Prospero's Half-Life

by Trevor Zaple

  Richard leapt at the opportunity. Troy hooked the charger up to the power outputs on the bike and checked all of the connections to make sure they were snug. Richard climbed on and began to pedal, slowly at first and then with a steadily increasing sense of urgency. At first there was no response from the tablet and he felt an old sadness, but then the screen lit up and the symbol that indicated that it was charging became apparent on the screen. His heart leapt into his throat and he began to pedal harder, trying to get the battery juiced up as quickly as possible. Even with hard pedalling, however, charging the battery to full capacity took a half-hour of sweat-inducing labour. When Richard got off of the bike he was breathing heavily, and his limbs felt shaky and rubbery.

  Troy clapped him on the back. “Alright,” he said, “power it on and let’s see what we’ve got”. Richard did so, his finger shaking as he pressed down the tiny power button. The screen flared into life and booted to a simple screen that told the time and date, and showed a simple slide-to-unlock mechanism. With something like religious awe he took his finger tip and slid the lock over to the unlock position. The screen changed and it turned into the home-screen that had once been so familiar but now seemed completely alien.

  “Hey, it works!” Troy exclaimed. Richard nodded and began poring through the artifacts that were presented on the screen. He saw the icon for the browser, but that would of course be useless; if anyone had a wifi signal up and running he had never seen nor heard of it. Besides that, even if he did have a wifi signal to connect to, the only place the internet existed was in Troy Larkson’s tent. It belonged to the past, a relic to be wondered over and to perhaps be consulted as though it were an Oracle from out of time. He found an icon marked “Pictures” and this was of much greater interest to him. He felt a twinge of panic about opening it but shoved it deeply down inside of him. He had to know.

  There were a large number of pictures on the tablet, divided into an assortment of categories. Cuba 2009 one read. Second Year went another. Richard selected Second Year, his heart seeming to beat only intermittently. The category resolved into a series of thumbnails of pictures and he selected one at random. It was a picture of a cheap apartment, with posters on the wall and inexpensive, shoddy wooden furniture everywhere. A trio of young women were posing for the camera, caught halfway between alluring sexuality and disarming hilarity. The middle one was unmistakably Samantha. She was slightly younger in the picture than the Samantha that he had last known, but she was still largely the same: the same curvy Dutch face, the same mass of blonde hair that he had once run his eager fingers through, the same steady, slightly knowing blue-eyed expression. He clutched the tablet and felt his knees buckle, and within a moment he had collapsed on the ground. Troy stood over him, trying to rouse him with increasing franticness, but for a time Richard was completely lost to the physical world, trapped as he was in a mirror-house of his own memories.

  THREE

  Richard made his way back to the farmhouse in a daze, the tablet clutched to his chest like a child’s teddy bear. His feet stumbled and stuttered over the rough cracks and season-teased rises in the pavement but he did not notice it very often. He was running that tape-loop of memory in his head, replaying his life from his last day as a working sales manager to the day that he had woken up to find that Samantha had left him. The words that she had written in her last letter to him had subsided to bare scratches but now flared into new, hideous relief; he remembered being called nine types of coward and felt the coppery tang of disappointment fill his mouth once again.

  He had not attempted to look at the tablet since he left Troy’s tent of wonders. He had powered it down and it was now silent and dark. He was loathe to turn it on at all, since he had no idea how he would charge the batteries again, but he knew that he was going to have to do it again at some point. His curiosity, his own treacherous heart, would force him into it. Even if it was as small a matter as turning it on and looking at a picture of her for the briefest of moments, he knew that it was only a matter of time.

  He broke out of his daze and found that he had walked nearly the entire distance in a trance, enraptured by the snippet of the past that he had uncovered. He saw the farmhouse rising in the late afternoon haze, only twenty minutes or so down the road. A coldness struck him with sharp force; Karl would never let him keep the tablet. Such an artefact would be something that Karl would insist that he keep for himself, and Richard would be without his window into the past as quickly as he had gained it.

  As he grew closer to the farmhouse the wilderness that bordered the road turned to carefully cropped land; Karl, like all other landowners, insisted that the wild growth be brought under heel on their land, in order to denote it as owned land. As soon as the border of Karl’s land was crossed, Richard got off of the road and began to cross the rough but short grass. He headed towards a small copse of four trees that was about halfway between the farmhouse and the wilderness. He had undertaken a lot of the clearing in this particular section of his master’s property and he’d discovered what he’d thought of as a mildly interesting feature of one of the trees. One of them had a large, cavern-like hollow in the base of it, the sort of thing one would expect an animal to live under in a children’s story. Now its existence came back to him, and before he knew it he had stashed the tablet snugly within the hollow. He looked up at the sky, concerned. The clouds above were white and blameless enough, he thought; if there was rain, though, all he could do was hope that the hollow under the tree would keep the worst of the moisture out. With a last, wary glance at the small grove, he made a direct path towards the arena with as much speed as his tired legs could muster.

  After oiling the hinges and testing the gates, Richard ran a critical eye over the arena and decided that it was as ready as he would ever be able to make it. He headed back to the farmhouse to inform Karl that preparations for the night’s festivities were complete. When he mounted the creaking stairs and entered the small, dusty office, he saw that Karl was not alone. A tall, whipcord-thin man with glittering black eyes and a sardonic grin sat in the visitor’s chair, his arms crossed. He and Karl were engaged in an animated, somewhat ribald conversation; Richard waited with a patient smile on his lips until there was a lull and Karl spoke to him.

  “Everything is ready, then?” Karl asked shortly. Richard nodded.

  “The House Speaker will find no more exquisite entertainment outside of London itself, sir,” Richard replied with a small, self-satisfied smile. Karl laughed at this, and the stranger seemed to find it fairly amusing as well. Karl gestured carelessly at the stranger.

  “This is the Speaker’s scout, a Mr. Anthony Mendoza. He’s come to alert us that His Honour is only an hours ride or so from our humble abode. Rouse the other servants and get them into position. Get that preening cat Sandra to finish the dinner preparations and to prepare drinks, and then make sure old Tyler is sober”. Karl grinned at Mr. Anthony Mendoza. “Tyler can do his job sodden or sober, but I would prefer not to offend His Honour with the smell of farm-fermented booze”. He shot a serious look at Richard. “If he is drunk, have him whipped. Marcus and John can do it. Those lazy bastards are getting fat off of my dime, anyway”.

  Richard nodded, already vowing to whip Tyler himself if the man was drunk at this moment. He’d warned the stable-keeper on any number of occasions that he would either have to curb his drinking or develop a higher tolerance to blinding pain. Marcus and John he would leave alone; they were a pair of vicious, half-bright mongrels that would be more likely to kill Tyler than to punish him. None of his thoughts passed through his expression, which remained an engaged, pleasant smile. Karl nodded brusquely and waved him onwards. Richard ducked out of the office with a slight nod of his head. Once he was away from his master he allowed himself to grit his teeth and begin to track down the other servants.

  He found Tyler first, since the question of his sobriety was a rather imperative one. Thankfully Tyler was mostly sober, having only had a smal
l amount of their potato moonshine several hours before. The heavy-set, pot-bellied man assured Richard with great alacrity that there would be no problem with his performance during the entertainment; he intimated that he was gravely insulted by Richard’s accusations and withered away from this sentiment under the harsh lights of Richard’s staring, knowing eyes. When Richard left him he was rousing the horses and beginning a last-minute mucking of the stables.

  Marcus and John he found cooling their heels on a bench in the garden that grew majestically behind the farmhouse. They were an odd couple – a balding, cunning Trinidadian with the body of a boxer gone to seed, and a scrawny young man of Irish heritage with a stutter – but they were strangely effective at keeping order and security on the property. Both of them stared at Richard as he approached them, and their stares were empty enough for him to find them very disconcerting.

  “Are you gentlemen aware that our VIP will be arriving within the hour?” Richard asked them sharply. Both of them grinned at him in a way that made them seem even less intelligent than Richard suspected they were.

  “Sure thing,” Marcus boomed, his baritone rumbling Richard’s eardrums. “Everything’s under control”.

  “Ye-yeah,” John seconded, “wuh-wuh-wuh-we have eh-everything under c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c...”. Marcus whacked John on the back and the skinny red-haired fellow nearly fell forward. “Control!” he exclaimed, and both he and Marcus cracked up into irritating schoolyard laughter. Richard rolled his eyes at them and drew himself up with authority.

  “If anything goes wrong tonight – anything at all – I will come looking for you,” he threatened. Marcus lumbered to his feet and Richard stepped back unconsciously. He was a very big man, and were it not for his position and the ultimate authority that Karl provided him, he would have felt intimidated.

  “What will you do when you find us?” Marcus asked mildly. “Got a plan for that, big man?” Richard stared at him, his eyes narrowing.

  “I’ll have John whip you,” he replied flatly. “I’ll suggest it to Karl and he’ll sign off on it without a second thought”.

  “Maybe I’d like to see you try that,” Marcus said, and all softness had vanished from his voice. His tone was almost a growl, and Richard blinked before getting ahold of himself.

  “Would you?” Richard asked, putting every ounce of his authority into his voice. It seemed to do the intended job. Marcus sat back down on the bench.

  “I suppose not,” he rumbled genially. Richard shook his head in disgust and left them to oversee the preparations in the kitchen.

  He found Sandra, the chef, lounging on the daybed in the common area just inside the farmhouse’s front door. She seemed indolent, but Richard was much less irritated with this than he had been with the others. Despite her lazy appearance she was keenly aware of everything that was happening in a kitchen she did not even have in the line of sight. This was proven when, as Richard approached her, there was the slight clank of something being dropped within the kitchen.

  “Andrea!” she barked. “If you’ve dropped the spoon for the soup on the floor and plan on continuing to use it, please do me a favour and set yourself on fire now. It’ll save me burning you alive later!” There was an awkward pause, and then the rattle of utensils in a drawer could be heard, muffled by the intervening wall. Sandra turned her attention to Richard and smiled wickedly at him. He was willing to admit that the other reason that he was less irritated with her had something to do with how devilishly attractive he found her. She had a lush, overripe figure, dark, earthy eyes, and the kind of pouty lips that seemed tailor-made to dream about. She crooked a finger at him now and he felt his heart pick up speed.

  “Care to join me for a word before we get the feast put together?” she asked throatily. Richard chuckled nervously and shifted his feet. He had the same reaction every time, even though he’d taken her up on the offer several times before. “Having a word” was Sandra’s euphemism for hard, enthusiastic pairing, and she likely meant for him to join her on the daybed. He had to reluctantly shake his head this time.

  “I’m afraid not,” he rejected her smoothly, “it seems His Honour will be arriving within the hour”.

  Sandra rolled her eyes. “I suppose I should get in there, then,” she sighed. She got to her feet and looked Richard up and down salaciously. “Maybe in the kitchen?” she speculated. “Andrea knows enough to look away – not that I care if she does”. Her eyes twinkled and Richard had to laugh.

  “You’re insatiable,” he said. She joined in his laughter with a thick laugh that came right up from her considerable belly.

  “Maybe I am,” she admitted, and walked slowly into the kitchen. She gave Richard one last glance as she left the room and he chuckled nervously again. As soon as she was in the kitchen he fled with his cheeks burning. There was still much to do and distractions could prove to be fatal.

  His last stop was the arena and by the time he arrived there a number of hard-muscled, dangerous-looking men were gathered around the gates. Richard did a quick head-count as he approached and cursed his luck. There were seven, which was an odd number and therefore a problem. He centered his focus on a long-timer named Simon and spoke to him directly as soon as he reached the circle of men.

  “Do you have any other friends who feel like fighting tonight?” he asked hopefully. Simon shook his head.

  “This is all that wanted to come out tonight,” he replied, his voice gravelly. “It’ll be harvest time soon enough, and a lot of the men don’t want to ruin their livelihoods in weapon brawls. It’s one thing to trade fists with someone for the locals – sort of thing to blow off steam, I guess. But you put out word that someone’s looking for people to fight and die for money, and interest dries up real quick, unless they’re desperate for the prize money”. He looked around at some of the others. “Or unless they’re the type to need a good life-or-death fight just to feel alive”.

  “Which are you, Simon?” Richard asked quietly, and Simon merely smiled in response. Richard shook his head, made one last count of them just to prove the number to himself, and opened the gate to let them into the arena. The seven would-be gladiators began stretching and preparing on the beaten-earth grounds of the ring while Richard dragged the weapons cases out from the storage center under the stands. He checked over the integrity of the contents, testing the edges of the swords and making sure that the cudgels were not cracked or bent in an unacceptable fashion. The weapons were only used rarely, when visitors warranted the advance in severity, and were thoroughly washed and maintained following their usage; Richard gave them a once-over and declared them ready to use.

  An hour and a half later Marcus came marching up the path to the arena carrying a covered pot. He reported that the House Speaker had arrived and that dinner had been served. He handed the pot over to Richard with a blank expression and went to go lean against the gate without another word. Richard took the pot to a seat in the front row of the stands and ate while watching the gladiators prepare. The pot contained a stew of leftovers that Sandra had thrown together from what the freemen’s feast had been composed of. It was delicious and Richard had to force himself to slow down as he ate. He needed to be without distractions as the night unfolded, and an aching belly would be a heavy distraction indeed.

  He finished eating and had twenty minutes before a ringing bell heralded the arrival of Karl and the House Speaker, with their respective entourages. Richard straightened himself, brushed off his clothing, and walked out to the center of the ring to greet everyone. The gladiators went to stand by the wall and watch the procession come in, their faces unknowable.

  The first grouping through the gate were a quartet of women carrying brass instruments, all of which were polished until they shone in the setting sun. The women wore white, tightly spun dresses that seemed to have been crafted with a loving touch. Afterwards a procession of armed men entered, carrying assault rifles in their hands and swords strapped to their backs; they wore a uniform o
f denim jeans and thick black dress shirts, and they wore sunglasses to a man. This group fanned out and watched over the entry of an eclectic group of four people: Karl Tiegert, a tall Asian man dressed in a resplendent teal silk shirt and dress pants, the stable-master Tyler, and a man in a simple white robe that Richard recognized with a brutal shock. The mans name escaped him, largely because at the time that they had known each other, the man and his associates had done everything in their power to freeze Richard away from knowing anything. He had once upon a time been one of Brother Bentley’s white-robes, and the mirrored look of shock on the mans face was all Richard needed to see to confirm his identity. Richard noted this, smoothed over his shock, and continued on with his well-worn introduction to important visitors to the arena.

  “Welcome, honoured gentlemen,” he said in booming, theatrical voice. “Welcome to the Tiegert Arena”. He spread his arms wide and smiled with the satisfaction of a competent host; although he addressed everyone throughout the rest of his introduction, his eyes never quite left the rip in time that had appeared into his midst. There was a pressure growing inside of his head, and he wondered whether it was a physical headache or merely some grim bit of precognition.

  When he finished his spiel, the man in the teal shirt, obviously the House Speaker, applauded and asked where they might be seated. Richard led them quickly to the ornately carved section where important guests were seated – he had referred to it on a number of occasions as the ‘Executive Box’. The House Speaker, Karl, and the white-robe were seated with pomp and dignity; Tyler left the arena to bring the horses into position. The Executive Box was given drinks, mugs of foaming, locally-brewed beer, and Karl and the House Speaker fell into a engaged discussion between themselves. Time passed and others began to filter into the arenas seats. Most of the spectators were local farmers and businessmen; one of Richard’s many jobs was to keep undesirable elements from attending these events if important guests were to be in the audience, but tonight it seemed that he would not have to throw anyone out. He recognized the overwhelming majority of those in attendance, and did not suspect any of them of plotting some mischief. After waiting for the seats to fill up, Richard cleared the gladiators from the ring, stood in the center, and held up his hands. A hush fell over the crowd.