by Geoff Rodkey
James elbows the man next to him and says, “How do we do that?”
And the man says, “Nothin’ to it. Just see what needs doin’. Then do it.”
I’d seen what needed doing, clear as day.
I just couldn’t do it.
FINALLY, THEY CAME for me, so soon after my last meal that I knew it couldn’t be another feeding. The door opened, and two soldiers beckoned me into the hallway. They led me down the hall and up the stairs, then down another hallway and into a room with a wooden table and three chairs.
In the middle of the table were a pitcher of water and two glasses. Off to the side, an inkpot and a quill pen were carefully arranged atop a short stack of parchment.
They took my manacles off and motioned for me to sit. Then they left the room, closing the door behind them.
I poured myself a glass of water. Under other circumstances, I might have waited to ask for permission. But I’d been parched for as long as I could remember—even after they started feeding me, I couldn’t seem to get enough water to slake my thirst—and I figured there was nothing they could do to punish me that was any worse than what was coming anyway.
I kept refilling my glass until the whole pitcher was gone. Then I sat and waited.
Fifteen minutes later, Roger Pembroke entered. He was clean-shaven, in a blue linen long-tailed coat over a white silk shirt. He shut the door and walked over to the table.
He picked up a glass and the empty pitcher. When he felt its weight, his eyebrows rose a little. He smirked.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked, lifting the pitcher slightly.
“I need to pee,” I said. It was true.
Pembroke went to the door and opened it. “Boy needs a privy.”
The two soldiers from before must have been guarding the door. They came in and escorted me off to do my business.
When I came back, the pitcher was full again. Pembroke was sitting casually, his fingers entwined over his stomach and his legs stretched out in front of him.
“Sit,” he said.
I sat. He poured me a fresh glass of water. Then he stared at me with his ice-blue eyes. They weren’t hateful, or angry, or even friendly. They just stared, with no emotion at all.
“I don’t suppose there’s any mystery as to why we’re here,” he finally said. “I only hope your memory’s equal to the task.”
He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out a worn piece of folded parchment. He slowly unfolded it and placed it on the table in front of me.
“This should help get you started.”
I stared down at the smudged figures, scrawled with a charcoal pencil. It was the same sequence of Okalu hieroglyphs that began the map in my head. I’d never seen that particular parchment before—not up close, anyway—but I instantly knew where it came from and who had written it.
It was the parchment that started the whole thing—the one my father had copied from the wall of the tomb before he took us to Sunrise and we met the Pembrokes. The one that made the Moku think Dad was footman to a goddess who’d just floated down out of the eastern sky.
Dad kept it in his pocket. The only way Pembroke could have gotten it was by robbing his corpse.
I could feel the bile rising in my throat.
“You stole that from him. You robbed his dead body.”
The blank stare didn’t waver. Pembroke slowly leaned forward in his chair until our faces were just inches apart.
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s exactly what I did.”
Then he leaned back again.
“Now finish it.”
I didn’t move for a while. When I finally did, it was to drink another glass of water.
We stared at each other through the silence. Then Pembroke looked away, pursing his lips as if he’d just remembered something.
“I’d almost forgotten…Someone wants to join us.”
He stood up and went to the door.
“Could you bring him in, please?” he asked one of the soldiers.
I heard the soldier walk off. As Pembroke returned to his seat, I looked down at Dad’s parchment. The lines were thick and shaky, their proportions badly distorted from the original. It looked like a child had drawn it—and for a moment, I felt embarrassed for Dad, and sorry that he’d spent so little time with a pencil that he could barely copy figures.
Then I had to look away, because I thought I might cry. I took a couple of deep breaths to steady myself.
When I looked back, there was a man in the doorway. He was big and rough, with a face so deformed that at first I didn’t recognize him. The nose was out of line with the mouth, there were wormy lumps over the left eyebrow, and underneath it the eye was gone completely from its socket, leaving a puckered, red-scarred hole.
His one good eye burned with hate.
“Mr. Birch. So glad you could join us. Have a seat.” Pembroke waved to the empty chair next to him.
Birch sat down, never taking his eye off me.
Pembroke placed a gentle hand on Birch’s shoulder.
“Not to bring up a sore subject, my friend—but remind me again how you lost that eye?”
“Little — kicked it out,” Birch growled.
My mind flashed back to Guts in the dingy hold of the slave ship, taking his foot to Birch’s head.
Pembroke nodded in my direction. “This little —?”
Birch’s lip curled. “Nah. But he’ll do.”
Pembroke nodded, approving. Then he leaned in toward me again.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m going to give you two minutes to draw that map. And if you haven’t done it by then, I’ll leave you and Mr. Birch to discuss the situation privately.”
Pembroke sat back and waited for me to make my decision.
Birch pulled out a rusty pocketknife and began to inspect the jagged, brown-crusted blade. After a moment, he raised his eye to stare at me again. He was smiling.
“Got plans fer you,” he said. “I been thinkin’ ’bout this fer a while now.”
I looked at the floor.
One way or another, I was going to die. I knew that.
But I wasn’t going to let them get that map out of me.
I was going to show them what courage was.
The two minutes passed.
Pembroke got up and left. He shut the door behind him.
Birch went to work on me.
He liked his work, and he was good at it.
I didn’t last long.
When Pembroke finally came back, I begged him to let me draw the map.
Once they got Birch out of the room, that’s what I did.
I did such a good job on it that when dinner came to my cell after they locked me back up, there was jelly bread for dessert. I cried as I ate it.
THE LAST PIECE of jelly bread was still in my mouth when the cell door burst open. Roger Pembroke stood me up and pinned me to the wall by my throat.
“YOU THINK THIS IS A JOKE? THINK YOU CAN PLAY GAMES WITH ME?”
His face was bright red. A thick, angry vein bulged on his forehead.
I tried to speak, but he was crushing my windpipe, and all I could do was dribble bits of food onto the back of his hand.
He slammed me to the ground and kicked me once, so hard it knocked the wind out of me.
“Don’t know…what you mean,” I managed.
“GIVE ME THE REAL MAP!”
“I did!”
He picked me up and bashed me against the wall again. His burning eyes locked into mine.
“Who wrote that nonsense? Was it the Okalu girl? WHERE IS SHE?”
My whole body was shaking. “Don’t…know…what you’re…talking about.” I gulped air. “I drew the map. From the tomb. Memorized it best I could. If it’s wrong…I can try again…”
His eyes searched mine. The fury was slowly leaving his face.
He let me go and took a couple of steps back.
“You’re actually serio
us?”
I nodded. “I gave you what I had. Right from the tomb. Best I could.”
The fire in his eyes fell to a smolder. He looked at the wall. Sighed deeply. Rubbed his face with both hands.
Then he started to laugh.
“What is it?” I asked.
He kept on laughing for a while. Whatever the joke was, he seemed bent on enjoying it.
When he was done laughing, he sighed again. It was a heavy, worn-out kind of sigh.
“I’m not one for talk of the Savior,” he said in a wistful voice. “But I’ll say this…If God exists, He’s got quite a sense of humor.”
He started for the door.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because after all that time and trouble…the damned thing’s worthless.”
SENTENCED
After Pembroke left, I lay in the darkness for a long time, trying to puzzle out what he meant by “worthless.” At first, I figured he was talking about the map—that it wasn’t a map after all, or it was but just didn’t lead to the Fist.
But the way he’d said “all that time and effort”—with a sort of heavy weight in his voice—made me wonder if he wasn’t talking about something else.
He’d gone to real trouble to track down the map, following it first to Deadweather and then all the way to Mata Kalun. But the kind of regret I heard in those words didn’t seem to match up with the loss of what only amounted to a few weeks—during which he’d managed to invade and capture the biggest city in the New Lands, so it wasn’t like finding the map had taken up his every waking moment.
And the map wasn’t the real prize. It was the Fist of Ka. Millicent once told me her father had spent years searching for the Fist, digging all over Sunrise, long before he ever suspected there was a map that might lead him to it. I’d seen with my own eyes the long shelf of books he kept in his library about Native tribes and their legends, all part of the research for his quest.
The Fist, and its supposedly godlike powers—that was what had taken years from him. If the map was worthless, there’d still be other places to look, and maybe even other maps. But if whatever I’d copied down from the Fire King’s tomb convinced Pembroke that the Fist itself wasn’t what he thought it was, and all the time he’d spent looking for it had been wasted…well, then his reaction made a lot more sense than if he’d just spent a few weeks tracking down a bum map.
And the more I thought about the legend of the Fist, the more it made sense that the whole thing was just a story, cooked up by people who’d seen things beyond their understanding and were looking for a way to explain them.
What had Kira said were the Fist’s powers? To give life and take it. To heal and to kill. To burn and to build.
Everyone I’d ever heard of who entered the Valley of Ka for the first time—me, Guts, my family, all the way back to the first Cartager invaders a hundred years ago—had been struck down by an invisible, deadly force.
And those of us who took the cure had just as miraculously been healed.
But that deadly force was just something in the water. And the cure was a kind of medicine, growing naturally in that mossy plant. It made perfect sense—except maybe to those Cartager soldiers, most of whom never got the cure and wound up dropping dead at the feet of the Okalu they were trying to conquer.
I could see as how both sides in that battle might mistake the mass death of the invaders for the wrath of Ka, even though it clearly wasn’t.
Then the power to burn: what was that? If it was the ability to summon fire from nothing, I’d seen Kira do that with the fireballs. It looked mystical at the time, but when she explained the whole thing, it turned out there was nothing more to it than a simple recipe and a lot of practice.
What was left? The power to build. What did that mean? The Okalu had built Mata Kalun, and the massive temple definitely looked miraculous. But from what I’d read in books and seen in pictures, builders on the Continent had created equally miraculous things, from kingly castles to giant cathedrals that glorified the Savior. I couldn’t for the life of me explain how they built them, but I felt sure if I was a builder, it wouldn’t seem any more mystical than thatching a hut.
It all made perfect, stupid sense. There was no Fist at all. Or, more likely, there was—and it was hidden away somewhere just like the legend said, buried in secret by a dying and desperate king who hoped someday his people would dig it up and rule again.
But it was all nonsense. That Fist wasn’t going to save the Okalu now any more than it had saved them a hundred years ago.
It was a piece of jewelry.
And Pembroke was angry because it wasn’t going to help him rule the New Lands after all. But he’d figure out soon enough—he probably had already—that it didn’t matter. He hadn’t needed the Fist to take Pella Nonna. He wouldn’t need it to take the rest of the Continent. He was either going to come out on top, or he wasn’t. The Fist wasn’t going to make a bit of difference either way.
It was cold comfort, figuring all that out now. And it made me feel like a fool. If I’d only realized it, at any point, right up until the end…I could have just walked away. We all could have.
That whole time, we were chasing a fantasy.
Why didn’t I see it? All I had to do was think it through. Why did I believe the fantasy?
Because everybody else did. And I wasn’t strong enough to think for myself.
THE DOOR OPENED. There were two soldiers, and a third man in uniform—older than the others, with gray in his hair and fancy ribbons across his chest that said he was someone important.
The older man wrinkled his nose.
“He stinks. Clean him up.”
The old man left, and the two soldiers took me upstairs. They let me have a bath, and gave my clothes to an old Native woman who washed them while I ate breakfast. It was morning, although I wouldn’t have known it until I came up from the dungeon and saw the light.
Then they left me alone, wrapped in a cotton blanket. I hadn’t had the manacles on for a while now. They were barely bothering to guard me. If I’d been wearing clothes, I would have made a dash for it.
Pretty soon, the soldiers brought the clothes back, which were tolerably dry. I put them on and was just starting to think seriously about how I might run off when the man with the ribbons returned.
“Time to go,” he told the soldiers. “Bind his hands. Rope, no chains. And put a gag on him—Governor doesn’t want any editorializing.”
“Where am I going?” I asked.
“An appointment with justice,” he said, in a voice that made me wonder if he was trying to be funny.
They bound my hands behind me and tied a length of cloth around my mouth so I couldn’t talk beyond an “unnnngghh.” Then they led me to the courtyard.
A double line of six soldiers was waiting. The two in the rear had big drums hanging from shoulder straps. The other four had rifles. They stuck me in the middle of the group, between the two rows of rifles. The two soldiers who’d been escorting me fell in on either side to surround me.
We started to march. When we approached the iron gate, the man with the ribbons signaled to a guard on the wall, and he winched the gate open to let us out.
As we crossed the long spit of land toward the port, the seriousness of the situation started to sink in. They didn’t give you an escort like this to take you shopping.
I figured I was headed for some kind of trial. Either that, or they’d skipped the trial, and we were going straight to the execution.
There was no way to run. The soldiers had me penned in so tight I could barely see past them to the ships in the harbor.
We turned down the boardwalk. There were a few merchantmen and importers doing business, but not nearly as many as there usually were. The ones we passed spoke in hushed voices and were careful not to look at us.
We started up the main street, which was just as empty as the boardwalk. Compared to its usual chaos, Pella Nonna seemed quiet as a fu
neral.
When my brain made that connection, I got woozy.
Halfway to the palace square, the drummers started up. Hearing the drums boom right behind my ears, so loud I could barely think, was almost a relief after that unearthly quiet.
As we neared the square, I saw the first hints of the crowd, and I realized why the streets were so empty. Practically the whole town was there—it was as big an audience as the one that greeted Li Homaya when he came back from his southern campaign.
Then we turned the corner, and I saw the gallows. In front of the palace steps was a twenty-foot-tall scaffold with a standing platform about a third of the way up. Hanging down from the top of the scaffold was a rope with a noose on the end.
There wasn’t going to be any trial.
As they walked me over to the platform, I saw Roger Pembroke at the top of the steps, flanked by a handful of aides in uniform. He was wearing a starchy, stiff-collared shirt and the long blue coat from the day before.
Two of the soldiers marched me up a narrow set of wooden steps onto the gallows. They positioned me just to one side of the noose, facing Pembroke with my back to the crowd.
The drums stopped. Pembroke slowly walked down the stairs until he stood just far enough above the scaffold to look over it at the crowd.
A short-eared Cartager in a Rovian soldier’s uniform walked behind and to one side of him. When Pembroke stopped, the Cartager kept going until he was a few steps farther down.
Then Pembroke began his speech.
“Good people of Pella Nonna! I stand before you today, twice a humble servant—of his majesty King Frederick, sovereign of New Rovia…and of this community, which it is my great honor to serve as your Governor.”
Pembroke paused to let the Cartager translate his words for the crowd. I wondered if the band—Salo and Illy and the others—was in the audience, and whether there was any chance they might intervene. It seemed unlikely, but it was all I had.
“When first I stood before you,” Pembroke continued, “I swore upon my honor that I would rule with justice for all—that New Rovia would be a land in which every man, woman, and child”—he paused just long enough to glance at me—“would enjoy equal rights, and equal responsibilities, under the king’s laws.”
