*
For winter, he had brought in a pot-bellied stove with a chimney that poked out of a broken window. It filled the room with a choking heat, but I was shivering so hard that my voice shook like a lamb’s and my teeth seemed to rattle in my head.
One of the guards had come in with us and stood standing at the desk beside him.
‘Seems you’re determined to work,’ said Boathwaite.
‘Yes, sir,’ I told him, trying to keep him level as the room danced around his head.
&lsuoYou’re sick,’ he said.
‘Nothing too serious,’ I whispered between chattering teeth.
‘Your winter clothes. What happened to them?’
‘Gambling debts.’
Boathwaite winked at the guard. ‘I heard you’re none too good at cards.’ His voice echoed down to me, as though I was listening to him from the bottom of a well. ‘I heard you told the prisoners in the sick ward you got a plane coming for you. You planning to fly out of here?’
I shook my head.
‘You ever even seen a plane, Makepeace?’
‘No sir. I must have been raving.’
I thought then that perhaps my stash of bread had been found, or I’d blabbed about my plan to escape. In that case, they would certainly kill me.
‘You’re from the Far North, aren’t you?’
‘American originally.’
‘Settler family?’
I told him yes.
‘They tell me the settlers in the Far North are tougher than frozen mammoth shit,’ Boathwaite said, and the guard cackled.
I could barely hold my head straight. ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said.
‘Seems about right to me. Go get some rest,’ he said, and nodded to the guard.
I was too tired to fight. I barely understood what was happening. They hauled me down to the workshop and broke me out of my chains.
THREE
1
IT WAS A couple of days before the change in my life began to make sense to me.
For the first time in almost three years I had a room to myself. My new quarters had a cot bed with a stained mattress, a tiny desk with an oil lamp and a window that overlooked the parade ground. There were half a dozen streaks of brown on the ceiling above my head, each of them ending in a squashed mosquito carcass from the summer. There was no heat, but I had a pile of army blankets that stank of naphthalene.
Someone brought me food three times a day, and I sweated out my fever.
Part of me wanted to walk out the door right then, back onto the highway that was all silvered in the moonlight, and that would take me back the way I’d come. Likely as not, my house sat empty, with the pianola sagging to bits inside, and the dusty books and the bed-frames. The garden would have seeded itself from old crops and grown straggly and wild. I had a hankering to be back there, i a place I knew well, among the memories of my loved ones.
But something more than the practical concern about the time of year and the provisioning for the journey kept me from leaving.
Out in the yard, the prisoners were crossing to their bunkhouse.
In the twilight, you might almost think that I was looking out at the old world right here. There was a farm, and these were workers, idling in the cold night air in twos and threes on the other side of my filthy window.
One of them was Shamsudin. I knew him by his gait. None of the prisoners moved with urgency, but Shamsudin went especially slowly nowadays. Lately he’d begun to stoop a little too. He was one of the oldest at the base by now. This was our fourth winter in that place, heading into our fifth summer. We hadn’t exchanged a word with one another for over a year.
The hard life at the base had aged him. I had noticed him working in the fields over the past months, resting on his shovel more often and breathing hard. There was a kind of defiant slowness in the way some of the younger guys worked, as though they were daring you to chivvy them. But the older ones like Shamsudin worked slower because they were weakening, and they needed to conceal it. There was a casualness about the way they moved, but its root was deep fatigue. Sometimes you’d surprise one of the older ones where he wasn’t expecting to be seen, flat on his ass behind a wall, legs splayed in front of him, his face slack with exhaustion and hollowed out like a corpse’s.
There was no one in the base much past fifty. Disease and the foul weather tended to do for them after that. Even on the guards’ side there wasn’t much grey hair.
The oldest prisoners only had two hopes. One was that they would be made a guard, but it got less likely the older they became, and never happened at all if they were a muslim. The other was to find easier work in the Zone.
It was pitiful to see the effort they went to when they heard that a round-up of men was about to happen. They’d shave and comb their hair the night before. Once an old fellow they called Tuvik put on a fresh shirt he’d been saving somehow and pinned a bar of medals to it. He jutted his skinny jaw as the guards’ eyes fell on him. They moved past without choosing him and his adam’s apple bobbed once or twice.
One of the half-Tungus prisoners teased him for it as we walked back to the hut. ‘Where did you steal those medals, Tuvik, you old thief?’
That was too much for Tuvik’s wounded pride. ‘I fought two years in the Pacific war. I lived in a submarine and killed Japs and chinks like you with my bare hands!’
The Tungus boy laughed at him and fended off Tuvik’s reedy forearms as he came to strike him. Tuvik’s hands looked like bird-claws in the boy’s meaty brown fists.
The Tungus boy stole the medals that night and lost them the next day at cards. A week later, Tuvik died in his sleep.
It was the guards as much as anyone that fed our dreams of the Zone. When I was a prisoner, they’d drop casual remarks about what we’d find there. The refrigerators in the guards’ village, the generators, our weapons — all of them were made there, they said. Someone even said they had a picture house.
I was curious to see it myself, but most of all I thought it would be good for Shamsudin to get there.
There was a growing sense of defeat about him. That day on the roof I had a glimpse of the man he might have been. Some of those others slipped into life at the base like they’d known no other — perhaps they hadn’t, or known worse — but Shamsudin still carried about him some dignity, like a fading scent of the world he’d come out of.
It struck me that a man like Shamsudin would be welcomed in the Zone. He might have to do menial work at first, but any place with a little ambition would soon see the value of him — a man who had travelled and knew languages, who knew the name of every muscle in the human body. People like me were ten a penny in that place: practical, tough-minded ones who knew ways to grub in the tundra to stay alive. But Shamsudin had knowledge that could only be got from books. I couldn’t say the use of all of it. Sometimes I know it seemed foolish and a little strange, like a silk tie round the necks of one of those prisoners. But what he knew had been thought precious by people who knew more than we did. What he had in his head had been hoarded up over centuries. It was precious enough for blood to be spilt over it. It took a thousand years of study for him to know the things he did — a thousand years of science and testing and people prepared to die to say the earth went round the sun and not the other way around. And once it was lost, it would take another thousand years to learn it again.
It made me sad to see him weakening. He seemed to go into himself and spend less time with the other muslims. I wished I could take him out of that place somehow. He reminded me of one those books that I used to hide in the armoury. Only a person is always better than a book.