The Serpent Gift

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  “You,” he said sourly. “Move. We haven’t got all night.”

  They marched us into another courtyard and then through a narrow door at the base of a tower. Greasy stone steps led downward into a round, bare chamber with six identical black iron gates. The guard captain rapped the bars of one gate with his spear.

  “Mascha,” he called. “Hey, Mascha, wake up. Fresh dragon fodder for you.”

  Dragon fodder? Did he mean us?

  There was a rattle from the darkness behind the gate. Then a man appeared. He was beardless and bald, but this did not make him look childish or grandfatherly. Much the opposite. His naked upper body was marked by dozens of scars, some of them whip marks, others caused by what looked like knifings or sword cuts. He wasn’t enormously tall, but there was a sinewy strength to him that made the idea of getting into a fight with him an extremely discouraging thought.

  “Again?” he said. “Can’t Erlan take them?”

  The guard shook his head. “No, they’re all yours. By Master Vardo’s direct order. But if you disagree, I’m sure he would be happy to discuss it with you. Shall I ask him?”

  Mascha’s answer was just a wordless snarl.

  The guard grinned. “Thought so,” he said, unlocking the gate.

  “Welcome to the Gullet, boys. Never fear. Uncle Mascha will look after you like you were his very own.”

  It wasn’t exactly a room, behind the gate. More like a vault or a tunnel, with a ceiling so low I had to duck my head. There seemed to be a gate at the other end, much like the one we had entered through, but it wasn’t likely to be much use to us; the guards unchained our hands, sure enough, but they then clapped leg irons on us and tethered us to the same long chain that held Mascha and eight other prisoners safely captive. They had us, and they obviously intended to keep us.

  “Sleep tight,” said one of the guards with a grin that seemed rather malicious. “Long day tomorrow, or so I hear.”

  Then they locked the gate and went away, taking their torches with them.

  Even in the dark, Mascha’s voice was unmistakable—deep and rough and unvarnished.

  “They always give me the pigheaded ones,” he said. “The troublemakers. The rebels. Now, why do you suppose that is so?”

  I didn’t say anything. Neither did Nico. But apparently, he was talking to me, because when I didn’t answer, he gave the chain a sharp tug, so that I nearly tumbled to the floor.

  “Why do you think, blank-back?” he repeated.

  “I don’t think anything,” I said tiredly.

  “No? Well, maybe there’s a bit of wisdom in you after all. Because up there in the daylight, it may be that things are run by Prince Arthos. But down here in the dark, in the Gullet, I am king. King Mascha. Understand, blank-back?”

  I already hated him. I wanted to tell him to go to hell. But my ribs still hurt abominably, and the last thing I needed was more bruises.

  “Understand?”

  “Yes,” I muttered.

  That was enough, apparently. Mascha’s voice lost some of its threatening edge.

  “Sleep,” he said. “You’ll need your strength tomorrow. And if you need to take a piss, do it in the gutter there. Try not to wet anyone else.”

  There weren’t any blankets or other luxuries, just a bit of old straw, thinner than the bedding I normally gave the horses back home. It stank badly and was probably full of lice and other pests, but I lay down anyway. My bruised and weary body was clamoring for rest.

  With the torches gone, the darkness in the tunnel was so complete that it hardly mattered whether we had eyes or not. I could hear the others breathe. I could hear the occasional clanking when one of them moved, dragging a chain. And then I noticed another sound. A tiny rattle of metal against stone, rapid and regular like the beat of a moth wing against a windowpane. I listened to it for a while, not understanding what could make such a noise.

  “Nico?” I whispered. “Is that you?”

  “What?” His voice sounded strangely breathless.

  “That sound. Is it you?”

  “Sorry,” he said, and the sound stopped.

  Not long after it started up again. This time I didn’t say anything. I just reached out and touched Nico’s leg.

  He was shaking. He was shaking so badly that the iron around his ankle vibrated against the stone floor, making that little noise, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.

  Mascha heard it too.

  “Stop that racket, blank-back,” he snapped. “Are you really so scared of me already?”

  But it wasn’t Mascha that had Nico shaking.

  It was the darkness.

  I knew it, from the courthouse cellar in Sagisloc.

  “It’ll be all right,” I whispered. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.” And he made sure, after that, that the chain didn’t rattle. But I don’t think he stopped shaking.

  “What is a blank-back?” he asked me, in a whisper.

  I didn’t know. But my neighbor did.

  “Blank-back?” he said. “That’s what you call someone who hasn’t been whipped yet.”

  The walls around the Sagisburg were mountain-tall and solid, and most of them were wide enough that six men could march abreast along the top of them without even brushing the parapets. Below the outer wall lay the dragon pits, more than thirty yards wide in places and inhabited by scaly man-eating monsters like the ones Drakan kept at Dunark. From the guard bridge where we were standing I could see two of them sunning themselves on the hot rocks. From snout to tail they measured three or four horse-lengths.

  Mascha noticed my interest.

  “Mind how you go, blank-back,” he murmured. “If you fall, well, they’d enjoy tender young flesh like yours.”

  I gave him a sour, sideways look. If I did fall, I thought, I wouldn’t have to worry too much about the dragons. The drop was quite enough to kill me without any help from the monsters.

  All in all, the Sagisburg defenses were the most unbreachable I had ever seen. But apparently that wasn’t enough for Prince Arthos. He had ordered the outer walls built even higher.

  “The wall from Hawk Tower to Lion Tower is your task,” said the Wallmaster. “Erlan’s lot will do the bit from the Lion Tower to the Dragon Tower. And the Educators want to know which gang finishes first and which is last.”

  He said it with no particular emphasis, but a strange sort of sound went through Mascha’s gang, halfway between a moan and a snarl. And as soon as the guards undid our leg irons, my fellow prisoners threw themselves into the task as though their lives depended on it. I had never seen men work quite that hard before.

  “You. Blank-back. Ever done any masonry?” asked Mascha.

  I shook my head. Saw and hammer, yes, but I’d never handled a trowel.

  “You?”

  “No,” said Nico. “Never.”

  “Pity. You’ll have to haul rock, then. Go with Gerik. He’ll show you what to do.”

  The stone blocks for the wall were hewn from a quarry at the back of the Sagisburg, where the fortifications met the mountainside and more or less became one with it. Nico and I had to load the stone onto a sledlike cart and then haul the cart along the top of the wall to the section Mascha’s gang was working on. That may not sound so bad, and the first load was no great strain. It was after the tenth haul, or thereabouts, that it stopped being hard work and became a torture instead. My ribs hurt so badly by then that I couldn’t walk fully upright anymore.

  “Let’s stop for a moment,” said Nico, who had watched me hunch up more and more.

  I nodded. I didn’t have breath left to speak.

  While we stood there with the sled-cart, trying to catch our breaths, I saw two boys come running across the courtyard down below. They both had their hair cropped short like Markus the Tattletale, one fair, one dark, and they both wore white shirts, black waistcoats, and gray knee-breeches, so I guessed they must be two of the wretched children from the House of Tea
ching. It seemed like they were racing each other, and I was quite relieved on Mira’s behalf. I had thought the Teaching consisted mostly of being caged up in dusty classrooms learning endless nonsense chants like the one she had had to know for her test. But at least it seemed the children were allowed out to play every now and then.

  How they ran. Legs milling, arms pumping. The goal line seemed to be the gate over there where one of the Educators waited. As they rounded the last corner, the dark boy drew a little ahead of the fair one.

  Suddenly the fair-haired boy grabbed the dark one’s collar and jerked at it, so that the boy lost his balance and fell. Little cheat! He won the race and got to the gate first because of that dirty trick, but I was sure the Educator would have a thing or two to say to him about the way he won it.

  But no. Apparently not. The Educator put his hand on the fair-haired boy’s shoulder and praised him—or that was how it seemed, because the boy beamed like a small sun and stood a little taller than before. Together, the two of them went into the next courtyard and vanished into the House of Teaching.

  The dark-haired boy had regained his feet. He had scraped his knee, and a thin trail of blood was trickling down his shin. He didn’t even notice. He was staring at the Educator and the fair-haired boy as they disappeared, and I could suddenly see that the race had been no game. His face looked completely frozen, pale and numb with despair. He looked as if his world had just come to an end.

  “Children should never look like that,” I muttered.

  Nico followed my gaze.

  “I think there are a lot of desperate children in that House,” he said darkly. “The sooner we get Mira out of there, the better.”

  I almost laughed out loud. Here we were, chained like mules to a sled, with barely a hope of seeing the outside world again for the next six years, and yet he spoke blithely of freeing Mira, as if it was only a matter of when, not if.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get on with it before Mascha sees us and tears our heads off. I don’t mind being a blank-back yet a while.”

  It wasn’t Mascha, however, but Gerik, who had noticed our breather.

  “Are you mad?” he hissed and sounded almost more scared than angry. “Get a move on! Or do you want Erlan’s gang to finish before we do?”

  I looked at him in puzzlement. “So what if they do?” I said. “What terrible things will happen?”

  He stared at me as if I had lost my mind. “Don’t know that, do I? They never tell us in advance. But trust me, whatever it is, you won’t like it. And if we lose because of you, Mascha will hear of it. That’s a promise!”

  When the day’s work was finally done, the Wallmaster carefully measured how much we had managed to build, and how much Erlan’s gang had done. And even though Nico and I were newcomers and apparently horribly slow, Mascha’s gang had still added a yard more to their wall than Erlan’s had. The Wallmaster made careful note of that, too, on a tablet that reminded me a bit of the debtor’s slates at the Foundation.

  The guards put us in leg irons once more, and I thought we were headed back for the Gullet. But that wasn’t where the guards took us.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Gerik.

  “To the Whipping Yard,” he said, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

  “Why? Did we do something wrong?”

  “No, this is just the Count of the day,” he said. “But today, it’s on Erlan’s lot.” He grinned with malicious humor.

  Count of the day? What on earth did they mean by that?

  They meant, apparently, that a man from the slowest gang had to receive three lashes of the whip. That in itself was sickening enough, though it seemed that Gerik and the others hardly reckoned it. But it became even more sickening when I saw who had been appointed to do the whipping.

  It was a boy of no more than eleven or twelve. One of the Teaching House boys, in waistcoat and knee-breeches, his hair cropped close to the skull. An Educator stood behind him, resting his hands on the boy’s shoulder. And even from this distance, I could see how the boy’s hands were shaking as he clutched the whip.

  One of Erlan’s men had already been unshackled from the leg irons and tied instead to a stout post, facing it, his arms above his head.

  “This man is an enemy of the Prince,” the Educator told the boy. “Your arm must be strong when you punish him.”

  The boy was staring at the man tied to the pole. Hesitantly, he raised the whip. Then he lowered it again.

  “I—I would really rather not,” he whispered.

  “Pavel,” said the Educator, “do you not love the Prince?”

  “Yes…”

  “And do you not hate his enemies?”

  The boy nodded obediently.

  “Then you must not be weak. Do your duty. You do not want to be one who fails, do you?”

  The boy’s face for a moment looked drawn with pure terror.

  “No,” he said loudly in a thin scared voice. “I’ll not fail. Never.”

  He looked once more at the man’s naked back. Old white scars and newer red streaks told their tale. This was not by any means the first time this man had stood at the whipping post. In a fit of determination, the boy raised the whip and brought it down on the man’s back.

  But not hard. Not hard enough by far, it seemed.

  “Pavel,” said the Educator reproachfully. “You have not even marked him! Is your hatred of the Prince’s enemies such a weak and feeble thing?”

  The boy had begun to cry, quite soundlessly.

  “No,” he sniffled. “I hate them. I hate them!”

  “Then show us.”

  But still the boy hesitated. Tears were coursing down his pale face, and he sniffed softly.

  Suddenly, the man at the post turned his head and looked straight at the boy.

  “Crybaby,” he snarled scornfully. “Piddling little crybaby. Come on. Get it over with. Or don’t you have the guts?”

  That did it. The boy raised the whip and hit the man as hard as he was able, three times. Three new weals joined the collection on the prisoner’s naked back.

  “That was well done, Pavel,” said the Educator. “You have served your Prince well.”

  The guards released the man from the post, and we were all allowed to leave, this time to go back to the miserable holes we slept in.

  “Why did he say that?” I whispered to Gerik. “The crybaby thing, I mean. Anyone would think he wanted the boy to hit him.”

  “Of course he did,” said Gerik. “Anton is hardly stupid. If the boy doesn’t make it, the guards finish the job. And which would you rather be whipped by, an eleven-year-old crybaby or one of the armored swine?”

  Put that way, it made a certain kind of sense.

  “Why him, then? I mean, why him and not someone else from Erlan’s lot?”

  Gerik shrugged. “That’s for Erlan to decide. Or Mascha, if we lose.” He rolled his shoulders reflexively, in a way that suggested that he, too, had taken his turn at the post. “In some gangs it’s always the weakest ones who take the beatings,” he said, “on account of them being the least use anyway, when it comes to the next day’s work. Not with Mascha. We mostly take turns.”

  That surprised me. After my first encounter with Mascha, I wouldn’t have put him down as a champion of the finer points of justice.

  “And Mascha?” I asked. “Does he take his turn as well?”

  Cold-eyed, Gerik looked at me.

  “It happens,” he said. “But don’t get any ideas. Blank-back.”

  It was clearly a dirty name in his book. Spoken in almost the same tone of voice as Anton had used when he called his whipping boy “a piddling little crybaby.” Here, a man took his beatings, it seemed, with something almost like pride.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Of the ten prisoners in Mascha’s gang, Nico and I were clearly the lowest. Even slump-shouldered old Virtus had more respect from the others than we did, though he practically crept along the walls an
d cringed every time a guard so much as looked at him. He was always muttering to himself, a jumbled sort of chant that at first I couldn’t make head or tails of: “Zprinzescrate, zprinzescrate, zprinzescrate,” over and over again. Only gradually it dawned on me that he was saying “the Prince is great.” No, he wasn’t quite right in the head, that was for sure. His hands shook so badly he could barely hold the tools. Yet none of the others, not even Mascha, gave him a hard time. Nico and me he ripped into every time we so much as paused for a breather, but not Virtus. Not even when he dropped the plumb line into the dragon pit and we had to ask the guards for a new one and then wait forever before it got there.

  “Why do we have to put up with such a doddering old fool?” I muttered to Gerik. But he took offense.

  “Hold your tongue, boy,” he said. “You don’t know anything. And Virtus is no older than I am.”

  “How come he looks that way, then?” I said, eyeing the trembling hands and the hunched-up figure that looked almost as if his spine was crippled.

  “None of your business, blank-back,” snarled Gerik. But a little later he added, “You might end up looking like that. If we lose.”

  Was he trying to pull my leg? I took another sideways look at Virtus. There was some gray in his beard and hair, and deep furrows on his brow and around his mouth. But it was probably true that he wasn’t actually ancient, even though he acted like an old man most of the time.

  “What is it they will do to us if we lose?” I asked Mascha later. What could make a man end up like Virtus?

  “So that we may learn to be more obedient, the Educators will come up with an entertaining little game for us.”

  Mascha’s growl was even deeper than usual, and his eyes glittered with hatred. It wasn’t hard to figure out that this “little game” was entertaining only to those lucky enough not to be part of it.

  Five days went by. We slaved away at our wall-building for as long as the sun was in the sky. Come sunset, the Wallmaster measured the result of our efforts and noted it on his tablet. And then we went to the Whipping Yard. The first three days, Mascha’s gang managed to stay ahead of Erlan’s, possibly because we were a little closer to the quarry. Each night a new boy from the House of Teaching had to wield the lash. Not all of them were as reluctant as Pavel had been the first day. One of them really put his back into it, so that the prisoner he was hitting moaned loudly at the last stroke. The Educator praised the boy for his strength and his hatred of the enemies of the Prince. And the boy beamed and stood taller at the praise. It was enough to make you sick.