The Stars Askew

by Rjurik Davidson

  “You look like a bird, number 2591.” Irik stopped beside Armand. “Looks like you’re on your way to happiness.”

  With a grim smile, Armand glanced at Irik. The laughing eyes, the sculpted high cheekbones, the finely shaped forehead—the man was quite handsome.

  They followed the line of prisoners, led now by guards, along a winding road. As they walked, they passed strange melted red statues that threw off the same weird light. Bodies were barely discernible beneath the melted forms: arms and legs; tilted heads; mouths open in wonder or terror, or perhaps both; eyes staring wide.

  “We must escape this place,” Armand said.

  Irik laughed softly. “You think so?”

  Constructed from wooden uprights and wire mesh, the high walls of a camp rose up before them. Guards stood on high towers behind huge bowless, pressure-powered ballistae fixed to rotating stands. Past the camp, a factory pumped out smoke from some furnace. There, prisoners loaded a train with metal barrels containing bloodstone.

  The newcomers shuffled underneath the camp’s sturdy gate, where they broke into a run toward a row of water pumps lining one wall. Armand found himself struggling against the rushing bodies, pushing them aside. As one prisoner pumped the water, others cupped their hands, drinking frantically. Someone jostled Armand. He shoved back and saw an old man with his shock of white hair fall down. But Armand didn’t care: he needed water. He held his hands beneath the pump. The water tasted cool and sweet, better than any drink he had ever tasted. He could not drink enough of it.

  Again and again he cupped his hands until he was bloated and thought he might vomit.

  Finally he stepped back to see Irik looking on calmly. The man’s self-control was enviable. Perhaps it had been steeled through long years of deprivation as an oppositionist in Varenis. When Irik was finally able to approach the water pumps, he did so without rushing. This was the man who Armand needed to ally himself with if he were to survive.

  Eventually one of the black-clad guards stood before them and pointed to a row of low-lying buildings across a central square. “Your bunks are numbered. Today you rest—you are lucky. Tomorrow you will begin work. Then you’ll know the meaning of life in Camp X, and you will curse the day you betrayed Varenis.”

  * * *

  When the bell rang in the evening, Armand dragged himself from his tiny cot and stepped out into the drab yard. He surveyed the camp, which was composed of primitive wooden buildings circling the central square: four long sleeping halls, a row of outhouses, an infirmary and mess hall (which were the largest and best constructed of the buildings), a small carpentry shop and mechanics shop. There was no beauty here, just brutal functionality. Cracks gaped between the buildings’ timber beams, which the weather had stripped of most of their paint.

  Apparently, the guards lived off site somewhere, but there were always several of them standing by the ballistae on the wall, ready to strike down escapees or troublemakers.

  Darkness loomed over the valley; the evening air was cool, intimating the winter to come. Through the wood and wire walls, Armand could just see a second camp across the valley in the distance. That was where the women were taken, he presumed.

  Along the road from the factory, prisoners trudged toward him. When they entered the camp, Armand followed them into the mess hall. He collected a plate of food from prisoners who worked in the kitchen, and spotted Irik seated at one of the tables nearby. The oppositionist was seated between two other grim-faced prisoners.

  Armand made his way to the table. “Excuse me,” he said to one of the prisoners as he tried to sit between him and Irik.

  Irik looked up, amused, then back to his plate.

  The prisoner bared his blackened teeth and pushed Armand back.

  “Can you just let me—” Armand tried once more.

  The prisoner growled like an animal. Then he was standing, the number 2267 sewn on his muscled chest, which was now directly before Armand’s face. Armand looked up, past the scar that ran across the man’s neck—perhaps someone had slashed him with a knife—and into the lurking brutality of his expression. He was all rippling muscle, like one of those fighting dogs that people dragged around the Lavere in Caeli-Amur.

  Prisoner’s 2267’s shove was rapid and forceful. Armand stepped back, lost his balance, regained it briefly, then his plate crashed to the floor, upside down.

  The man faced Armand, his eyes unmoved, his massive hands clenched, ready to smash into something. The hall now fell silent. Hundreds of eyes were on Armand. Only the group of barbarians—who apparently were allowed to retain the beads wound into their beards and feathers in their long hair—continued eating as if nothing had happened.

  The sound of a chair scraping the floor broke the silence. A man stood from his place at the head of a central table close to the kitchen. His pale moonlike face looked coldly on; his eyes, equally circular, were blank and devoid of warmth. There was something imperious about that look, which was offset by the man’s babyish face. This incongruous combination made him seem all the more terrible, as if he were an ancient boy-king looking over the scattered bodies of his enemies on a desolate battlefield. There was something familiar about him too, and Armand tried to place him.

  “Bendik. Enough,” said the moonfaced man.

  Prisoner 2267—whose name was Bendik, apparently—sat back down and resumed eating.

  As the moonfaced man sat quietly, the prisoners turned back to their food, leaving Armand to pick up his plate. Sadly, his pasty food was now spread over the floor.

  Armand returned to the kitchen, but they refused to give him more food. The elderly kitchen hand crossed his arms. “What have you got to offer me, then, boy?”

  By the time Armand returned to rescue his pasty meal from the floor, it had already been scooped up by others.

  Desolate, he found a half-empty table populated by those most afflicted by the bloodstone disease. About half of them picked perfunctorily at the plates before them. The others stared into space, their focus turned inward on whatever terrible process was running wild inside them. One of them ran his hand over his arm, its veins crystallizing a deep crimson. “It’s starting. I can feel my thoughts changing, like there’s a low hum in the background. A distant hum beneath the surface of things.” He looked up at Armand. “It’s not so bad, you know. You enjoy it after a while.” He started to cry softly.

  Another prisoner with scarlet eyes looked at Armand. One side of his face seemed frozen, so that when he spoke, only half of his mouth moved. “The bones move, but we’re not aware of it. The hum of things. Humans—we live in such a state of hurry, always trying to get here or there. Always straining, cutting things down, building them up, cutting them down again. Restlessness. But the stones know there are slower rhythms, longer cycles. They can move, though. Soon we will hear their thunder.”

  The number 3329 was sewn onto the prisoner’s overalls. He took a shallow breath from the side of his mouth. Inside it, his teeth were as red as his tongue. Shades of crimson played across his skin. The bloodstone disease was moving through him in different concentrations. His eyes flicked open suddenly and he leaned forward, coughing at first, then a flow of red liquid spewed from him onto the table. Armand leaped back as the liquid instantly crystallized into bloodstone, though Armand knew this would contain none of the mineral’s thaumaturgical properties—those would be retained inside the body.

  With horror, Armand walked away from the table. Many of the other tables were now empty. He shuffled, ravenous, toward the door, when an arm pulled him to a bench.

  Irik pushed his plate toward the now-empty space opposite him and nodded toward it: he’d saved half his meal for Armand.

  Armand fell upon the paste, scooping it into his mouth with abandon. Each terrible tasting mouthful was like a gift from the gods, and his body awoke from its long-suffering dormancy.

  Irik grabbed his arm again. “Slowly. You’ll make yourself sick.”

  Armand spooned the p
aste into his mouth with greater care. The food was gone too quickly, but at least it was something.

  “I will repay you,” said Armand.

  Irik ran his hand over his chin. “That seems unlikely.”

  * * *

  Armand’s bunk was hard, and though he was exhausted, he couldn’t sleep. Heavy rain rattled against the roof. Though other prisoners snored and moaned around him, the room echoed with the ravings of Prisoner 3329. “Into lines of greatness, forever we fall. Let me lie down and rest. There is no time for this. There’s never any time.”

  Somewhere a child was crying. They would die fast, Armand realized. Not even a father could save them.

  Armand thought of Irik’s kindness. How strange that the oppositionist should be so generous. But Armand had come to realize that one’s political opinions were of little relevance to personal kindness. An oppositionist might be caring, just as a traditionalist like Valentin might be selfish.

  Prisoner 3329 called out, “Tomorrow. Yesterday!” Then he said, as if to someone in the room, “Humanity is finished. A thought doesn’t need to be short. No, it can stretch like time itself. Can you feel it? I don’t feel right. Something’s not right. I don’t feel like I’m the same. Am I the same? I can feel it, running inside me. Oh dear, oh gods.”

  SIXTEEN

  A deep and ominous bell rang in the morning. Armand lay in his cot, his body refusing to move, his eyelids impossibly heavy. Around him, prisoners were shifting slowly, each in their own hell. Eventually Armand dragged himself from his bed, his limbs heavy, bereft of energy.

  In the dining hall, he sat silently next to Irik as they ate thin porridge. Around him, the prisoners looked on with gaunt and broken faces. Many seemed skeletal, as if the men had already died and their skin had shrunk around their bones. Misery hung in the air.

  When they shuffled into the muddy square in the middle of the buildings, cold misty rain was already sweeping across it. The prisoners lined up, as one would in an army barracks. Immediately the cold seeped into Armand’s bones, and he started to shiver.

  To his right, he noticed a smaller group of prisoners lined up at a right angle to the main group. At its head stood the moonfaced leader, who Armand felt certain he had met somewhere.

  “Who is that?” he whispered to Irik.

  “His name’s Tiedmann.”

  “Oh,” said Armand, the name rattling around in his mind.

  Next to Tiedmann stood Prisoner 7624, who had supervised their arrival the day before. He ran his fingers along the indentation in his forehead as he examined the prisoners. This smaller group stood straighter; their uniforms were cleaner, their boots newer.

  Commander Raken paraded across the square, examining the prisoners, poking at the first line with his black baton. He lifted a barbarian’s long braided hair, examined its beads and feathers closely. “We’re going to have to shave you after all. Special dispensation so you would behave! We were kind to you, and for what? So you can infest us with lice?”

  The barbarian trembled slightly, in fear or rage.

  Then Raken turned on his heel. “To work!”

  The children were left behind to clean and carry out odd jobs, while the men, surrounded by guards, were marched out of the camp’s gates toward the factory. Near the factory wall the train waited. Through its open doorways, Armand could see the carriages were already filled with metal barrels, marked with BLOODSTONE in shadowy white letters.

  Behind them, he noticed Tiedmann leading his team to the mechanics shop. Meanwhile, some of the Northerners headed for the carpentry shop. That was where you had to work if you wanted to survive, thought Armand.

  “Eyes forward.” A guard slapped Armand with the flat of his pike.

  Helpless, Armand followed the rest of the prisoners through the gates, past a grim cemetery. Copses of birch, leaves yellow with the onset of autumn, dotted the landscape. Farther on were clusters of pines. The slate-gray sky seemed like a huge roof suspended between the mountaintops.

  Prisoner 7624 stepped in front of the factory building. A number of prisoners congregated in front of him: The factory workers, Armand reasoned.

  The remaining prisoners broke rank and pressed toward him. “Me. Me.”

  “Back.” He sneered at them, his black teeth like crumbling tombstones jutting from the rotten ground.

  Two of the accompanying guards stepped beside him, their pikes lowered frighteningly.

  Prisoner 7624 picked out prisoners, who stood to one side. “You. You. You.”

  He pointed to Irik. “You at the back. The rest of you—on.”

  Armand followed the sorry remaining prisoners to a towering granite cliff. A dark opening was cut into its base, like the maw of some beast, calling them in and down to their deaths.

  On nearby rails rested wooden carts, like smaller replicas of train carriages. The prisoners broke into teams of eight, and a second supervisor assigned the new ones to the smaller groups. Armand didn’t want to think of the missing members, or what had happened to them. “Remember the quota of a cart for the day. You all know the penalty for failure.”

  A soft-spoken western barbarian—his hair tied behind his head and braided with wooden beads—directed Armand’s team to a cart. In unison, Armand’s team leaned against it. At first the cart barely moved, but once in motion, it whined and groaned its way into the cavernous opening of the mine.

  In the darkness of the tunnel, the cold bit at Armand’s ankles and hands, clamped down on his face. Someone lit a lamp, hung it from a hook on the side of the carriage, and they continued down to where the cold deepened into an icy clasping hand. The cart’s wheels whined as they turned, the sound echoing weirdly against the stone walls. Armand sensed the great weight of the mountain above him. To Armand it seemed as if they were eight little ants crawling along a tiny passage, only a little bubble of light in the darkness. From the roof above, drops of water periodically fell on Armand, running down his now sweat-soaked uniform.

  They plunged down a second tunnel. The roof closed in on them, and Armand had to watch that he did not bump his head. The ground was wetter and wetter beneath his feet, and he periodically slipped and almost fell. Anxiety gripped him, for he imagined that the timbering that held up the roof might give way at any moment and crush them all. At times he imagined he could hear the beams groaning. While the air above had been icy-cold, as they marched onward, it became leaden and hot. Armand felt his slick uniform grip his body.

  Eventually they reached the end of the underground passage. Their leader held up his lamp, illuminating the vein of bloodstone that ran like a jagged red scar in the black rock.

  “You’re on hewing, to begin with.” The Westerner unhooked a short-handled pickaxe and handed it to Armand. Five others joined him, and they began to strike at the rock face. The rock was hard, and the pick rang painfully in Armand’s arms when he struck it.

  “Don’t break that pick,” one of the others said.

  Armand gradually realized that the trick was to plunge the tool into a soft section of the rock, found at the edges of the bloodstone seam, and lever it away. Meanwhile, the remaining two workers sorted the bloodstone from the rest of the debris and scooped it into the cart.

  If he struck the bloodstone, it would occasionally shatter into little clouds. These he stepped away from, for inhaling the dust would infect him with the cancer. After he did this several times, the barbarian leaned toward him. “If we fail to meet the quota, you don’t want to be the one blamed.”

  Soon Armand was breathing in the bloodstone clouds as if they were the freshest air.

  Water dripped relentlessly down, and Armand’s feet were constantly soaked. Yet the temperature was feverishly unbearable. Before long, his back was in agony. To prevent it from seizing up, Armand changed his swing, reversing the positions of his hands on the pick’s handle. But soon enough he felt as if a hot spike had been driven through his spine. He stopped, rested for a moment, began again. So it went on interminab
ly, until Armand thought he might scream from the pain. He worked more and more slowly, aware that those beside him kept on relentlessly. Despair took him then, and he could feel his will breaking.

  Finally the Westerner poked him. “You’re on shoveling now. Make sure it’s the bloodstone, right?”

  The Westerner swapped the shovel for Armand’s pick. Armand began to scoop through the rubble, separating as much of the bloodstone as possible from the rest of the rock and scooping it into the cart. Some of the red crystal was still joined to some stone, but he did not worry about this—there was already plenty of similar material in the cart. It would be separated in the factory. Scooping was significantly easier than hewing, but after a while the prisoners rotated once more, and Armand again had the pick in his hand, the savage pain shooting down his back. When the Westerner called out, “Break,” Armand collapsed onto the ground, sweat-covered and in agony. As he lay, his back seized up in spasms.

  Armand pulled his knees up with the intention of rolling over so he could talk to the Westerner, but the idea of moving again was too much. Soon they would begin work again, and the agony would return. He breathed deeply, his face pressed against the cold wet stone, and waited with dread.

  Finally the barbarian called out again, and the prisoners took to their feet. Armand struggled up, took up a pick. Moments later he was again in torment. So the hours wore on, Armand stuck in some hellish trance. The heat, the wetness, the exhaustion, the suffering—he could not conceive of a more terrible combination. Mechanically, he continued, his mind dulled, the stone wall magnifying and distorting eerily.

  A deep rumble filled the tunnel, as if the mountain were breathing out. The timberwork above groaned, and dust fell from the roof. The other prisoners pressed themselves against the rock walls. The rumbling passed and the mountain rested once more, leaving Armand blinking in the whirling dust.

  Without a word, the prisoners began to work once more. So the hours wore on interminably. Finally the Westerner checked the cart and called something indistinguishable to the others, who hooked their tools onto the side of the cart. Together they began to push the cart back up along the tunnel.