask of him constructed not from observances but from second-hand accounts, or from observances of him made by one as inaccurate as Benjon himself in determining the note and content of a man’s character.
“Liar,” Ferdinand muttered in a stricken voice that carried the promise of unshed tears, “liar.”
“Ferdinand,” Hajar hissed, not knowing what she intended to do, as Benjon smiled beatifically upon them both from his circle of destroyed paraphernalia. “Ferdinand, you must detain him, something is not right.”
It took a punishingly slow moment for the huge Moor’s distraught mind to catch onto her meaning, in which time Hajar circled gently to the opposite side of her dear friend, her heavy-soled boots crunching harmless over the glass shards. But when Ferdinand had her plan, he darted for Benjon like a striking hawk, driving him toward her arms.
Benjon squirmed from them, slippery as an oiled eel, and Hajar seized at his leg without modesty. She gritted her teeth as his flailing foot caught her below the sternum hard enough to knock the air from her; she clung on, tenacious as a tick, and turned his leg as best she could, meaning to unbalance him.
She could not see Ferdinand’s efforts, only feel Benjon struggle and buck without his customary oaths and exclamations.
Hajar herself did not waste breath with entreaties or admonitions and held Benjon’s too-thin leg with grim determination worthy of recounting by the poets.
All at once there came a thump, and a crash, and the leg to which Hajar had attached herself angled up from the floor instead of down from his hip.
Ferdinand growled with horrid calm, “Hold your bloody peace, Gooddoctor, or I will strike you.”
Hajar uncoiled her headscarf one-handed, which took a heart-stopping long time, and with a great many pauses for his struggles, and to dodge the kicks he aimed at her face (not always successfully), she bound his ankles tight together.
Bleeding from the gum, Hajar cupped her hand below her jaw to catch the unasked-for bloodied drool with her hair falling loose in great dark swathes about her. She nodded to Ferdinand that he might now concentrate on binding Benjon’s wrists without interruption.
He did this almost cruelly-tight – though she could hardly censure him, for his face already began to swell around the imprint of human teeth – with a length of wire he must have carried in his pocket, like any good engineer might. Together they set Benjon upright on the high-seated stool, and with a thick leather strap Hajar knew to be for the restraint of surgery patients, they secured the doctor’s bound legs to the legs of the stool.
“Now,” Hajar panted, pushing back her hair from her eyes with a blood-streaked hand, “Who are you? What are you?”
Ferdinand, still clasping Benjon’s shoulders as if he feared another escape attempt, stared at her that she might have run mad herself. “He is the murdering bastard who has killed Hugo,” he said, his voice catching at the verb, as well it might.
But Hajar shook her head. “This is not Benjon Silverstein,” she said, sure of herself. She released the false Benjon’s feet and stepped back from him, wiping the blood from her lips onto her forearm.
“Of course I am Benjon Silverstein,” said Benjon in an ingratiating voice he had never used, and smiling weakly from the stool as he spoke. “Who else could I be?”
“If you are Ben,” Hajar insisted, staring into his dark eyes (a challenge he met without qualm or quaver), “you are far from in your right mind, but I think rather you are lying to us. Not of Hugo, but of yourself. You don’t move like Ben and you don’t talk like Ben.”
The prisoner who had the very physical spit of Benjon clicked its tongue. “You’re even sharper than the dark one is,” he said, with none of Benjon’s croak, rasp, or rising voice. “It took him at least a week to get in his head something was amiss with his man. You, a day, at most? You must be very clever.”
“No,” Ferdinand said, letting go Benjon’s shoulders and leaving him sitting poker-straight on the stool. “No, I knew at once something was awry. I’ve known him fifteen bloody years. What did you do to him?”
Benjon’s doppelganger said, “He is dead, I told you. It was not my intent –” here he twisted on the stool to look at Ferdinand, but Ferdinand was staring rigidly at the ceiling as if mesmerised by the thick blanket of spiders’ webs (for unlike most Albionmen, Benjon had never had any great compulsion to destroy the smallspiders).
“What are you?” Hajar repeated, under her breath, but Benjon’s double seemed only to have a care for Ferdinand and Ferdinand’s questions.
“—I had no desire for his death,” said Benjon’s mouth, with such great sincerity that Hajar rocked at the thought of her friend showing this much emotion, “but he was old, Ferdinand, old and filled with sickness. His body was failing, even as we – I – left it. There was nothing to be done.”
Hajar was quite certain she had not told this thing imitating Benjon that her new companion’s name was Ferdinand, and she was also quite sure that were he truly Benjon, he wouldn’t have bloody remembered.
Somewhere out of sight a rat squeaked.
“You lie –“ Ferdinand began, covering his face with one vast palm, his fingers spread. He sounded as if some invisible hand were slowly twisting a wide blade through his innards.
“His body was ailing,” Benjon’s voice said. “You know it in your mind, if you think. He was growing weaker. He was ageing. The function of his inside organs was coming to an end. Lumps grew in places lumps should not.”
Hajar had never known Benjon so laymanlike in his description of the progress of disease. He was more apt to give over-wordy name to each process failing, and had to be corrected into a translation for the ear of the common patient.
“Believe me, Ferdinand del Cadiz, I do not, we do not kill, we do not murder with purpose. We are not a human, we have no malice, no prejudice, no anger. We seek only a home.” Benjon’s face creased into a smile so warm and so charming that for a moment Hajar saw Ferdinand try to answer it himself, the corners of his mouth twitching in some suppressed instinct.
“We?” Ferdinand blurted instead, stepping back from the stool.
“What in the name of beetle shit are you?” Hajar asked, trying to hold her hair away from her face without the use of her hands. “And what have you done to Ben?”
“We’re borrowing him,” said Benjon with an unsettlingly earnest smile. “We perish almost in a head-beat without a body about us, and your doctor is our best hope now that Hugo Waldren has died of his tumours –”
Ferdinand made a low choking sound in his throat.
“–Though it is far from satisfactory. He will be returned to you wholly unharmed,” Benjon said, fixing his suddenly-intense gaze pleadingly on Hajar, “and with no memory of all this. It will be as if we were never here.”
Hajar saw an immediate inaccuracy in this, but she felt it was not her place to point to it, even if this Benjon-imposter, this Benjon-possessor was not lying.
"Except Hugo will still be dead," Ferdinand said. He plainly meant it to be a snap, but there was too great a catch in his throat, and his voice sounded unsteady. “Is he dead? Have you
killed him or are you holding him prisoner? What have you done?”
“He would be dead anyway,” corrected Benjon’s mouth, which was a little more like him even if the brazen tone had little in common with his natural speech. “His inside was riddled with the cankers. He would have dropped within the week, with or without me. I came to find myself a fresh home.”
“Why not him?” Hajar asked, indicating Ferdinand with a jerk of her chin. She still meant to catch out this strange, alien Benjon, to corner him into admitting there was still hope. “You had … the body of … his lover, surely there were opportunities plentiful for you to take him.”
The occupied Benjon smiled very wide, his eyes flashed, and his face contorted into an expression she had never seen Benjon wear, “Ferdinand’s heart is inadequate. It misbeats. You can hear it if you listen closely. He might continue to walk for a lifetime or he might die in a second, and after the cankers we are not content with this risk. Your doctor is – against all odds – healthy enough. But inadequate, still.”
Hajar had a fleeting thought of how Benjon would take to being informed that he was inadequate.
“No,” Ferdinand said, shaking his head. “No.”
“What must we do, Ferdinand del Cadiz, must we produce the tumours with this man’s hands?” asked Benjon’s mouth in a more reasoned tone than Hajar was used to hearing. “You might ask me riddles of Hugo Waldren’s body and I will tell you all the answers.”
Hajar tried to meet Ferdinand’s eye, but got nowhere.
“What are you?” she repeated again, motioning surreptitiously with her fingers for Ferdinand to step back from Benjon. For she had seen his hand twitch in a manner that suggested he was itching to fasten them around Benjon's neck, as if this might somehow punish the thing that had taken over him. Ferdinand it seemed longed to bring some vengeance upon Benjon’s body, that this would do anything to return a spark of life to Hugo's body, wherever it lay. It did not seem characteristic of a man with his face and eyes, but Hajar knew grief might do strange things to man.
“Tragically fragile,” said Benjon's mouth, turning wide eyes on her, “and possessed of no protection of our own. We are rare and we are delicate, and we seek a vessel which will fit our tiny selves to survive in this world. We ask for your help.”
“You killed Hugo,” Ferdinand snarled, and Hajar shoved him away from Benjon with the flat of her hand against his stomach. “I’m not helping you to do anything except die in pain.”
Hajar was sure that the thing or things inhabiting the body of her friend must be able to see as well as she could (though Benjon would never have) that Ferdinand would do no such thing. He had too much gentleness in his voice and in his face to enact violence of much effect on anyone. Even now, with acceptance of Hugo’s death turning his eyes red and his voice lumpen, she was sure of it.
“Canker and age killed Hugo,” said the thing in command of Benjon’s body. “I ask for your help, in return for which I will restore to you your friend, unharmed, and with my sincere apologies for my ill-timed interception of your lover.”
“What do you mean, help?” Hajar asked, keeping her hand pressed to Ferdinand’s belly to ward him off should his temper rise again. Something scuffled in the darkness at the corner of the room, and Hajar felt Ferdinand tense at the sound. “You mean to take me over?”
“We’re not enthused by human impregnability or rather the lack of it,” said Benjon’s voice, unsettlingly direct. He smiled the ingratiating smile again, showing his teeth. The easy fluidity of his expression and movement was all wrong for his body: Benjon always seemed to be subjecting his motion to careful conscious deliberation before invariably failing to quite coordinate. The smiles bandied about with such ease were quite alien to his face. “There are more resilient bodies.”
For a moment Ferdinand and Hajar both stared uncomprehending at Benjon’s unnaturally animated face, before the understanding came to Hajar in a hiss of exhaled breath.
“The arthropods,” said the thing occupying Benjon rather (Hajar thought) as a man inhabited a fur coat, “live for a century, maybe two, at a time. They are robust. Less diseased. He has books—”
“Who?” Ferdinand barked, troubling Hajar’s restraint of him again. “Who has?”
“Your Gooddoctor Silverstein,” said Benjon’s voice, flourishing a hand at his own body as if making presentation of it, and looking quite mad as a consequence. “He has read books on arthropods. They are more suited, and you have no such emotional attachment to their safety as to his or your fellow-humans.”
There followed this bizarre proclamation a silence, or rather a pause in which none spoke. The polecat in the next room or some other vermin knocked a metal tray from its perch with a loud clang.
“What does that have to do with us?” Ferdinand asked, eventually.
“They’re not here,” said Benjon’s voice with maddening smugness. “I must get to them, and safely.” He smiled a smile which had some significance for Ferdinand, perhaps, for he winced and looked away from it with his hands in fists. “And it might be easier to travel in a group. Certainly of less remark to the kind of authority that prevents a lone man from leaving this island, and of some protection should wolves find us, beyond the Wall—”
“And,” Hajar said slowly, “when you leave Ben, he won’t know where he is. Someone must bring him home again.”
“And that, also,” said Benjon’s eager voice.
She let go Ferdinand and swept her hair away from her face. “I’ll come, then.”
“Wait,” Ferdinand said, extending a hand to hold her back, a small pressure on her upper arm. “Wait, wait, wait. What the fuck are you talking about, al-Fihri – come where? You’re not accom—you’re not prancing off over the Wall, into the, the, to who-knows-where in the company of a bloody parasite who has killed –” his voice shook only a little at this, “—killed at least one person that you know of? Alone?” He grabbed her other shoulder too, the better to give her a puzzled shake, which Hajar wished very much that he would not do. “Are you run mad?”
“Let go of me,” Hajar advised, prying his fingers from her shoulder: his grip was not so very firm, only agitated. She held his hand away from her until the large, distracted Wirelessman got her hint and lowered his other of his own will. “How else am I to get Ben back from this infestation? I can’t very well bleed it out.”
“An exorcism—” Ferdinand began, hopelessly. He seemed unconvinced by it himself, reaching in the dark for any answer.
“I am an Empiricist,” Hajar said more haughtily than she had truly intended, and added, “and so is he, when he’s of his right mind. This is the only rational course to be taken.”
“We could bring here some enslaved beetle,” Ferdinand said, casting about with his body as with his thoughts, gesturing to things not in the room. Hajar noted the sudden emergence of ‘we’, but made no comment on it. “That would serve for its purpose and involve no trespass for you into a dangerous and forbidden territory where we’d like as not be executed for spies—”
“No,” Hajar agreed, calmly, “just theft, lies, and the destruction of all three of our reputations as they stand, and imprisonment or at the inside a flogging for him and the stocks for you and me.” She met Ferdinand’s reddened eyes steadily. “I have thought it, Goodman del Cadiz. We, if you will attend, or not, shall take to the Wall in the Frankish lengths of its passage; I speak a little of their tongue, and Benjon is a doctor of some papers and may therefore pass as visiting for either patient or colleague. Once the Wall is scaled we may move freely, and hunt the arthropod this … thing … desires.”
“Then I should go in your stead,” Ferdinand said firmly, as if the thing squatting in Benjon’s body were not in the room with them.
“You have no stake,” Hajar said, confused but unwilling to show it. “This is no concern of yours, Goodman del Cadiz; the moment at which it was has passed in tragedy and I am sorry for it, but there is no call for you to sacrifice yo
urself—”
“I have nothing to lose if it betrays –” he stopped himself, and appeared to be counting. “If something should go wrong, I’m the stronger of us, and—”
“No,” Hajar said, “you’ll be missed at Broadcasting—”
“—I will not,” Ferdinand said, “they’re already in uproar. They will,” he bit at his lips, “they will expect my absence. They may expect it in hostility. Oh, Hugo thinks, Hugo thought no one guessed, but they know enough. His absence, my absence, they’re entwined.”
Hajar said, “Then you must clear your name.”
“Without any body? Without any way to? They’ll suspect, it makes no odds; rumour will take the place of law; what chance have I against augers. And besides—” here he examined the air before his face, contorting his features into a variety of expressions Hajar recognised as a universal ‘holding back tears’, “I don’t have reason to go back there. The whole place is his, Hugo’s dominion. It has his ghosts all through it.”
“Don’t you have family—?”Hajar began, thinking foremost of Hana. Hana could be bought off with a note. Hana could be silenced with ‘have gone to Franks with Benjon for parts/alliances’. Hana could be diverted easily, for the mainstay of her attention was always elsewhere: the past, and the Dardanelles.
Hana would not notice she was gone.
“He was my family,” Ferdinand said in a voice so broken that Hajar turned away from him, embarrassed on his behalf at this great sorrow, this tidal grief. The room seemed strangely deserted, for all that it had three people inside its little confines, and a barrage of unclean plates, cups, equipment, and ominous jars of preserved bodily parts.
“Just him?”
Ferdinand said, “Just him,” and was as desolate as the cold wastes before dawn. Hajar would have hastened to reverse this, turned him back to fury had she known how.
Benjon, or whatever controlled his speech, offered no assistance in this and nor did she hope him to; as the orchestrator, accidental or intentional, of Hugo Waldren’s death and Ferdinand’s current desolation, he would be of no help should he be inclined to speak at all.
