His father had begun to teach him the names of the stars when he was four. Gave the words to his soft child’s tongue, where they rounded into natural forms and he could, even then, taste the sand and honey of their root language. Stars named fell from his tongue in streams, in buckets and cascades to form bright burning bridges in his subconscious for all time. Sometimes he thought the repetition of these things, the focus on something so far from earthly care and woe, was the only thing that kept his sanity intact.
He was on kitchen duty that morning, stirring the dirty gray industrial slop that passed for breakfast, reciting grimly to himself from the table of chief spectral classes. He’d just worked his way through examples of orange stars, ‘Arcturus, Pollux, Alpha Ursa Majoris’ and was beginning on the characteristics of red stars, ‘rich spectra showing many strong metallic lines with wide bands produced by titanium oxide,’ when he was hit sharply between the shoulders by something narrow and hard. He barely missed overbalancing into the porridge pot, cursing aloud at the same time, as he swung around to face his attackers.
They stood in a loose semi-circle, five of them, all gripping paddles identical to the one he held in his own hands.
Fear, his constant companion of late, hit hard, grabbing him in the knees and stomach. Just as quickly he put it to the side, his brain sizing up the opposition. Five men, none as large as him, granted, but, as he’d long ago learned, sheer number made up for a lack of size every time. They were familiar to him, prison being the small world that it was. Henchmen of the Baron of D wing, where all illicit items could be bought and sold, if you had the coinage, be it in prison currency or blood.
“Well lads, who do we have here then?” asked the one in the middle—the corporal to the Baron’s general and likely the man who would decide his fate in the next few minutes. Any talk would have to be directed at him.
“I’m mindin’ my own business, doin’ my job here, an’ not lookin’ for any trouble,” Casey said, keeping his voice polite but not allowing for the weakness of actual civility.
“Did I say ya could speak, ya Paddy bastard?” said the corporal, smiling nastily and revealing a row of rotting, broken-off teeth. He looked, Casey thought, like a weasel in need of dental work.
“I wasn’t aware I needed yer permission,” Casey replied as coolly as he could manage, though his intestines felt as though they’d turned to icewater.
“Ya need my permission to take a piss round here, boy, it’s only a right div as would forget that.”
“Aye well,” Casey said, half-turning back towards his cauldron of bubbling oats, “I’ll bear that in mind next time nature calls.”
“E’s a smart mouth on ‘im lads, an’ we know as what happens to smart mouths in here, don’t we.”
From the corner of his eye Casey could see the four henchmen nod as one—well-trained and likely bluntly stupid. Unfortunately, that made them all the more dangerous. They’d do as they were told and wouldn’t give a thought to consequences. He angled his back carefully, casting a quick look about him. Not an ally in the place, the other men in the kitchen had their eyes carefully averted, hands on their assigned tasks. He was alone, utterly and completely. The brain, wondrous weapon that it was in many situations, was of limited use when the physical odds were squarely against one. He’d have to do the best he could with size, agility and his paddle and hope to God they didn’t kill him.
Not only did they nod as one, they moved as one and he could feel the force of their coming in the air as it began to push against his skin. He tensed himself for it—muscles contracting, skin pulling back toward the sanctuary of bone, body trying desperately to find a fixed anchor in the sea of adrenaline that poured unrestrained through him.
They were almost to him now, he could smell their body odor—onions, piss and, oddly enough, rosewater. Then, again as one, they stopped dead, only a foot and a half away, close enough to grab, close enough to hit. He slid his hands lower down the haft of the paddle, cursing the sweat that slicked their path and wondered, rather wildly, if he would live to see the next hour.
He could feel the tremor of their muscles through the air, the violence that heated their blood as one, making of man an animal. He braced himself, knowing the first blow was always the worst. Then suddenly their eyes flicked to the left, and they backed away an inch or two, the expressions on their faces changing almost comically. He didn’t relax, but dared a slight intake of air. He knew something had put up their guard but couldn’t afford to turn and look.
“Somethin’ goin’ on here, lads?” Casey judged the gruff voice to be a few yards behind and to his right. It was one of the screws, a Welshman by the name of Manfred. He was known to be fair-minded and honest. He’d never treated Casey any worse or better because of his nationality. It was a gesture that was appreciated; most of the screws weren’t so unbiased. Casey dared a larger breath, the flood of adrenaline tapering down to a stream. He’d been given a reprieve, though he knew it wasn’t likely to last long.
“I asked a question, lads, if you’ve not an answer I suggest the bunch of you clear off and let this boy finish his work.”
Casey could feel the guard standing close behind him, his stick tapping rhythmically against a callused palm.
Wisely the four men backed off, the postponed threat still there in their silence, though. Casey let the haft of the paddle slide down, his arms suddenly the consistency of the sticky porridge that bubbled beside him.
“Thank ye,” he said quietly.
“Be careful laddie, those ones are not done with ye yet,” Manfred said, before casually strolling the length of the kitchen, as if he were out for a Sunday meander.
Casey returned to stirring the porridge, though every hair on his body remained alert and prickling. He remained wary throughout his pull of kitchen duty, through the cleanup, the scrubbing of the large pots, the mop up of the floor. He didn’t relax until he sat to eat his own breakfast. He was aware of other men milling about, but the hunger in his belly overrode all other sensations, even that of caution. He was, after all, only a boy, still growing, and seemed to be hungry all the time. The food prison provided doing barely more than taking the edge off the gnawing in his belly. He was just finishing up the last of a glass of milk when someone called his name. It was the surprise—the sound of his Christian name after months of not hearing it—that made him turn without thought.
The scalding oatmeal took him full in the face, blistering his skin on contact. The pain was enough to make a man scream, but he bit down hard on the inside of his lower lip, willing the sound to stay inside his body.
“Whaddya have to say now, Paddy bastard?” Weasel Tooth asked, his flinty little eyes glittering maniacally, dripping paddle still held in his hands.
“Well,” Casey said, wiping the sticking mess from his face with a dismissive gesture designed to cover his badly shaking hands, “I’ve heard as oatmeal is beneficial to the complexion, though I imagine they meant it to be taken cold.”
“Have a nice day Paddy-boy.” The man gave him a nasty wink. “We’ll catch up with ya later.”
The threat was implicit, but Casey couldn’t think far enough past the pain in his face to give it the importance he needed to.
He hadn’t bothered going to the infirmary, determined not to give the bastards the satisfaction of his hurt. So he gritted his teeth through the pain and waited until he got back to his own cell before giving in to the raw searing agony. But he didn’t cry, for he no longer knew how.
In the night, they came for him.
HE’D NEVER DREAMED they’d come back for him so soon. Later, he would damn himself for a fool. He’d been dreaming when they came, one of those odd half-waking dreams where the border between reality and the night of the mind is blurred. Dreaming of home, the narrow streets, the curling wallpaper in his bedroom, and the sound of his brother murmuring in his sleep beside him. And so when the first man touched him, he’d thought it was Pat, grabbing him in the grip of one o
f the night terrors he’d been afflicted with since childhood. Then knew just as certainly that it was not Pat.
His recollection of the night would never be entirely clear, though even years later it would seem as if it had lasted many nights, not just the hours it had been in reality. Though one thought would remain clear many years later—he was going to die and was going to wish death would take him quickly many times before it did.
They blindfolded him with a sack over his head. Small bits of dirt and fiber found their way into his nose, eyes and mouth as they dragged him down the corridors of the prison. He recognized, with a bitter chill, the smell of potatoes on the inside of the bag.
He fought to gain his feet, but was kicked solidly behind the knees, buckling his legs and causing them to scrape the uneven stone. Blind and in pain, he quickly lost track of the twists and turns they took; the entire world coming down to the sound of harsh voices, brutal hands and the scent of blood that raced in panic too near the surface of tender skin.
A minute, or a lifetime later, they stopped, throwing him face-first onto the floor. Then, they pulled the sack off his head. He wished they’d left it on. He wasn’t thrilled about witnessing his own murder.
It was not an area of the prison with which he was familiar. Granted it was damp and freezing like the rest of the place but it was also pitch black. With only the rough grate of stone under his face and the taste of moss in his mouth to go on, he’d no idea what wing they’d taken him into. There were empty areas of the prison, rooms that hadn’t been used in years for one reason or another. He suspected this was one of them, which meant it would take a while for them to find his body. Though there’d be a full-scale alert once they found he was missing from his bed, unless of course the screws were in on it, which was entirely possible.
They removed the gag, wanting the sound of his torment, as well as the physical struggle, though he only screamed once and then the pain was beyond the relief of sound. He was frozen by it, suspended by raw terror and agony beyond his comprehension in some odd fugue state where ordinary time had no meaning.
The first cut of the knife felt like a shard of fiery cold in his back. He didn’t realize what it was at first, rational thought was not possible, only the deafening clamor of instinct screaming inside his skull.
Their voices reached him as though from a great distance, as if he were hovering up near the ceiling of the tomb they’d dragged him to. Some words reached far enough to impress themselves upon his ears, others did not.
“Kill the bastard... Feel that, Paddy? Not so cocky now, are ya?...Fuckin’ little terrorist, we’ll teach ya real terror, won’t we lads?”
He felt as though his soul pulled itself away from the shell of bones and flesh and shrank down until it was only a small thing, hiding in a corner, hoping only to remain unnoticed, knowing that was the only chance. It was this small part of himself, disconnected from the conscious mind, that ensured his survival. By not asking, not begging for release or mercy, by maintaining a silence that was beginning to frighten his captors, it saved his life. It would be a long time before he could find a shred of gratitude for this foreign part of him, though he knew it would always reside in that dark corner of him, waiting, should he ever need its assistance again. He hoped to God he never did.
Odd things registered—the smell of the sacking still thick about his face, a loose bit of stone digging into his stomach, the sucking hiss of a cork being withdrawn from a bottle, the sound of liquid pouring, and the realization of what that liquid was.
Acid like razors with horrible small teeth, bent on gnawing its way through to his core. When he felt the first smoking rush of it in the open channels of his back, he thought it was water, that they were trying to keep him conscious. What was left of his mind at that point quickly corrected that first impression and mercifully he finally lost consciousness, profoundly grateful that death had seen fit to come take him at last.
CASEY COULD HEAR what sounded like the pages of an old and well-thumbed book being turned in haste, and amongst those rustlings a vaguely cross murmur.
“…-now where is that damned recipe, can never remember from one day to the next. Is it the Velvet Flowers for the bloody flux—hmm, Moonwort—to open locks an’ unshoe horses, no doubt handy in some situations but hardly applicable to us here. Ah there—bleeding, vomiting, blows an’ bruises, an’ to consolidate fractures an’ dislocations, bit of a miracle plant that one, but we’d best be after coverin’ all the bases as we can.”
He heard a heavy tread then, and the movement of displaced air where he lay.
“Open yer eyes then, laddie. Come now, ye can do it. Ye must wake up now, if only for a bit.”
Though his eyelids felt as though they’d been forged shut with molten lead, Casey made a great and terrible effort to open them, and promptly wished he had not done so. For above him stood a fearsome giant of a man, with a great bushy black beard and eyes so blue they cut like an unsheathed knife.
“I’m yer nurse,” the man said with a smile.
“Kill me now,” Casey muttered, wanting merely to sink back into oblivion, dark and painless.
“Don’t go to sleep on me boy, ye canna just yet.”
“Let—me—be,” Casey said, realizing in some dim way that his words seemed to come with long lapses of time between them.
“Nay, ‘tis not my job to let ye be. Come lad, sick as the thought makes ye, I’ll need to look at yer back.”
Even the slight breeze that came from the crack in the window felt like harsh fingers flicking across his raw nerves. The man busied himself, his touch surprisingly light, the running commentary punctuating his touches.
“Hmm, it’s none so bad as I thought, though it’ll never look the same. An’ I’ll say the one thing for the wee doctor, for all he’s the face of a puckerin’ lemon on ‘im, he’s a dab hand with the needle. ‘Twill take all my skills though, hm—is there any of the Adder’s Tongue left? An’ we’ll need a pinch of the Graveyard Dust for sleep, an’ some burned Nettle round about the room...” he mumbled on but Casey was drifting towards unconsciousness again and so was only vaguely aware of the things that took place over the next few days.
Poultices that smelled of bitter rooted things were applied to his back. Their scent was brimstone, but their touch was cool and soothing. He was given—what he could only think of later as potions—to drink. Things that left the taste of earth and tart green-ness upon his tongue and lodged firmly at the back of his throat. The drinks made him sleep, made him dream—of ships, of the sea, of terrible black things that slunk beyond the edge of his nocturnal horizon.
Sometimes the drinks tasted of flowers, and when they did, his dreams were considerably kinder and were often of women. Or rather one woman, whose touch healed and burned him all at the same time, though he never could see her face.
Time became a vortex, into which he sank dizzily, unaware of hour or day or month. It was some time before he realized that Angus and the doctor, who checked in on him twice a day, were never present at the same time. This puzzled Casey, but his fevered brain would turn fretfully away to its kaleidoscope of unconnected dreams and dread filled nightmares, and he would wonder no more about the oddity of this arrangement.
During the day, the doctor would feel his forehead, change his dressings, force more antibiotics down his throat and then shake his head. Casey, even in his dire straits, understood what that shaking head meant. The doctor wasn’t putting odds on his survival.
At night, Angus would rumble his disapproval over the doctor’s methods of treatment, “Christ the man couldna’ cure a flea of the dogs.” And then he would remove the dressings, saying that the wounds needed air, and apply his own poultices.
The room itself seemed different at night, as if the sterile furniture and implements transformed themselves into something more organic and soothing in the darkness. For instance, Angus had a big old battered sea chest, replete with salt-rusted hinges, that Casey had never noti
ced during the day.
The sea chest sat in a corner and had strange symbols burned into its body. From his bed, he could make out a few of the figures. There was a three-headed beast with the body of a lion, a mermaid with talons and snakes in her hair, and a very large five-pointed star, with what looked like Hebrew lettering inside of its angles. One night while Angus was rootling through it muttering about gathering some sort of fungus now that the moon was full, Casey asked him about the chest.
“An’ what do ye call that thing?” Casey asked.
“It’s my wizard’s chest,” Angus replied simply, as if the title explained it all.
“An’ all the wee symbols on the outside?”
“’Tis so nosy buggers like yerself won’t open it. Scares people, aye, if they don’t understand. They think there’s like to a hex on the box.”
Casey had glimpsed what lay inside the chest—old books, instruments of brass, weights and stones, small packets of herbs, glass vials and velvet wrapped tools, as well as other oddments of the healer’s trade.
His interest was short lived. Even sustaining any kind of coherent thought exhausted him. Sleep called him constantly, became his lover, and he was grateful to sink into the dark arms and stay there for longer and longer periods of time.
He knew he wasn’t getting better and in fact was getting worse. Infection had invaded his body and his soul. Dark thoughts clustered near at all hours, his dreams all of darkness and fire, his defences dissipating like smoke before wind. He was, he realized, in the process of dying. He could feel the veil between one world and the next getting thinner and thinner. Sometimes he even thought he could glimpse shadowy figures that existed in that other realm. They did not frighten him, but merely seemed to offer a vague sort of peace.
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 12
