Land Of The Headless (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Up the ramp and inside. I was nervous, a condition exacerbated by the superior stopping, pointing at a door and saying: ‘If you’re are toying us, you’ll pay for it, believe me.’

  ‘Superior!’ I barked.

  I knocked at the door.

  At ‘come in’ I opened and stepped through.

  The captain was standing at a chest-level desk. He appeared, at first sight, to be consulting a datascreen, although from where I was I could see that the screen was not switched on. There was a pile of slim plastic ovals on the desk before him, irregularly piled, each no bigger than a palm; perhaps medals, or music players, or simply plastic ornaments.

  The captain was clearly surprised to see us. ‘Greenwood?’

  The superior stood forward. ‘This headless recruit insists upon talking to you, Captain.’

  ‘Insists?’

  The superior ducked his chin down, but did not reply.

  ‘Well,’ he said, turning to me. ‘What is it?’

  He was the sort of man termed handsome by other men, but with that style of male beauty women find forbidding rather than beguiling. He wore a moustache, as black and glistening as if recently dipped in ink. This moustache followed the downward bowing contour of his upper lip, and was clipped into a precise tapering bow. His eyebrows (or his single eyebrow, for they were joined over the bridge of his nose into a single line of black) formed a larger upper echo of this shape, arcing over the whole face. His nose was straight and symmetrical, with a sculptural curl to each of his nostrils. His eyes were small.

  ‘I must report, Captain - confess, Captain.’

  ‘Confess?’ he said.

  ‘It is a burden upon my conscience,’ I said. ‘I must confess I have committed a crime.’

  The captain did not change his expression.

  ‘It is a serious crime, Captain,’ I said. ‘I regret to say - regret for my own sake, for the punishment will be my death. But I must confess that I . . . attacked a woman.’

  ‘Attacked a woman?’

  ‘A virtuous woman, whom I assaulted in the ugliest manner possible.’

  ‘Rape?’

  ‘Captain,’ I said, tipping my torso forward. ‘It is indeed that word. I am ashamed. The police questioned me and I denied the crime, hoping to save my life. I escaped into the army with the same aim. But the crime will not permit my conscience to settle. The attack happened a little way south of the city, in the scrublands.’

  ‘I’m truly, genuinely surprised by this,’ said the captain, speaking slowly. ‘I mean, surprised that you reckon this confession might interest me.’

  I considered his response. ‘Captain,’ I said. ‘My shame is greater that I must disappoint you.’

  He put his head a little on one side, with a tender expression on his face. ‘I’m afraid my position does not permit me the leisure to be concerned either with your shame, nor your crime.’

  ‘I ask you, respectfully,’ I said, ‘to deliver me to the police.’

  ‘That’s perfectly impossible,’ he said, turning away from me. ‘There is only one crime that interests me here, and this is wasting the time of a superior officer.’

  ‘Rape - which is to say, criminal adultery—’ I pointed out to him. ‘This is one of the three most serious crimes in . . .’ I was, I think, merely puzzled at his reaction, thinking he had not understood my confession.

  He said: ‘No, no.’

  ‘Captain,’ I said. ‘Forgive me for pressing you on this matter, but—’

  ‘The crimes you committed in the civilian world do not interest me in the least. You are new. But you will soon learn that the least infraction of military orders - let us say, stepping accidentally upon a newly watered lawn, or failing to address an officer as “Superior” - is infinitely more serious than rape, murder and heresy in the civilian world. That’s always been the way in armies, ever since men have walked without drawing their fists in the dirt as they go. You’ve nothing more to say to me.’

  ‘Captain, a moment more, I beg of you,’ I said. ‘There is more at stake here than simply my life! My victim is herself at risk of beheading. A virtuous woman—’

  The Captain put his head on one side again, with a tenderly curious expression upon it. ‘But why should she be beheaded if she was the victim of your assault?’

  ‘She refused to lay charges against me, knowing that it would cost me my life.’

  ‘Foolish of her,’ said the captain.

  ‘By making my confession to the police I would be saving her head.’

  ‘Some whore in the city,’ he said, his tone of voice not changing, ‘and I should care about her head? Let her lose her head. It won’t affect her trade. It may increase it.’

  ‘With respect, Captain,’ I said, becoming agitated, ‘she is not - that thing you name, but a virtuous woman.’

  ‘Whore or fool, I don’t care.’

  ‘Captain, so much depends upon me confessing the truth to—’

  ‘Carcass!’ the captain snapped, his voice suddenly hardening. ‘Back to your barrack with you. I shall not hand you to the civilian police. You’re to be a soldier.’

  With a thunderous sense of horror, that came upon me all at once, I recognised that he meant exactly what he said. He refused to report me to the police. These words from the captain were, in effect, sentencing Siuzan Delage to beheading. My terror and fury got the better of me. Much of this, I later reflected, was a fury at myself, for I had been given the chance on three separate occasions to confess and save her head, and I had not done so. The first time was from fear and a base instinct for survival. The second came about because I could not (believing that the law would never behead a woman it knew to be innocent) allow other people to see me in so vile a light - I who loved women above all else, to be thought a woman-hater! But this was merely pride. And the third time because I had decided my duty was to prevent the real culprit from committing more outrages before sacrificing myself. In all these three self-justifications I now saw only one thing: the despicable desire to clutch my miserable life to me, a cowardly refusal to accept the necessity of my death.

  I gathered myself. I must be a coward no longer. My task was clear: to make this captain understand the urgency of my need - the hideous injustice of any woman, but especially of so pure a woman as Siuzan Delage, suffering on my account -

  Stepping forward I blurted: ‘Captain, I beg that you must understand—’ The sentence was broken off by the sensation of my shins and thighs, my spine and ribs, flaming with overwhelming agony. I felt the thud of the floor against my chest. My arms jerked out. I quivered and jerked upon marble tiles. The horribly scintillating pain completely filled my body.

  Then, after too long, it ceased. I lay front-down on the floor. My breathing was very rapid. I heard, somewhere else in the room, the captain saying, ‘He screamed through the whole of that.’

  ‘He’s new, Captain,’ returned the superior. ‘He has spent merely one night. It hasn’t been conditioned out of him yet.’

  Later, reflecting on this, I came to understand one purpose of the sonostat, to condition us to swallow our screams when pain happened to us. But, naturally, this is a secondary function. The first is the same function as all torture. To ensure we know our inferiority. ‘Up, carcass!’ snapped the superior. ‘Or you’ll feel again the—’ But I was already on my legs, jittery though they were, up before he even finished his sentence. This was the effectiveness of the truncheon as a motivational device.

  Four

  The superior marched me back to the barrack, leaving me at the door. There was to be, it seemed, no further punishment.

  Stepping inside I discovered that breakfast had been entirely devoured. ‘In your absence,’ said Syrophoenician gaily, ‘we were all able to take a full ladle of porridge. Even Garten has ceased complaining.’

  I slumped onto my bed. ‘I am cursed,’ I said. ‘I have brought disaster upon a pure and undeserving woman.’

  ‘What’s that you say?’ asked
Syrophoenician.

  ‘I will not train,’ I said. ‘I will lie me down on this bed, and not rise from it. They can kill me. I don’t care if they do.’

  ‘This poet seems a glum sort,’ said Bil Costra, coming over.

  ‘Come along, Jon Cavala,’ said Syrophoenician. ‘You mustn’t speak this way. What was it that so burned inside you that you had to speak it to the captain, anyway?’

  ‘I went to request he handed me over to the police,’ I said, my stomach griping and swirling with the sense of horror of what I had done - by which I mean, of what I had done to innocent Siuzan Delage.

  ‘A strange request,’ said Bil Costra.

  ‘I can indeed see why the captain refused it,’ agreed Syrophoenician.

  ‘You fools!’ I cried. ‘You idiots! A beautiful and innocent woman has been raped!’

  ‘I do not understand the connection of this fact with your previous statement,’ said Syrophoenician.

  ‘Don’t joke, don’t speak about this matter in that way,’ I cried, in an agony of remorse. ‘She was assaulted, assaulted sexually, but to preserve the life of her attacker she did not report him to the police.’

  ‘Preserve the life?’ asked Syrophoenician.

  ‘The attacker was headless,’ said Costra.

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘But this does not explain why she would wish to preserve the life of a man who assaulted her in such a vile fashion,’ said Costra.

  ‘Because she is pure!’ I said. ‘Because she is devout, and does not wish the death of another man - even so vile a man - laid upon her conscience!’

  ‘Is it you?’ asked Syrophoenician. ‘Were you her attacker?

  In my convoluted fury and bitter self-devouring rage I could have plunged my hand into the fool’s chest and pulled his heart straight out. But I did not. I rolled, upon my bed, in a series of jerks and spasms. ‘No, no, no!’ I cried.

  ‘Yet you want to be given to the police.’

  ‘I wish to confess to the crime to save her head - not because I am guilty, but to save her head. I wish to save her, because I love her! I love her!’

  Neither man said anything to this. Eventually Costra said, ‘I see.’

  ‘An unfortunate situation,’ agreed Syrophoenician. ‘The captain - he refused your request?’

  ‘I tried to explain to him,’ I said. The words did not come smoothly, but rather with fluttery little lurches from word to word that accentuated their artificial, electronically-vocalised tone. ‘But he would not listen to me!’

  ‘This doesn’t surprise me,’ said Syrophoenician. ‘He prefers military justice to civilian.’

  ‘But,’ I said, sobs breaking up my words completely, ‘she will lose her head, because of me, and because of my foolish delay! She is the purest and best of women! I love her! I love her!’

  ‘Well,’ said Syrophoenician, drawing the word out. ‘If I were you, Sieur Cavala, I would hold your love at arm’s length.’

  ‘To do so,’ agreed Costra, ‘might remit your suffering a little.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I cried.

  ‘Only,’ Syrophoenician said, in a whiningly pious voice, ‘that it sounds as if this love between you and the woman is not a permitted thing. What, after all, does it say in the Bibliqu’rân? Does not Solomon himself say, in the Book of Light, Corrupt women for corrupt men, and corrupt men for corrupt women; but pure women for pure men, and pure men for pure women. Is not the purity of a woman like a pearl?’

  ‘The mouth of a virtuous man is a wellspring of life, but violence covers the mouth of the wicked man,’ said Costra, completing the quotation.

  ‘Do you mock me with scripture?’ I cried.

  ‘What’s this yelling? You must learn to temper your voice come nightfall, ’ said another man, coming over to the bed. ‘No matter your distress. Keep your howling quiet, or we’ll all suffer’.

  ‘My distress is such that I will die of it,’ I claimed. ‘Before the night comes I shall be dead.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ retorted a chuckling Syrophoenician, perhaps attempting to jolly me out of my self-concern. ‘Nonsense. You’ll overcome this little setback, my friend. You’re strong.’

  I screamed. I believe I did, although the memory of this morning is hazy to me now. Perhaps I merely moaned. Certainly the others left me be, and I rolled and thrashed upon my bed. I couldn’t believe that I was trapped in this hideous existence. I couldn’t believe the persistence of my misery. It circled and circled violently inside my head, a great serpent of thought biting its own tail. I had caused the woman I loved to be beheaded. In her innocence she had been beheaded. I loved her. I was the cause of her mutilation. I could have saved her. I had not saved her. The intensity of the emotion inside me was enough, I felt certain, to snap my spirit into two. To break it like a green bone held between two gigantic fists and bent savagely until it splintered in two.

  But this did not happen.

  I was, I think, vaguely aware of the entry of a superior into the barrack; but I was utterly rolled up into my misery. I was unreachable. I had taken my knees in my hands, and was lying curled like an ampersand upon my side, producing a double-noise, an electronic warble from my chest speakers and a tuneless hooting through my neck stump. I do not know whether the superior ordered me to my feet. I was unaware. Perhaps he did, perhaps not. It hardly matters. The next thing I knew my sight had switched to whiteness and I could hear nothing. Pain shorted up and down my body as if I were a man-sized electrical wire being overloaded with a constantly reverting shock. My bones were glass. Fire flowed through the glass and shattered it all to powder, and the powder retched and ground against my flesh. No. I can’t express to you the intensity and duration of this agony. Think of the worst physical pain you have suffered, imagine it intensified and prolonged, and fill in this space in my narrative with that memory. The pain flayed skin from flesh, flesh from bone, and left behind only a Hiroshima shadow that was nothing more than a flattened layer of pain upon the bed.

  Finally the pain - stopped.

  I became aware of

  —myself gasping, a forceful series of expulsions of air from my lungs almost like coughing.

  I was lying on my back, my arms and legs starfish straight.

  ‘Off your bed, soldier,’ said the superior.

  Still gaspingly breathing, I tried to roll myself sideways, to plant feet on the floor and stand up. Instead I collapsed to the floor. I felt the smack of it against my two palms at once. I heard the noise of this smack. If I had eaten breakfast I would, at this point, have vomited it up. Instead I forced my willpower down my spine, like a pump forcing water along a very thin pipe, to my legs, willing them to work. I pushed back and tried to stand, but my muscles were cramped from the severity of the contractions the truncheon had forced them into. The floor slapped my palms again.

  ‘Soldier,’ said the superior, in a warning tone. I could picture his thumb hovering over the button of his truncheon.

  With a monumental effort I pushed back again, and compelled, strenuously and effortfully, my legs to hold me up. I was on my knees. Everything in my universe had shrunken down to this: to get to my feet, to stand, and so to avoid the truncheon. There was nothing else: neither future nor past, not Siuzan Delage being fitted with an ordinator prior to beheading, nor me facing a lifetime (however short) in the army. Not my comrade headless, not even myself. There was nothing except the superior and his truncheon; nothing except my recalcitrant body. I reached back, because my hands seemed more under my control than my lower body, and found the mattress. Placing my hands upon the lip of this I pushed myself up, and slowly, shudderingly, and with a series of juddering aches running up and down them, my legs began to do what I so frantically wanted them to do.

  I stood.

  The superior was in front of me. I recognised him, although I did not know his name (it was not Greenwood, who had taken me to the captain, but another one). He was looking at me. All my will was focused on not staggering, not falling,
on holding myself steady.

  He turned away from me. I do not believe that anything, in all my life before or since, has been such a relief to me as that turning away.

  ‘To the parade ground, carcasses,’ he said. It appeared he was no more interested in the reasons for my display upon the bed; that once I had stood up, his interest in me ceased. I trotted out onto the parade ground with all the others.

  Five

  My misery was resilient, and returned to me. But the conditioning power of pain and discipline was more resilient. In those two sentences you have the nub of my military training.