Erik picked up a body, not sure what the man’s name or crime had been, and carried it to the wagon, placing it where the gravediggers could grab it. He looked at the man’s face and didn’t recognize him. He knew it was one of six men he had seen for two days and probably spoken to, but he couldn’t recall who this man was.
Roo looked down at the man at his feet, then tried to pick up the body. He struggled, tears from an apparently inexhaustible fount streaming down his face. Erik hesitated, then moved to help him.
‘Get back there, von Darkmoor,’ commanded de Loungville.
‘He can’t do it,’ said Erik, discovering his voice still hoarse and his neck sore from the rope burn. De Loungville’s eyes narrowed menacingly, and Erik quickly added, ‘Sergeant de Loungville!’
‘Well, he’d better,’ said de Loungville, ‘or he’ll be the first one of you sent back to hang.’ He pointed back up the steps with a dagger he now held.
Erik watched as Roo struggled to find strength enough to drag the corpse to the wagon. The ten feet must have looked like a mile. Erik knew Roo had never been a strong boy, and whatever vitality was usual, his had fled days before. He looked as if his arms were damp rope, and he had no power in his legs as he dragged hopelessly on the corpse.
Finally it moved, first a foot, then two, and after a moment more, another. Grunting as if he were carrying suits of armor up a mountain, Roo pulled until he got the body to the foot of the wagon. Then he collapsed.
De Loungville came to stand over him, crouching down so his face was level with Roo’s. He shouted so loud he nearly screamed, ‘What? Do you expect those honest workmen to climb down from there and finish your job for you?’ Roo looked up at the short man, silently pleading to die.
De Loungville reached down and gripped Roo by the hair, pulling him to his feet, holding the dagger to his throat. ‘You’re not going to die, you useless piece of pig snot,’ he said, as if reading the boy’s mind. ‘You’re mine, and you will die when I tell you it is my pleasure that you die. Not before. If you die before I tell you, I will reach into the Death Goddess’s hall and yank you back to life, and then I will kill you. I will cut your belly open and eat your liver for dinner if you don’t do as I tell you. Now get that dead meat into that wagon!’
Roo fell backwards, hard against the wagon’s tailgate, and barely kept himself from falling. He leaned down, got his arms under the body’s arms, and heaved.
‘You’re no good to me, boy!’ bellowed de Loungville. ‘If you don’t get him in that wagon by the time I count to ten, you worthless slug, I’ll cut your heart out before your eyes! One!’
Roo heaved and his face betrayed panic. ‘Two!’ He forced his own weight forward, and got the corpse sitting up. ‘Three!’
He lifted with his legs and somehow got himself half turned around, so that the dead man rested against the tailgate. ‘Four!’ Roo took a breath and heaved again, and suddenly the man was halfway into the wagon. ‘Five!’ Roo let the body go and reached down quickly, gripping the corpse around the hips. He ignored the reek of urine and feces as he heaved with his last reserve of strength. Then he collapsed.
‘Six!’ screamed de Loungville, leaning over the boy, who sat at the base of the wagon.
Roo looked up and saw the man’s legs were hanging over the end of the tailgate. He struggled to his feet as de Loungville shouted, ‘Seven!’ and pushed as hard on the legs as he could.
They bent and he half pushed, half rolled the dead man all the way into the wagon as de Loungville reached the count of eight.
Then he fainted.
Erik took a step forward. De Loungville turned, took a single step, and delivered a backhanded blow to Erik that brought him to his knees. Lowering his head to lock gazes with the stunned Erik, Robert de Loungville said, ‘You will learn, dog meat, that no matter what happens to your friends, you will do what you’re told when you are told and nothing else. If that’s not the first thing you learn, you’ll be crow bait before the sun sets.’
Straightening up, he shouted, ‘Get them back to their cell!’
The still-stunned men moved raggedly along, not certain what had happened. Erik’s ears rang from the blow to his head, but he risked a glance back at Roo and saw that two guards had picked him up and were bringing him along.
In silence the men were taken back to the death cell and herded in. Roo was unceremoniously tossed in, and the door slammed shut behind.
The man from Kesh, Sho Pi, came to look at Roo and said, ‘He’ll recover. It is mostly shock and fear.’
Then he turned to Erik and smiled, a dangerous look around his eyes. ‘Didn’t I tell you it might be something else?’
‘But what?’ asked Biggo. ‘What was all this vicious mummery?’
The Keshian sat down, crossing his legs before him. ‘It was what is called an object lesson. This man de Loungville, who works, I imagine, for the Prince, he wishes you to know something without any doubt whatsoever.’
‘Know what?’ asked Billy Goodwin, a slender fellow with curly brown hair.
‘He wants you to know that he will kill you without hesitation if you do not do what he wants.’
‘But what does he want?’ asked the man whose name Erik didn’t know, a thin man with a grey beard and red hair.
Closing his eyes as if he were about to take a rest, Sho Pi said, ‘I do not know, but I think it will be interesting.’
Erik sat back and suddenly giggled.
Biggo said, ‘What is it?’
Finding himself embarrassed before these men, he said, ‘I loaded my pants.’ Then he started to laugh, and the laughter had a hysterical edge to it.
Billy Goodwin said, ‘I dirtied myself, too.’
Erik nodded, and suddenly the laughter was gone and he found to his amazement he was crying. His mother would be so angry with him if she found out.
Roo roused when food appeared, and to their astonishment it was not only abundant but good. Before, they had gotten a vegetable stew in a heavy beef stock, but now they were served steaming vegetables and slabs of bread, heavy with butter, and cheese and meat. Rather than the usual bucket of water, there were cold pewter mugs, and a large pitcher of chilled white wine – enough to slake thirst and ease the tension, but not enough to get anyone drunk. They ate and considered their fortune.
‘Do you think this is some cruel thing the Prince is doing to us?’ asked the grey-bearded man, a Rodezian named Luis de Savona.
Biggo shook his head. ‘I’m a fair judge of men. That Robert de Loungville could be cruel like this if it suited his needs, but the Prince isn’t that sort of man, I’m thinking. No, like our Keshian friend here says –’
‘Isalani,’ corrected Sho Pi. ‘We live in the Empire, but we are not Keshian.’
‘Whatever,’ said Biggo. ‘What he said about this being a lesson is right. That’s why we still have these on.’ He flipped the length of rope that still hung from around his neck. ‘To remind us we’re officially dead. So that whatever happens next, we know that we’re living on sufferance.’
Billy Goodwin said, ‘I don’t think they’ll have to remind me anytime soon.’ He shook his head. ‘Gods, I can’t remember what I was thinking when they kicked the box from under me. I was a baby again and waiting for my mum to come fetch me from some difficulty. I don’t think I can tell what I felt like.’
The others nodded. Erik felt tears start to gather as he remembered his own feelings as he fell. Pushing that aside, he turned to Roo. ‘How are you doing?’
Roo said nothing, only nodded as he ate.
Erik