Polystom

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Have you ever seen a skin-frame used before?’ Stom asked the aide, as they climbed back up to the house.

  ‘I have,’ replied the aide, benignly. ‘A few times.’

  ‘It’s a military punishment, then?’

  The aide nodded.

  ‘I’m just wondering,’ said Stom, trying to keep the quaver from his voice. ‘What to expect, you know.’

  ‘Depends. It depends, for instance,’ the aide said, ‘on the strength of the man. You’ll find that they hold out for a while. Then they drop a little, and the pain of that gives them the strength to pull themselves up again. This could go on for a while, dropping, pulling free more skin from their legs, the agony inspiring their tired muscles with a little more energy, struggling up, drooping again, crying out, struggling up again.’

  Stom nodded. He felt sick in his stomach now. He wished the aide were not being so graphic. But perhaps it was better he know in advance. And, anyway, wasn’t he a soldier now? A soldier couldn’t afford squeamishness.

  ‘Their hands are tied to the rails, of course,’ the aide continued. ‘They can’t just drop completely off the device. That would end it too quickly. Though, actually, I doubt if any man would have the strength of character to just drop off – the pain would be unbearable, all at once. So, they drop lower and lower, and the skin is flayed off up to the middle of the thighs. Eventually they reach a stage where they can’t support themselves, no matter how hard they struggle. Then they do flop down. The executioner makes a slit, running up the skin of the inside of each leg and across the skin of the perineum before the execution, you know, so that at that stage the whole skin should come away quite easily. They’re left hanging, nude, as it were, except for their faces and their arms – still tied above them, you know. The top part of the hanging body is, well, sheathed as it were, so you can’t see the face unless you look down from above.’

  ‘And they’re dead by then?’

  ‘It doesn’t take long for them to die then, if they’re not already. I’m only telling you this,’ the aide added, ‘so you know what to expect, sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stom. ‘Thank you.’

  The aide clapped him on the shoulder and laughed abruptly. ‘How pale you look sir! Don’t worry about it, really. They deserve it, these criminals; keep that in mind. They’re just insects. They’re lower than animals. They’re not anybody.’

  ‘I’ll try and keep that in mind.’

  They wandered out onto the flat ground east of the house, where the frames were being assembled. The two main skin-frames were fully built; and now the long beams of the two lifting scaffolds were being hauled up. ‘One thing occurs to me,’ said Stom.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What if they shout out that they’re innocent, that they’ve been brought in from the Mudworld. I daresay that people wouldn’t believe them, of course, but it might spoil the effect a little.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, sir,’ said the aide, pulling a cigarette white as a bleached finger-bone from a silver packet and slipping it between his lips. ‘Their tongues were pulled out yesterday.’

  And, later in the day, in the cool sunlight of another autumnal afternoon, with an enormous, murmuring crowd of onlookers gathered in the open ground east of the house, Stom tried to focus himself. To act like a soldier. The two condemned men were being led out, their bodies naked but unwashed. Stom sat next to the general and his two aides on a platform, raised opposite the execution frame. It was, the aide explained, important they be seen by the crowds. That was a large part of the point of the exercise. And so the four of them sat virtually enthroned, as the condemned men were brought out by the executioner and his uniformed assistants. They were lifted up, dangled in the air from the rear scaffold, the rope under their armpits forcing their arms forward into a gorilla’s pose (that mythical beast), as the executioner positioned them; flashing his large knife around their ankles to cut the skin, fitting their feet into the network of sprung hooks of the cradle, tying their hands to the rails. One last touch involved him running the point of his knife up the inside of one leg and down the inside of the other, doing this for both men, like a tailor measuring fittings. Blood oozed out, red sap, and dribbled from their pinioned feet to drip to the ground. Then the scaffolds were removed, the executioner untying the supporting ropes, and leaving the men there. The crowd, which had buzzed and shuffled as the elaborate preliminaries were undergone, had fallen absolutely silent. Polystom, too, was rapt, staring at the condemned man nearest him. I doubt if any man would have the strength of character to just drop off, the aide had told him. The pain would be unbearable, all at once. But, Stom wondered, how could you not? How could you do anything other than try and end it quickly? What would it be like to hang there, knowing what inevitable agonies awaited you? The two scrawny bodies hung, displayed, ribs standing proud of the skin like thick scars, faces crumpled in pain, the surprisingly large genitalia of the nearer man dangling like sausages in a butcher’s window, the other man’s shrunken and snaillike, the circlets of bright red around both sets of ankles surprisingly decorative, like red cloth tied there to brighten the picture. They hung there on their own muscles’ strength, arms crooked out at the sides like lizards, as if frozen in the middle of press-ups. They strained. There was something in them, Stom realised, that refused to give up to the experience. They clung on, quite literally, for their lives.

  Turning to the aide immediately on his left, and lowering his voice, he hissed into his ear: ‘These were servants, on the Mudworld, originally, I suppose?’

  ‘Years ago,’ the aide whispered back, without turning his head. ‘On Aelop, yes. The insurrection is so old now that they’ve long since forgotten servantly ways.’

  And yet there was something almost noble, in a grotesque sort of way, about the effort they were putting in. Work was a servant’s only currency, a servant’s only freedom, and these two were working at their last few minutes of existence with a worthy intensity. Stom tried to think himself into their position; mouth ragged and sore, starved, agony gripping around your ankles, the prospect of worse agony to come, and yet hanging on, hanging there though your muscles were popping and screaming with the effort of it. Everything in the cosmos focused down, reduced to that effort, to the pain and that effort. To pain and will-power. Stom shut his eyes. But the General was saying something to him, leaning across his aide to talk to Stom. ‘This is,’ he was saying, sotto voce, ‘a much better – I mean, by that, much worse – version of the execution than I’m used to. The – lesser gravity of the moon means that they can hold themselves longer, and it also means that the process is that much more drawn out. I wonder,’ the General mused, sitting upright again, ‘if we shouldn’t schedule all such executions for a lower gravity world, rather than a higher?’

  ‘A good idea, sir,’ said the aide. ‘A good idea.’

  THREE

  THE MUDWORLD

  A Ghost Story

  [first leaf]

  The two lieutenants, younger sons of good family, flew down in the same plane. They were called Sophanes and Stetrus, and they were two young men formed from a similar mould: tall, svelte, their uniforms the dark brown with gold trimmings of the Ground Corps. Long-featured faces, long slender noses, wide mouths rimmed with thin lips, lenticular eyes, eyebrows as long as a finger reaching out from the middle of their brows on each side almost to their ears. Handsome, but severe. To Polystom they looked like killers, trained killers. They could have been brothers, although in fact they were only second cousins. They called one another ‘Sof’ and ‘Stet’, without inviting the same intimacy from Polystom, although he was their superior officer now.

  They called him ‘sir’.

  They came to train the platoon, the fifty men that Polystom had chosen – or had Nestor choose for him. As the Autumn Year moved towards its close Stom had a barracks built on land east of his house. He hired three tailors from the southern hemisphere, and housed them in his own house. He ordered so
much brown bolt-cloth, so much leather and cotton, that a special delivery was made by balloon-boat, landing on the lawn, unloading their bales and departing. The three tailors took a dozen servants under their temporary command, and set about making seventy Ground Corps uniforms; fifty for the men, twenty as spares. The number of spares had been Stom’s own ideas. ‘Sof’ and ‘Stet’, when they arrived into the middle of all this busy-ness, were unimpressed. ‘If the men think there are spare uniforms just sitting around,’ drawled one of them (Stom found it hard, initially, to tell them apart), ‘then they’ll not treat their clothes with the proper respect. A better way is to have none spare, sir, and punish the men for any raggedness in their own uniforms. That encourages them to keep themselves neat.’

  Polystom, still unsure of himself, feeling almost completely unlike a captain, had acquiesced. He didn’t like the lieutenants’ insouciant tone, felt it almost as an affront, but he fretted about it in private rather than challenging them directly. They knew more about war than he did, he told himself. Told the tailors that only fifty uniforms would be needed. Or, rather, fifty-three; because he, as captain, needed three uniforms: one for battle, one for travel, one for dress occasions. A tailor attended Stom in the Velvet Room, measuring every point on his anatomy. When the travel uniform, the first of the three, was completed five days later, Polystom strutted around before a mirror for hours, admiring himself. He did the same with the battle uniform: a more severely styled garment, but still elegant, gold braid covering the stitching between body and arms, gold hemming the rich brown at bottom and top. Stom sent all the servants away and danced around his bedroom with an empty rifle, hiding behind the bed and pretending to shoot at himself in the mirror.

  His two lieutenants, on the other hand, had embarked on a two-month training process with the men. This began with long runs, through the forests and to the mountains, then back: the lieutenants shouting all the time, the men carrying sacks of stones in each hand. Each evening Sof and Stet dined with Polystom in the main house, where of course they were staying. They laughed a great deal at one another’s stories, laughter in which Polystom tried, slightly awkwardly, to join. Some of it frankly passed him by, and many of his own conversational sallies fell flat. ‘Do you two read at all?’ he asked once, to be met by blank expressions. Evidently they did not read. ‘Poetry?’ Polystom pressed. ‘There have been some superb martial poets, poems about war. Phanicles himself fought on Bohemia, you know.’ ‘Phanicles,’ said Sof. ‘No, never heard of him.’

  ‘Knew a major called Palicles,’ offered Stet.

  At dinner they might vaguely ask his permission for some aspect of training or other. ‘We’ll need to dig up a field, put some trenches in it, lay some logs. For the training you know. That alright?’ Yes, said Polystom. Of course. But their easy, almost insolent manner grated on him. Perhaps they were more experienced in war, but he was still Steward of Enting – they ought to be more respectful. He wanted to express this feeling, but couldn’t think of the form of words. Obviously he didn’t want to rebuke them outright. He didn’t want to alienate them. But, after all – he was the Steward.

  The next day’s training saw the men out digging, turning the daisied turf beyond the airfield into a plain of mud. The day after that, the two lieutenants sent all the men to the far side of it, and ordered them to advance from trench to trench whilst Stet and Sof stood firing shots at them. Polystom came out to watch this exercise. His men were scrambling desperately out of each trench, running low and zigzagging, dropping to their knees and crawling through the mud, hauling themselves prone over the logs laid in their way, and dropping into another trench. All the while, the two offers were firing live ammunition at them. It looked to Stom, and presumably felt to the men, as if they were shooting to hit. They took aim, fired, swivelled the gun, took aim, fired again. One man was shot in the thigh, and without a cry fell back into the trench from which he was emerging. After the exercise, Sof stood over the man whilst another soldier, a man appointed corporal medic despite his lack of medical knowledge, bandaged the wound. ‘He can have five days rest,’ Sof said, loftily. ‘Then I want him training again. And he’d better patch the hole in his uniform. He’d better patch it, or his friends had better. Or he’ll be on punishment detail. Wound or no wound.’

  ‘Sir!’ barked the medic. ‘Sir,’ groaned the wounded man.

  Despite the injury to one of their own, or perhaps because of it, the men were in high spirits that evening. Polystom, in his own house, stood in the Yellow Room looking over the lawn to where they massed by the sea’s edge, rinsing their mud-clogged uniforms in the water. Some were naked, some in longjohns, but they laughed and joked, splashing one another and larking about in the paling light. Stom returned to the dinner table. ‘I must say,’ he said to his two lieutenants. ‘It looked like you were having a jolly go at shooting them this afternoon. I mean, actually trying to shoot them.’

  ‘Trying to shoot near them,’ said Stet. ‘So they know what a bullet sounds like cracking past their heads. But it’s good practice to shoot one of them, in an exercise like that. Toughens them all up. Keeps them all on their toes.’

  ‘I see,’ said Polystom. He felt an obscure unhappiness pressing inside his solar plexus.

  ‘They’ll face worse on the Mudworld,’ Sof observed, pushing his silver knife through his fillet of trout with chicken and sourberry stuffing.

  ‘Have you seen action there?’ Stom asked.

  ‘Certainly have,’ said Sof. ‘Both of us. I say, Stet, do you remember the Pencil Ridge? That was no picnic, if you like. The enemy had dug themselves into the ridge, actually into the ridge.’

  ‘How they do it’s a mystery,’ put in Stet. ‘Why they don’t drown in mud and earth. But they don’t.’

  ‘So they had a troop on the top of the ridge, and we were ordered to take it. So we pushed forward with two hundred men, and got cut in half, fighting uphill you know and so on. But we took the ridge. And just as we were settling ourselves, weapons unready, ciggies out, didn’t they just pop up from the ground?’

  ‘They?’ asked Polystom.

  ‘Sir?’ said Stet. The two of them managed, continually, to give the impression that they weren’t really paying any attention to him.

  ‘You said they just popped up. Who? Who do you mean?’

  ‘The enemy, sir,’ said Stet, as if explaining to a child. ‘Coming out of the ground, where they’d dug themselves in. Up they came, and cut us in half again. Only a dozen of them, but wild, and with that element of surprise.’

  ‘That element of surprise is a killer, sir,’ said Sof.

  Sometimes, Polystom felt he ought to attend more closely to their conversation, and especially to their military anecdotes, as a way of preparing himself for war. But the impression of war he got from the two of them was that it was a giant playground, where kicks and knocks were of the same order as amputation and death. He didn’t much care for that version of war. He wanted to believe it something altogether more enormous, great glory, intense tragedy. Something poetic and beautiful in the terror and pain; something meaningful in the carnage.

  The training continued: sometimes brutal (‘toughening them up’, Stet called it), sometimes merely gruelling. Polystom occasionally toyed with the idea of joining in, but his lieutenants dissuaded him. Best not diminish yourself in the eyes of the men, they said. You need the manner of command, they said, that’s the important thing. And you have that already, of course, sir, they said, possibly smirking a little as they spoke; it was hard for Polystom to tell. As Steward, you automatically have that.

  ‘Is there nothing I can do?’ Polystom had asked, a little plaintively.

  ‘Well,’ said Stet, tapping a cigarette against the back of his hand prior to smoking it, ‘you could practise your shooting. An officer can always stand improving his accuracy with the gun, you know.’

  ‘Rifle,’ said Sof, ‘and pistol both.’

  ‘Oh yes. Pistol especially.’

&nbs
p; Accordingly, whilst his two lieutenants were making the men clamber up and down the trees, under fire, to retrieve parcels from inaccessible branches, Polystom made his way to a different part of the forest. He carried an elmwood box, like an attaché case, which he opened to display two perfectly crafted silver slot-pistols. He had had them made by a specialist gunsmith who lived on Rhum. Polystom levered them both out of their velvet surrounds, and then unhitched a layer of stiffened cloth from the lid of the box to reveal a layer of polished metal bullets, like fish-eggs crammed in together. It reminded him of a chocolate box. He fitted five bullets into each slot, and then turned the pistols over and over in front of his face, examining them carefully, their symmetry, their craft, their weight. The handles were inlaid with flat panels of teak, scored and crisscrossed with lines like wood engraved for printing. The barrels were straight and hollow like birds’ bones. The slot fed into the trigger casing. There was something delightful about the intricacy of the clock-like machinery. Standing with his feet apart, Polystom held both pistols away from him straightening his arm and aiming each at the trunk of a tree a hundred yards distant. A mutual clench in each trigger finger and the things exploded, a colossal synchronised bang, like reality itself splitting and cracking.

  All around, birds flew upwards with an amplified shuffling sound of wings and rustling leaves.

  Polystom had wrenched his left wrist with the recoil and, muttering curses to himself, he replaced the guns in their box and sat on the floor, nursing the jarred joint. For five minutes he wondered, bitterly, if he had broken it, but he seemed to be able to flex it slightly, and he probably (he told himself) would not have been able to move it all if he had snapped any bone. But it was hugely sore. Sprained. The stupidity! He’d tried to brace his joints, he really had. But now he knew he was facing the ridicule, howsoever elegantly expressed, of his two lieutenants. How did your pistol practice go sir? Hurt your wrist sir? What a shame, sir.