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“He’ll die soon no matter what you do. You’ll feel better afterward if you let him die naturally.”
I would have said more, perhaps, but Eskil’s left hand was moving, and I fell silent to watch it. Like a crippled spider it crept toward the fusil, and at last closed on it and drew it toward him. His comrade could have taken it back easily; but he did not, and seemed as fascinated as I.
Slowly, with an infinity of pain and labor, Eskil lifted and turned it until its barrel was directed toward me. Dimly by starlight, I watched his stiff fingers, fumbling, fumbling.
As the striker, so the stricken. Earlier I might have saved myself, if only I could have discovered the catch that would have permitted the weapon to fire. He who knew so well where it was and how it operated would have killed me, could only he have made his numb fingers release it. Impotent both, we stared at each other.
At last his strength could no longer support the weight of the fusil. It fell clattering to the deck, and I felt that my heart would burst for pity. In that moment I would have pulled the trigger myself. My lips moved — but I scarcely knew what it was I said.
Eskil sat up and stared.
As he did, our vessel slowed. The deck sank until it was nearly level, and the plumes of water behind us vanished as a wave does that breaks on the beach. I stood up to see where we were; Eskil stood too, and soon the friend who had nursed him and my guard joined us.
The embankment of Gyoll rose to our left, cutting off the night sky like the blade of a sword. We drifted along it almost in silence, the roaring of whatever engines they had been that had propelled us with such speed muffled now. Steps descended to the water, but there were no friendly hands to tie us up. A sailor leaped from the bow to do it, and another threw him our mooring line. A moment more and a gangplank stretched from ship to stair.
The officer appeared at the stern, flanked by fusiliers with torches. He halted to stare at Eskil, then called all three soldiers to him. They held a long conference in tones too faint for me to hear.
At last the officer and my guard approached me, followed by the men with torches. After a breath or two the officer said, “Take off his shirt.”
Eskil and his friend came to stand beside us. Eskil said, “You must remove your shirt, sieur. If you don’t we’ll have to tear it off.”
To test him I asked, “Would you do that?”
He shrugged, and I unfastened the fine cloak I had taken from the ship of Tzadkiel and let it fall to the deck, then pulled the shirt over my head and dropped it on the cloak.
The officer came nearer and made me turn so that he could examine my ribs on both sides. “You should be nearly dead,” he muttered. And then, “It’s true, what they tell of you.”
“Since I don’t know what’s been said, I can neither confirm nor deny it.”
“I’m not asking you to. Dress yourself again. I advise it.”
I looked around for my cloak and shirt, but they were gone.
The officer sighed. “Somebody’s filched them — one of the sailors, I suppose.” He glanced toward Eskil’s friend. “You must have seen it, Tanco.”
“I was looking at his face, sieur, not at his clothes. But I’ll try to find them.”
The officer nodded. “Take Eskil with you.” At a gesture from him, one of the torchbearers handed his torch to the other and bent to free my leg.
“They won’t find them,” the officer told me. “There are a thousand hiding holes on a boat like this, and the crew will know them all.”
I told him I was not cold.
The officer slipped off his uniform cape. “The man who took them will cut them up and sell the pieces, I imagine. He should make something from them. Wear this — I’ve got another one in my cabin.”
I disliked taking his cape, but it would have been foolish to refuse his generosity.
“I must fetter your hands. Regulations.” The manacles gleamed like silver in the torchlight; still, they bit into my wrists like others.
The four of us crossed the gangplank to water stairs that seemed nearly new, mounted them, and marched in single file up a narrow street bordered with little gardens and rambling houses mostly of a single story: a torchbearer first, I following him, the officer behind me with his drawn pistol hanging at his side, and the second torchbearer bringing up the rear. A laborer on his way home stopped to stare at us; other than he, there was no one about.
I looked over my shoulder to ask the officer where he was taking me.
“To the old port. One of the hulks there has been fitted up to hold prisoners.”
“And then?”
I could not see him, but I could visualize his shrug. “I don’t know. My orders were to arrest you and bring you here.”
So far as I could see, “here” was a public garden. Before we walked into the darkness beneath the trees, I looked up and beheld myself through their frost-blighted leaves.
Chapter XXXVI — The Citadel Again
IT WAS MY hope to see the old sun rise before I was locked away. That was not to be. For a long time, or at least for what felt like a long time, we climbed a gentle hill. More than once our torches set fire to raddled leaves overhead that ignited a few others, releasing the pungent smoke that is the very breath of autumn before they smoldered out. More leaves strewed the path we trod, but they were sodden with rain.
At last we came to a brooding wall so lofty that the light of our torches failed to reveal its summit, so that for a moment I took it for the Wall of Nessus. A man in half armor leaned on the shaft of his vouge before the dark and narrow archway of a sally port in the wall. When he caught sight of us, he did not straighten his stance, or show any other sign of respect for the officer; but when we had traced the path almost to his feet, he pounded the iron door with the steel-shod butt of his weapon.
The door was opened from within. As we passed through the thickness of the wall — which was great, but not nearly so great as that of the Wall of Nessus — I stopped so suddenly that the officer behind me collided with me. The guard within was armed with a long, double-edged sword, whose squared tip he permitted to rest upon the paving stones.
“Where am I?” I asked the officer. “What is this place?”
“Where I told you I would bring you,” he answered. “There is the hulk.”
I looked and saw a mighty tower, all of gleaming metal. The guard drawled, “He’s afraid of my blade. She has a good edge, fellow — you’ll never feel it.”
The officer snapped, “You will address this prisoner as sieur.”
“While you’re here, sieur, perhaps.”
What the officer might have said or done to him then, I do not know; while they spoke a woman had come out of the tower, followed by a serving boy with a lantern. The officer saluted this woman, who by the richness of her uniform was of superior rank, in the most negligent fashion and said, “You find sleep difficult, I see.”
“Not at all. Your message said you would come, and I know you for a man of your word. I prefer to inspect our new clients personally. Turn about, fellow, and let me see you.”
I did as she bid.
“A fine specimen, and you haven’t marked him at all. He didn’t resist?”
The officer said, “We present you with a tabula rasa.”
When he added nothing further, one of the soldiers with torches whispered, “He fought like a devil, Madame Prefect.” The officer shot him a glance that indicated he would pay for the remark.
“With such a docile client,” the woman continued, “I’ll hardly need you and your men to get him to a cell, I suppose?”
The officer said, “We’ll lock him up for you, if you wish.”
“But if you don’t, you’ll have to have his irons now.”
He shrugged. “I’ve signed for them.”