Armand awoke with cold about his face. Being jostled around. He moved his head to one side and saw a wooden plank. More jostling and he groaned at the sharp pains, and smelled hay and horse manure.
“You awake?”
He turned to the other side, saw Johnny kneeling down next to him. Armand realized he was in the back of a wagon, being taken away.
“Yeah,” Armand whispered. “It… it hurts.”
“It should, boss. You got stabbed something awful. You piss anyone off lately?”
Armand just shook his head.
“Well, you must’ve, that’s all I can say.”
Armand tried to talk. Couldn’t make his mouth move.
“Hey,” Johnny said, grabbing his hand, squeezing it. “Don’t give up on me, okay? Listen, this is important… so don’t pass out.”
His words seemed faint. Armand’s eyes fluttered, started to close.
Johnny leaned into him, raised his voice. “If you don’t make it, Armand, can I have your hat and gloves? Please? Armand? And does this mean I’m barracks chief now?”
There was a soft knock on the door to his room, and Randall de la Bourbon yawned and rolled over, and turned the electric light in his room up. His satin sheets and fine wool blankets were tussled about him. He checked the nearby clock, frowned at the time. It was damn late at night. By the clock was a tray with the remains of a late night snack: half-eaten roast beef and cheese sandwich, empty class of cider, half a dozen chocolate candy wrappers.
“Enter!” he called out.
And another surprise: Munro came in, dressed like he was just going to work, in sharp dark suit, white shirt and necktie. It was times like these that Randall wondered if Munro ever slept.
“Young sire,” Munro said. “I just received a telegram from the west. The job is done.”
Randall was fully awake with pleasure. “Wonderful, just wonderful. Tell me… is it their tradition to post heads on pikes at these camps?”
“Not that I’m aware of, sire,” Munro said stiffly.
“Too bad,” Randall said. “I would love to have a photograph of that fop’s head to look at. Nicely framed, of course.”
Munro said, “Yes, of course.”
Randall shifted in his warm bed and said, “Thanks for the news. And you could do one more thing, then.” He pointed to the tray next to his clock. “Take that away, will you?”
It looked like Munro’s face went flush at being ordered about, but he still came over and did as he was told. When he left and closed the door behind him, Randall turned the electric light off and rolled over and thinking, soon, soon everyone in this Empire will do as they’re told… and I’ll be the one telling them.
Chapter Five
Armand woke up in a lumpy bed, with bright lights over his face. He blinked and looked around. A man was in a nearby bed, his face bearded and sweaty, staring up, breathing hard. One of his legs was being held up by a pulley and rope device, but the leg ended in a stump just below the knee. The bandage there was stained and crusty with old blood.
He looked to the other side. A man was on his left hip on a bed, staring out blankly. His head had been shaved and there was a network of stitches about his skull. He kept on staring, breathing through his nose, snot bubbling and popping from his nostrils. Other beds with other patients stretched out in the distance. A wooden wall was behind Armand, and on a tiny black chalkboard, his last name was scribbled. Other chalkboards were hung up behind the other beds.
Armand sat up, winced in pain from his side. There was a sloppy bandage there, stained with blood, and he was wearing underwear, nothing else. His jumpsuit was in a pile at the end of the bed, which had a gray sheet and a single wool blanket. The air smelled of dirt and soiled things and old medicine
He felt sweaty and cold. In Toronto, the hospitals were clean, safe and warm. Once he had been a patient overnight in the main Imperial Hospital, after hurting his back when falling off a horse during a polo lesson. There he had a private room, wireless, a switch that if thrown, would bring in an attendant or nurse or --–
Stop, he thought. Just stop. Like MacKenzie said, it didn’t exist anymore. Not at all. What counted was what was here.
The Patterson brothers from the train. They had finally gotten their revenge and had done it so well. They hadn’t been part of that foursome in the warehouse, so nothing could be pinned on them.
Who thought they could have been so creative?
Armand’s roommate to the right still lay quiet, snot burbling from his nose. The roommate to the left was still moaning but at least he seemed aware. The scrawled chalk name on the blackboard said Dickinson.
“Hey,” Armand called to him. “Monsieur Dickinson. How long have you been here?”
He glanced over at Armand, fists clenched, eyes red-rimmed and unfocused. “The fools. I told ‘em that I could get better, if I got the right care. The fools. Now look at me. Look at me! How can I work in the woods now, with just one leg, eh? The fools… I get out in three years… what use am I gonna be in three years, eh?”
Armand asked, “How did it happen?” but he didn’t seem to listen. “The fools,” he kept repeating, “the fools…”
It was a long day. His side throbbed and burned and it hurt to breathe, and it was hard to find a comfortable spot. The bed was worse than his barracks bunk, with a couple of broken springs jabbing into his buttocks. By the bed was a counter with a metal pitcher and glass. Armand poured some water. It was warm and flecked with bits of rust, but he drank it anyway,
“The fools… the fools…”
Armand closed his eyes, tried to ease his breathing.
Eventually a doctor with watery eyes, a two-day old growth of beard, and a stained white coat came by. He examined Armand’s bandage with soiled and thick fingers, his breath smelling of booze. “You’ll survive. If you don’t get infected. If I didn’t miss anything while stitching you up. Otherwise, you’ll be out in the field again in a week or so.”
“It hurts,” Armand said. “Hurts like hell. Can’t you give me something for the pain?”
The doctor shook his head, belched. “We’re short this month, of bandages, needles, everything. What I do have, I have to save for your companion over there, the one with half a leg. I’ll see you again in a few days.”
“But –--“
No buts. He was moving down the other row of beds, carrying his black leather case, talking and probing, moving along, and Armand lay back down.
Hurting. Still hurting.
In the morning the lights came back up, and Armand rubbed at his eyes, wincing at the burning and tugging at his side. His one-legged companion was still there, gently snoring, and he glanced over at his other companion.
His face was white, almost the color of the sheets
Snot was no longer burbling from his nose.
Dead.
Armand coughed, wincing, and the sound woke up his neighbor, who instantly started murmuring, “The fools… the fools…”
He lay back on the bed. Damn wound seemed to hurt more than yesterday. There was a squeaking noise and a cart approached, being wheeled by two orderlies. A large metal pot was set on the top of the cart and after long, long minutes, they finally reached Armand. They looked like brothers, with thick beards, sunken-in cheeks, and dirty hands. Their white jackets and pants had faded to gray, and one said, “Breakfast, bud.”
Armand said, “This patient is dead.”
One orderly held a metal plate while the other slopped some white gruel into it. He shrugged. “Right now, we’re givin’ out food. Body’s somebody else’s problem.”
He handed Armand the plate and a spoon. Armand put the plate and spoon on his bed, clambered out and went over to his dead companion, where he pulled a dirty gray sheet over the dead man’s face.
Armand got back into his bed, careful not to spill anything. The man with one leg said, “What the hell was that all about?”
He picked up the spoon, started shoveling t
he cold gruel into his mouth. “Couldn’t eat with him looking at me like that.”
“So what. He’s dead, he doesn’t give a crap.”
“Yeah,” Armand said, “but I do.”
The orderlies came back and took the plates and spoons, and Armand laid on his side, breathing a bit easier, trying to find someplace, anyplace that was comfortable, but it was hard to do. After a while of tossing and turning, and of ignoring the murmurs of his one-legged neighbor --– “the fools, the fools, the fools” –-- Armand managed to get into some sort of daze where the time at least seemed to pass.
“Book, something to read, book, something to read,” said an approaching male voice. Armand muttered an obscenity at him and then there was laugh.
“I’ll be,” a familiar voice said. “Young sire, I thought they had brought you up better than that.”
Armand opened his eyes, raised himself up, and felt his mouth drop open in surprise. Tompkins Earl. His bunk companion on the train trip out west. He looked fine, well-dressed and rested, and his eyes were merry and twinkling. Before him was a cart, piled high with old books.
“What… what are you doing here?” Armand stammered.
“We all have our duties to perform for the empire,” he said with a touch of formality in his voice. “I’m fortunate mine is in the prison library.”
“Library? We have a library?”
“Yep. In the administrative section of the camp, away from all you riff-raff,” and he added a smile at that last phrase, to show he meant nothing by the casual insult. “I’m also fortunate that I’m pretty much left alone to do my job, set my own hours and pace.”
“I’ve never seen a book since I’ve been here,” Armand said.
He picked up a handful of battered volumes. “Oh, we have them, but there’s rules. The camp director doesn’t want the workers here polluting their minds whilst in the barracks. They should reflect on their crime and punishment. So books are only available here in the infirmary and a few other places.”
“Where in hell do you get books, Tompkins?”
His smile widened. “From the royal family, that’s who.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. Princess Madeline, the spinster aunt of our glorious emperor, is a believer in literacy and rising up the standards of the poor wretched prisoners in our empire. So she pays for books to be scattered throughout the islands of her nephew’s prison system.”
Armand had a flash of memory, recalling Teresa Dumont and the sailing trip and the reception she had attended with Michelle, and the talk of books and food and it was like Tompkins was reading his mind, for he dropped the books back into the cart. “Of course, if the old bat spent some sovereigns on better food, or maybe bankrolling a doctor who’s not a drunk, then that’d be something to celebrate. But I’m being rude. Young sire, how did you get injured?”
Armand rolled over, showed him his bandaged ribs. “I was attacked. Stabbed. In one of the rehab warehouses.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“No, I didn’t recognize them. But I think I know who arranged it. The Patterson brothers.”
Tompkins raised an eyebrow. “Those young fools? Really?”
“Who else?” Armand asked
“Mmm,” he said. “I don’t know… but if I were you, I’d be careful, young sire. Now, care for a book? I don’t want to be late getting back to my quarters. I’m trusted to go through the camp and distribute books but I don’t want to violate that trust.”
“Sure. Anything would be fine.”
So two books were passed to Armand and Tompkins said, “I’ll be back tomorrow. And be safe. Someone arranging to have you knifed… that takes a lot of hate, a lot of drive. Maybe it was the Patterson brothers, maybe it wasn’t. But they didn’t succeed this time. Make sure they don’t succeed again.”
The first of the two books he gave Armand was old, repaired by tape and string, and looked to be pre-war. Some of the pages had been torn out but there were enough left behind to make sense. The book was a collection of stories written about the early settlers in the Empire, back when it was just wilderness and the First Peoples lived here. It was written in an archaic style of Franglish, and though he had a hard time puzzling out some of the sentences, at least it made the day pass by. So he spent some hours reading about fur trappers and traders and fishermen, while the dead man next to him stayed dead, and while the one-legged man groaned and tossed about, murmuring “the fools, the fools.”
Supper of a sausage and boiled potatoes came by as light began to fade out beyond the cloudy windows. Armand didn’t even bother asking the orderlies about moving the body next to him. He ate the sausage –-- not caring what kinds of animal bits were shoved in –-- and the potatoes as well. A while later, the plate and spoon were retrieved, and he used a chamber pot under his bed, and that was that.
Now bored now with the tales of old and trying to decipher the old style Franglish, Armand picked up the second, thinner volume. It was more recent --– only a couple of decades old –-- and it was a political textbook, about the Compact that governed the Empire, and the roles of all the peoples contained within. It was a pretty dry piece of reading, but he plowed through it, hoping it would eventually put him to sleep. But in a chapter on the responsibility and value of the nobility system, Armand read a section that made him sit up with a start, gasping with pain.
The section was on treason, a part of the Compact that he was suddenly quite interested in, and he read and re-read that section until he had it memorized.
Then the light faded some more, and as the electric lamps overhead began to dim, Armand considered the approaching darkness and what Tompkins Earl had said. The Patterson brothers. Good on fists and bluster, but would they really have the means to hire four men to take him on? Really? The infirmary seemed dark indeed, with murmurs and groans and voices from the other patients. Armand got out of bed, and fumbled some in the dark, and then limped across the wooden floors, until he found an empty bed that smelled of stale urine and crawled in, and tried to sleep during the long night
In the morning Armand went back to his old bed, and the one-legged man looked over and said, “My God, the bastards… looked at what they did to that old dead fool over there.”
The body of the bald and sutured man still remained in the other bed, mouth open, flesh now swollen, and the sheets had been tugged away.
A metal shank was sticking out of his chest.
“The fools… killing a dead man. What’s the point of that, hunh? Killing a dead man… almost as bad as taking away my leg, the fools…”
Above the twice-dead man was the chalkboard Armand had replaced last night. His name was over the dead man’s bed. Armand switched the chalkboards back --– saw that his name was Dugan --– and said, “Thank you, Monsieur Dugan. Thank you.”
Armand yanked the shank out of his chest, and then tossed it under the bed. He waited and breakfast came. One orderly said to the other, “Damn it, didn’t you give word that there was a deader here, waiting to be taken out?”
His companion slopped gruel onto Armand’s metal plate. “Thought you did.”
“Crap, no, I didn’t.”
“Then we’ll do it later. He doesn’t care now, does he?”
“Yeah, I guess not.”
Armand ate his morning meal without tasting it and then waited. He was still being hunted, being hunted bad enough that someone was in the infirmary last night, wanting to finish the job. The Patterson brothers… no, this wasn’t their work. It had to be somebody else. The morning seemed to drag on and then the tightness in his chest eased as he saw Tompkins Earl come back in, pushing his cart. When he finally reached Armand, he handed back the book of folklore. “Get me out of here.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” Armand said. “Somebody tried to kill me again last night.”
“The Patterson brothers --–“
“No,” Armand said. “Not the Pattersons. Wh
at happened to me at the warehouse, that was beyond their skills. And then --– “ Armand motioned to his dead neighbor “—- there was last night. I moved the chalkboard with my name on it. Put it behind this dead fellow next to me, and I slept in a different bed. When I came back here a few hours ago, he was dead again. Somebody put a shank into his chest.”
Tompkins had a book in his hand, slightly trembling. “What do you think I can do?”
“You said you set your own hours, your own pace. Then set something else. Tell your overseer you need an assistant. An educated fellow who can read, write, and do accounting. Whatever you think can work.”
His eyes tightened and he looked distressed. “Young sire… helping you on the train, that was one thing. You traded companionship and that fine bread, and I helped you defend yourself. But this is very different. I hate to sound mercenary but one of the many things I’ve learned here is that nothing is for free. Payment must be made. So I ask you. Why should I ask my overseers to take you on?”
“Because I can give you payment,” Armand said, looking right at him. “Half now, half later.”
He cocked his head like a dog hearing a far-off sound, trying to determine whether it was friend or foe. “What can you offer me now?”
“Intelligent companionship, like on the train. Good conversation, debate. Something to liven up your evenings.”
A short nod. “That’s enticing, but I’m afraid it’s not enough. What’s the second payment?”
“Your freedom,” Armand said.
Tompkins’ face whitened. “That is nothing to be joked about.”
“I’m not joking,” he said.
Tompkins looked around, no doubt to see if anyone was overhearing this lunacy. “I don’t really think you’re in a position to offer me my freedom, young sire.”
Armand held up the second book given to him yesterday. “Recognize this? It’s a scholarly study of the Compact. The laws and rules that govern our Empire. Article twelve, section fourteen…”
The Noble Prisoner (Empire of the North Book 2) Page 6
