by Adam Roberts
‘There is Montmorillon,’ said Gymnaste slowly. ‘They call it the Land of the Headless.’
‘Yes,’ said Mark Pol impatiently. ‘I have heard of this place. But is it truly a Land of the Headless? Or is it merely a province where many of the headless have gone, such that they form a higher proportion of the general population? There they go to work the mines, isn’t it so? Perhaps you would be happy in the mines, Gymnaste: in those low-ceilinged tunnels, with light-amplifiers fitted to your epaulettes, servicing the mining machines and lugging cargo. Perhaps that would suit you. But it would not suit me. Even though I no longer have a face upon which to feel the sunlight, I would prefer to live above ground. Are you of the same mind, Jon?’
‘I have no strong feelings on the subject of working subterraneously,’ I said. ‘It is merely my whim to travel to the country. My’ - and I hesitated, but it was necessary that I become used to the locution - ‘my victim also lives in Doué, and I do not wish to encounter her. It would distress her, and discommode me. Better to leave the city altogether, and continue life in a new environment.’
‘I see,’ said Mark Pol. ‘I see.’
But this was the direct opposite of the truth. In truth my victim no longer lived in Doué, for she had moved to her family’s estate in Cainon. Her family name was Benet. My only wish (and I had nothing else with which to give purpose to my life) was to see her again. And so I planned to travel to Cainon. I had been revolving possibilities in my mind ever since coming to the House of Friends: perhaps to travel incognito, to apply to the Estate of Benets as a labourer under a false identity. Without my head I was virtually unrecognisable as the person I had once been. It could be that the Estate of Benets hired headless workers for menial chores; such was a common charity amongst the more devout families. Then, working on the estate, I might contrive a chance to see Bernardise. For this was the name of the woman for whose sake I had been decapitated. But, naturally, I could tell nobody this, since if it became clear that I was travelling specifically to see Bernardise I would be prevented, by law. A headless man can be imprisoned, as can any other person. A headless man can suffer any penalty under the law except decapitation- and the law says that should he commit a second crime for which that is the punishment there is only the final execution, and burial in a criminal’s grave.
I did not tell Siuzan Delage that this was my plan; and nor did I tell these two other headless men. ‘I have experience of working on farms,’ I told them, ‘from my youth. The work agrees with me. Besides, one of the headless can hardly pick and choose which work he wants to do. I will be lucky to earn the merest labourer’s wage.’
‘True,’ said Mark Pol. ‘Too true.’
‘How will you travel?’ asked the taciturn Gymnaste.
‘My friend means to ask,’ interrupted Mark Pol, ‘how much money you possess. He means to ask, will you fly? Or take the overland? Or will you, perhaps, walk?’ He laughed again his artificial laugh. ‘Of course, you must know where you are going before you can buy a ticket.’
‘I have no particular plans,’ I said disingenuously. ‘Besides, my funds are very limited. I spent most of my monies on the law, and what little was left paid for my prostheses. I have, perhaps, fifteen totales, and some odd divizos.’ I thought about the overland fare to Cainon, a hundred or more miles distant: it would be at least ten totales. I did not like the thought of arriving at Cainon with only five totales in my account.
‘I will walk,’ I said expansively.
‘I shall accompany you,’ said Mark Pol. ‘If you have no objections?’
‘None,’ I said.
‘Will you come too,’ Mark Pol asked Gymnaste, as if on the spur of the moment. ‘Or do you have other plans?’
Gymnaste was silent for a while, and then said: ‘I will walk.’
Four
Our walk to Cainon lasted four days and three nights. My account of it need not detain the reader any longer than twenty pages of this text; but I must tell you about it because so much of what followed was shaped by it. From this walk so much else, both evil and good, flowed. These few days have proved to be the dominant event of my life.
That Siuzan declared her intention to accompany us upon this walk did not, perhaps, surprise me as much as it ought to have done. She talked of her desire to go to Cainon and explore the possibilities of mission work in that city. The walk, she said, would be a pilgrimage. We were all pilgrims.
We were, but in ways neither she nor I could anticipate. I fear I flattered myself that Siuzan accompanied us because of some indefinable magnetism of mine. Headless as I was, infatuated as I was becoming, I could not see clearly, alas. But then again: why might not a woman love a man, though he lacks a head? Why does any woman fall in love with any man? Not for the outsides, or insides, of their heads, surely. For their hearts, surely.
We set out early one day, walking through the streets of Doué before most of the population were awake. Eager to be out of the city and away from the judgemental eyes of so many citizens, we agreed to take a central bus to the northern outskirts of the city. This cost us seventy divizos each, and Mark Pol grumbled at the expense, even so little an outgoing as this. ‘I see no reason why we should not have walked proudly through the city,’ he said, ‘holding our—’ And he stopped, with an electronic snickering sound. ‘I was going to say,’ he added, ‘holding our heads high, but that is not the best expression, perhaps.’
‘Can you not afford seventy divizos?’ Siuzan Defarge asked him, earnestly. It may have been that she was thinking of gifting him some money. Here I intervened crossly.
‘Do not pity him his lack of money,’ I said. ‘He spent more on his prostheses than either of us - the very best in visual and auditory augmentation. Nothing but the best was good enough for—’
Mark Pol laughed. ‘Are you envious?’ he demanded.
‘—good enough for the luxurious Mark Pol—’
‘Envious?’ he repeated. ‘Are you envious, Sieur Cavala?’
‘There is nothing you have that merits envy; nor do I covet anything you have ever possessed,’ I returned, rather stiffly. I cannot say where my dislike of this man came from, except to note that it was there from the very first time I met him.
‘The bus is stopping,’ said Gymnaste, standing up.
‘I will say only this,’ said Siuzan in a severe voice. ‘If you, Mark Pol, and you, Jon, intend to bicker and fight throughout the whole of this trek, it will become quickly tedious for myself and Gymnaste. Most tedious, indeed.’
I felt the sting of this rebuke keenly, for the last thing I wished was to offend Siuzan; and so I resolved at that very moment to leave Mark Pol be - neither to provoke him, nor to allow him to provoke me. But I did not remain true to this resolution. The more time I spent in the company of the chittering, preening, headless Mark Pol the more furious I became, and this fury frequently spilled out.
We began to walk, and the sun low to our right pulled tremendously long shadows from the putty-stuff of our bodies and draped them over the objects to our left. Yet even these early morning shadows, longer than serpents, made clear the headlessness of our bodies, shadow-arms trailing from flared shadow-shoulders. The valves in our neck stumps clicked quietly as each of us breathed in, and breathed out. This regular percussion from the three of us, synchronising into a single beat and then falling away from it again into intricate syncopation, aligning and dealigning, this was the constant accompaniment of our trek.
We walked for twenty minutes and came into an outlying industrial zone of Doué. Here we saw some other headless, making their way into a large factory building for their morning shift. It was not clear what the factory produced, or even (to be truthful) if it was a factory at all. Perhaps it was a prison, or an office, or a warehouse, I do not know. There are only a small number of industries prepared to employ the headless, and those that do pay poorly for what is often dangerous work, preferring cheap headless to expensive robotic devices.
My v
isual software was still strange to my senses, such that the scene acquired a more vivid and surreal aspect than otherwise it would. I might, in former days, have passed such a place without a second glance; but now I lingered staring at the irregular line of headless, all dressed in purple or scarlet overalls, all making their way across a tarmac field littered with boxes and randomly parked trolleys, beneath the peach-pink and treacle-yellow sky of a summer dawn. Their lack of heads gave them a caricature look, as if they were so despondent at their lowly jobs that they were hanging their heads far below their shoulder-blades. They made a sulky-looking, lumpish crew.
Because of the nature of this workforce we found a café in which to break our fast that did not forbid the headless from entering, or make them eat in the alley down the side, or lecture them on their duty of atonement, or any of the things most eateries did in the city. Inside, indeed, Siuzan Delage was the only patron with a head; and since the menu was mostly tasteless sludge, the cheapest of foods, palatable only to those without tongues to taste it, she did not eat.
‘I have been thinking,’ said Mark Pol, breaking the silence (because he could never bear to remain silent for long), ‘about my longer-term future.’
None of us replied.
‘Have you not, my fellow decapitatees, given thought to the matter? This countryside walk up to Cainon is all very good, but we have many years of life left to us. And the employment opportunities for the headless are rare. Surely observing the workforce in this dour place brings these thoughts into your minds as well?’ Even when created by a neutral electronic device, through a speaker, rather than out of his flesh, there was some unmistakable and unpleasant tone in his voice: a smugness, a selfishness. I recalled my new resolution to leave him be and though I shuddered privately I said nothing.
‘I am glad to hear you planning for the long term,’ said Siuzan.
‘Your gladness gladdens me, chère lady,’ said Mark Pol, in winsome imitation of the hero from courtly love. This infuriated me; for it sounded too close to flirtation, and the thought of this grotesque truncated murderer setting his sights so high as the pure lady Siuzan, even in jest, was too revolting. Yet still I strove not to antagonise the fellow, and limited myself to speaking in general terms.
‘We have no future,’ I growled. ‘It is fruitless to speculate. We must endure, and be grateful for any charity offered us.’
‘My dear melancholic poet,’ said Mark Pol. ‘But I disagree! There are many options.’
‘Name one.’
‘We might,’ said Mark Pol, ‘join the army.’
This had not occurred to me. ‘The military?’
‘Providing only that their prostheses are of a good enough quality,’ said Mark Pol, ‘the headless make excellent soldiery. They are far less vulnerable than headed troops, the head being (of course) the most fragile portion of any body in combat. You present a less dangerous profile to the enemy if you are headless, and yet you can fight as well as any man.’ He put out the palms of his hands. ‘Some headless join the army for no better reason than that they are thereby guaranteed the better prostheses, and a regular supply of endocrine pharmocopies.’
‘I have no experience as a fighter,’ I said.
Mark Pol put his palms out again, a gesture that seemed to substitute for a smile in his body language. ‘That matters not in the least,’ he said. ‘For would they not train us? Of course they would.’
‘But it would be repugnant to me to become, in effect, a professional killer—’ I said. I stopped myself, remembering that Mark Pol had been beheaded for murder. But rather than being offended by my remark, he misinterpreted it.
‘I, too, would not like to put myself in danger. I confess, it is the idea of a consistent and uninterrupted endocrine supply that mostly attracts me. It is no easy matter to guarantee a proper supply of endocrine chemicals, or so I understand. This is what other headless have told me. The pouches of pharmocopy are expensive, though vital, and many headless work long hours and spend most of their money only to obtain them. Nor can we simply do without them, or we will sicken and die. But in the army, the highest quality of synthetic endocrine materials are on guaranteed supply.’
‘Perhaps,’ I hazarded, ‘this might be thought a trivial reason for enlisting? ’
‘Indeed,’ he said. We fell silent. Gymnaste was spooning pap into the valve at the top of his neck. This action made a series of clicking and scraping noises.
After a while, irrepressible, Mark Pol began speaking again. ‘I believe that, on the world of Sung, the soldiers have their heads removed and stored prior to battle. Imagine that! The heads are cut away, but carefully, surgically, and kept chilled. After the battle the heads are reattached, specific nano-pharmakos reattaching the nervous pathways, as good as new in two days. Soldiers are thereby assured that their heads will suffer no injury in the battle.’
‘This is idle speculation,’ I said. ‘A mere fantasy.’
‘Perhaps,’ agreed Mark Pol, ‘you are correct. Or did I only see such scenes in a drama? Perhaps I have confused fiction and real life.’ He laughed.
‘Time isn’t loitering,’ said Siuzan, ‘and neither should we. Gentlemen, shall we go?’
We stepped out and walked away, making towards the north. The city fell behind us, shrinking from tall buildings into single-storey, from close-packed to more sparsely arranged. The ground between was parched by the summer, a scrub upon which strands of grass grew brittle as crystal, all very yellow and tan, all very pale and dry.
This whole time Mark Pol chattered on. He commented upon the landscape, and the nature of the road. He goaded me with references to the barrenness of my poetry, and his preference for music over poetry (‘Why must there be any words set to music at all?). He laughed. He commented that I was sweating more than the others, and that I was unused to physical hardship. I swallowed my anger and did not reply.
Instead I focused upon a separate irritation of my walk. For I had no staff. It cannot be denied that, for any lengthy walk or trek, a staff - a wand of wood reaching from the ground up to the walker’s shoulder - makes the process very much smoother and easier. I do not know why this might be, but I do know (having enjoyed several walking holidays in the Apollo foothills to the east of the Mild Sea before my disgrace) that it is so. And now, as I trekked to Cainon, I regretted my not obtaining a similar staff, at first ruefully, and then more bitterly. My feet began aching very soon after beginning the walk. I felt the friction of my pedestrian action in my heels, along the sides of my feet, in my knees and hips.
Why had I not thought of giving myself a staff?
At mid-morning we crossed the wide road-bridge over the River Goidel, which is the main river of Doué, flowing from the north-west into the city and out again into the Mild Sea. North of this landmark there were no buildings; only the outback landscape patched here and there by grass. It was a baked land. The sun was high enough now to drop a palpable heat upon us. It marked a brimming white circle in my field of vision; and its light, perhaps owing to some glitch in the software, registered almost as a pulsing throb, such as is produced by a badly tuned neon bulb. The river eeled away towards the eastern horizon, a very striking dark blue against the yellow.
On the far side of the bridge we crossed a wide star of tarmac, a surface marked with the monotonous runes of truck tyre rubber. This was the junction of several roads, one to the city in the west, another east, following the river for a while before turning off to other cities (to Hainly, to Crowne) and another. A smartpole sat inert in the centre of this junction waiting for traffic to direct. Our footsteps did not disturb it.
Dust trickled over the road like fluid gauze, moved by an intermittent ground breeze. My trachea felt dry as I breathed, and the click of my throat valve was increasingly noisy.
‘You are not used to such exercise,’ Mark Pol said again, ‘despite your well-developed physique. Gym-built muscles, perhaps?’
I restrained the urge to reply in anger, and
I held my peace.
The roads went straight east and straight west and straight north, and a smaller road curled away to the north-east. It was the north road we took, walking in silence for a while.
We saw no trucks at all for another half hour, by which time the river was beyond the horizon behind us and there was nothing but yellow scrub in all directions. Then one of those enormous robot-driven lorries announced its presence with a distant grinding noise, a groan which swelled to a shout and swelled and bore down upon us. It passed us with a roar to shame the largest lion, and a swaying sidewind rocked us on our heels in the aftermath. Then it was receding, shrinking in size and diminuendoing its noise.
