The Sling, they called it. It was four heavy wooden posts tucked away at the end of the barracks and beside the north wall, each hosting an iron shackle connected to a chain with a crank, two for your hands and two for your feet. What you do is you hang there, face-down and naked until they decide you don’t need to anymore.
The pain starts in your wrists, with the shackles digging into your skin and rubbing against your bones. You have three options. You can try to twist your wrist in some unnatural angle so that it digs into a different bone, you can pull hard with all your strength to bring your arms inward—this doesn’t help your wrists but it does make it easier to breathe, or you can give up and become one with the pain. As the hours wear you down, you find yourself cycling through all three options.
You can’t tell if it’s been thirty seconds or thirty hours, and you notice the same pain in your ankles. You have the same iron thing pressing into your shin while the other end digs hard at your heel, and you feel like you’re on the verge of being ripped apart. Half the muscles in your legs are stretched beyond capacity while the other half wish they could stretch but can’t.
Then some time later, the strain begins. You can’t relax. Your shoulders strain from shifting what tiny fraction of movement the chains allow in desperate hope for some scrap of comfort, and exhaustion takes its toll. You feel it in your back, in your hips, in your arms, everywhere. Keep tugging, keep stressing, hoping that the sliver of respite you can afford your tortured wrists and ankles is worth what rapidly depleting energy you have left.
The most sore of all is your neck. Try to hold your head up, and the sharp pain of muscles being overworked shoots throughout your body. Let your head fall, and you get dizzy from the blood rush.
I tried to focus on gratitude; I hadn't gotten my liver ripped out yet.
It didn’t help that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast some twelve hours earlier.
The sound of men laughing around the corner rose above the crickets and cut through the darkness. I could see nothing but the faint light of an oil lamp around the corner casting drops of yellow onto the grass that had crept around the corner. Then, the laughing stopped.
Centuries later, the chatter of more men around the corner, voices I didn’t recognize then went off to bed.
I’d probably hung there all of ten minutes for all I knew.
No, it must have been hours.
Maybe.
I heard footfalls in the grass. I had my head low, trying to give my neck a break, but the footfalls grew louder as someone approached me.
Might have been one of Ahmi’s friends coming for an easy snack. Maybe if it ate one arm, my other arm could get a rest.
I refused to look up. Not that I’d have been able to see who it was for the darkness, but I was busy. I was counting how long it took to get high off the blood rush to my head.
I heard someone sit down in the grass and felt the sudden jerk in my right arm as they leaned against the post. Then I heard a yawn, followed by a sip from a drink.
I yanked my shoulders forward to free up enough breath to speak. “I lost count.”
“What were you counting?” Commander’s deep baritone and deliberate cadence rose above the crickets to fill the night. I could smell the alcohol on his breath from several feet away.
I tried to grasp the question but it slipped from me. “I don’t remember.”
I heard a chuckle followed by another sipping noise. I could scarcely see anything for the darkness, and the strain in my chest continued.
“Are you comfortable?”
“No.”
“So you can be honest.”
“Yeah,” I grunted.
He got up and crawled over to my face, then I felt something poking into my cheek. “Drink this.”
It took me a moment to realize it was a reed straw and mustered up the strength to move my lips over the thing to take a sip. Right away my mouth set fire to the strongest liquor I’d ever tasted. My whole self shot up and I started to cough.
He laughed. Then without another word, he helped reposition the straw to my lips. I tried to take a strong swig, but that stuff was hard. Then after several sips, he pulled away and leaned back against the post, and took another sip for himself.
His smooth voice once again filled the night, “tagaŋu spoke to the princess and convinced her that you can come out tomorrow evening. His way of saying thank you for not making his life difficult. That makes three things I like about you.”
I pulled in some to allow my wrists to carry the weight of the shackles and give my chest enough room to make breath for words. “I don’t understand?”
“Well, you went right after Ahmi; usually they wait until the end of the day. Two, she says you were respectful about it when she said she wasn’t interested. Usually they argue, try to push, then her husband gets involved, and he can be… messy. Anyway…” he took another sip, “I see potential in you.”
“Thanks,” I grunted.
He leaned in close to offer me another sip, which I gladly took. I might have weighed the consequences of being inebriated in a place where they’d explicitly warned me not to be with the reality that if one of the alligators decided to come over for a snack there’d be nothing I could do about it. I wish I could say I had that level of cognition, but in reality I was hoping for something, anything to pass the time more smoothly.
“You going to tell me where you went?” he said.
I fought the chains for as deep a breath as would allow, and found the dizzying effect of alcohol made the task somewhat easier. “I’m afraid you’ll judge me.”
“Is that because you judge yourself?”
“Huh?”
“Are you ashamed of where you went? Is that why you’re afraid?”
It took me a moment. I wanted the ground to spin, and tried to figure in my mind if I’d consumed enough of that ridiculously strong drink and if I’d waited long enough for it to do its job. “I went to the church. I needed to be alone with my thoughts.”
“Is that the truth?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t ‘sir’ me; I’m drunk,” he leaned in closer and helped me take another sip before settling back down and taking another sip of his own.
“I wanted to…”
“I understand,” he said. “Ahmi said some things that were hard to hear, and you felt like you needed a moment to sort through it all.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t judge you for that.”
“No?”
“No, I don’t. The jungle will judge you, though… if you don’t. I know too much the value of a clean mind, and the best way to have a clean mind is to clean it when you’re not surrounded by things that want to eat you. The next time you feel like you need to be alone with your thoughts, let me know. Can you do that?”
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“Yes.”
“And for Mother’s sake don’t lie to the princess? She’s testy about that sort of thing.”
“Yeah.”
Then he took another sip. I relaxed my shoulders and allowed the world to blend into a chorus of crickets. Other sounds filled the night and crept into my ears—hoots of unseen birds, howls, chirps, and growls. I could only imagine how loud it would have been without the forty-foot stone wall to break it.
“Tell me about your friend.”
“My friend?”
“You said you had a friend back home growing up, who looks like me?”
“Sarina.”
He chuckled. “And her name rolls right off your tongue!”
“She was like a sister to me.”
“How did that happen? No…” he shook his head. “How did she end up in a place like Gath?”
“Mother Searnie was a doctor… OK, so no. She was a midwife, and then the plague happened and they said to her you’re a doctor now, and she said OK fine. Sarina had gotten very, very sick and they brought her…”
“From the plague?”
“Yeah. Except she got better while her parents got worse. They died, and then Mother Searnie brought her to the orphanage in Gath.”
“That’s what you were told?”
“Yeah.”
“And this Mother Searnie never said where she came from?”
“No. We asked, all of us did at one point or another, and the answer was always the same. She is our sister, she is our daughter, she is home now that’s what matters.”
“I see,” he took another sip. “Did they at least tell her?”
“If they did, she never said anything to me about it.”
“And you have no idea.”
“No.”
“So you never traveled anywhere, then?”
“I spent about two years at the church in Kyoen.”
He laughed. “The one you were exiled from?”
He remembered that. “Yeah.”
“And you never saw someone like her when you were there?”
“No,” I said. “I stayed at the church, and the friar there used to send me on odd jobs in exchange for a donation. Usually it was at the docks loading or unloading ships, that sort of thing. I met a lot of Tobori, lots of Goloagi were there, some other people I had no idea where they came from, but no one like her.”
“OK… so this is your first time outside Heralia, then.”
That made me smile a little. “Can I get another drink?”
He laughed, “the cost of a good story!” Then he leaned over to offer me another sip.
By this time I was hammered, and happily so. How long that would last, and whether it would be enough to take the edge off the strain my body was under didn’t matter at that moment. All I knew was it worked. “There's a pass into Saen from Gath, but the adults always told us never to attempt it. They said it was too dangerous.”
I could hear the smile in his voice. “And?”
“One summer, Sarina, Tor, and I breached it.”
“Tor is another kid you grew up with?”
“Yeah. One winter he got the chill and didn’t make it. Anyway the pass took us about a week and a half. We found a small Saeni village on the other side. Tor met a girl. She was making eyes at me, but Sarina wasn't having that, so she went with him. We stayed a few days, then we went home. We told everyone we'd gotten lost in the woods. Father Yewan didn't believe me. Sarina told him the truth, and I got double chores for a month!”
“That's very interesting!” he mused. “How old were you?”
“We must have been… I don't know, thirteen? Fourteen? That was before I got sent away to Kyoen.”
“You weren't upset that she ratted you out?”
“I was! I was very upset. She was upset, too, told me I wasn't mad that she'd told the truth, only ashamed that I hadn't the courage to, and she refused to speak with me. She made me apologize.”
He laughed a good, hearty laugh. “She made you apologize? And what leverage did she have over you?”
“I liked her,” I said. “I didn't want her to be mad at me. I knew she needed me to stay with her at night sometimes because…”
I stopped; I'd already said too much. Commander heard the reticence in me. “What happened at night?”
I needed a moment to figure out a better reason for what I'd almost spoken. “She had trouble sleeping sometimes.”
At that, I heard a sip. Then he leaned in close to offer me another. “You had a thing for her, didn't you?”
“I did.”
“Can you keep a secret?”
I tried to lift my head some to look at him despite the darkness of night. “Yeah?”
“I don’t tell this to people, but I'm Mayeni.”
“You came from Mayeno?”
“Yeah,” he took a sip. “My mother brought us here to escape the lottery.”
“The lottery?” I asked.
He chuckled lightly. “I wouldn't expect you to understand. The Emperor demands an annual slave quota from every Duchy, except Heralia. You being an orphan, you would have been culled first; you should have a number on your arms. Instead you grew up in the heart of diamond-tree country. Lucky you. Tell me something. Why is slavery outlawed in Heralia?”
“That was the condition. The Bear clan finally sat down with the Falcon clan to talk about what kind of peace they'd be willing to accept…”
“Spare me the history lesson. I didn't ask how, I asked why.”
“Because it's abhorrent; the very existence of the institution invites abuse. That was in the Epic. Elk had enslaved all the other animals. He’d made agreements with them all, but once he had power over them he broke those agreements and said, ‘who’s going to stop me?’ It was Cougar who set fire to the world…”
“I thought you were Daenma?”
“I am.”
“That doesn't sound like Daenma scripture.”
“You know what, Scripture does appear to condone slavery. That's true. It also says that when one thing is a problem, when something gets to a point where it doesn’t matter how many rules you put around it it’s still a problem, when it breeds anger, hatred, invites people to look down on one another, then it needs to be gouged out and thrown into the fire. We are born with a responsibility to know right from wrong and act accordingly, and slavery is wrong. It's wrong because it's wrong; there is no moral argument to justify it.”
Commander laughed. “I dare you to say all that to a Daenma priest!”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter?” he laughed further. “You have the Parable of the Golden Acorns etched on your bow!”
“That’s just a myth.”
“Then why do you repeat it?”
“Because it has metaphorical value.”
“And what if I told you your Daenma scripture was also a myth with metaphorical value.”
“That stuff actually happened.”
“Why? Because it's your god?”
“No. Because… I don’t know how to explain. I just know in my heart it’s true.”
Commander laughed again. Then he took another sip from his drink and offered me another. After a time he settled back down and asked, “you want to know why it's illegal here?”
“Sure?”
“Their argument goes like this. Mother owns you. Your body, your spirit, your soul, the forest, the sky, the mountains, everything belongs to Her. So, the reasoning goes, if She owns you, then how can someone else own you? For them, the very idea is heresy…”
By this time, the ground was spinning, as was my whole body. I drifted through clouds of dizzyness as my body carried me to a better place. Commander’s words came through muffled, as though he spoke to me through a long tunnel, and for a fleeting moment I was calm.
“... I’m sure you can imagine. Needing protection from what’s out there, and having no one else to turn to but the emperor, slavery is an absolute heresy, and yet the emperor wants to bring in slaves to increase the azuka harvest…”
“Sir,” I asked. “What’s out there?”
“The Sewu’oni.”
“Why are we fighting them?”
“Because if we don’t, they’d kill us.”
“But why?”
“Because one asshole decided that Carthia is the embodiment of all that is corrupt and evil in the world, and she convinced a whole lot of people she was right. That’s why. We have a different skin color, we bring foreign gods, we don’t even speak Uhuida, and when we do we use /n/ instead of /ŋ/, that sort of thing. Carthian men prefer children to grown women, we force ourselves on women, that sort of thing. Her solution is to exterminate us; we’re untermensch. But, we have a secret weapon.”
“What’s that?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret!” he laughed. Then he sipped his drink again and continued. “I’m joking. The long and short of it is that Kaxawi could, if she wanted to, assemble fifty-thousand men—enough to storm these walls and butcher everyone here—but she can’t. She can’t because her alliance exists on the principle of wiping us out. Once we’re good and wiped out, job done. Work complete. She will have made ‘uxuwi great again, and all the tribes can go back to killing each other as before. The thing about power is that once you get a taste, it’s hard to let go. So, the simple awareness that once she’s won the war she loses everything gives her cause to commit war on a more… ongoing basis. Not all of her people have figured that out yet, so they go hard anyway, and Carthia can’t stand alone against the entire Uhui region. So we need support from an emperor who has his own reasons to keep the war going indefinitely. That’s what you’ve been conscripted into—we’re pawns in an endless war between two powerful forces who have no incentive to win and every reason to keep going. How does that make you feel?”
“Can I have another drink?”