“Time for what?”
He motioned to the chains. “Don't wait. You have enough time but you must do it now and you must run. For what is coming is coming. I know it. You must run.”
She leaned forward, curiosity pushing away the fear. This broken man, his mind splintered and cracked, within him in pieces. First one and then the other and maybe more. “What's coming?”
“I don't know,” he said again. “But I know you have to do it now or it's going to be too late. You have to believe me.”
She looked toward the door. The silent guards beyond. Impossible to know when they would come and when they would not. Days or hours or minutes.
He reached up and took her chin in his fingers. The flesh thin and drawn and very cold. Turned her head toward him where he was crying and his face tracked with it. Rivers in the mud of years upon his skin. “Please,” he said. “Mountains fall and worlds turn.”
She set to the chains and the file was very small and it was very slow. In the first hour just working to make a small track in the link where the file would follow. The blade moving first to one side and then the other. In the end she had to make small, slow movements, always drawing the file toward herself and watching the line carefully. Over and over on that black metal.
And then it began to bite. Slowly at first, but she could feel it catch. The resistance on both sides. The file would no longer jump the line and she could move first backward and then forward. Doubling her speed. The movement still so slow that she could not see the work, but each time the groove just a little deeper, a little closer.
He watched her work and muttered to himself. First about the worlds and mountains. Then leaning against the wall in silence. Returning to ask her how it was coming and to tell her it was time. Then walking away into the shadows and muttering again things she could not make out and coming back and sitting beside her. At times alarmed and at others unconcerned.
Her progress in that darkness like trying to dig a grave without any tools. Clawing dirt and stone with broken fingernails. Painful in its slowness.
But progress all the same.
“How do you know?” she asked him at one point. The groove now deep and clear.
“I can see it.”
“What can you see?”
He did not answer. She glanced at him and could see that he was himself, but he did not want to answer. She stopped filing and he looked very quickly at her and then shook his head.
“Tell me or I'll stop.”
“There are many futures,” he said. “I can see them all. There is one where you don't cut them and what follows is a horror like we've never known. There is another where you cut them and you look back for me and you are found and then it returns to the first. And there is still another where you run and then I can't see you. But in this one you are gone and this is the one that must be.”
She could not speak. She had known he would say something she would not believe but she had not thought it would be that. “You're a seer.”
He shook again that old and frail head. “No, I am just a man. I don't know how I see it. But I saw it before they brought you here and I knew I had to wait and when you came you were the same as what I saw.” Waving a hand about them. “This time, when you can cut them without being found. The ladder I was to make, the bars I had to remove. You climbing them and going up through the window and running.”
“You see all of that?”
“As if it already was. I see it the way you remember yesterday. Like it happened, but I know it did not. A memory that has yet to be created.”
“How?”
“I don't know,” he said. “That's what I don't remember. All I remember is being here and waiting for you. Helping you.” He smiled and it was sad and thin. “And now you're here and I've done what I've always known I would do.”
She could find no words for that and she set back to work and the link grew thinner. She would need to cut first one side and then the other. Unless she could bend the link open when the first side was cut, but she did not think she could. The file would have to be sharp enough. Then she could cut the other hand.
She knew if she asked him he would tell her it was sharp enough. This man who had watched her cut that link already.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
He shrugged those thinbone shoulders and raised a hand. “My memories of before were lost. Maybe they're traded. I don't remember being anywhere else.”
“Ever?”
“No.”
She stopped then but not to make him talk. Just to look at him. Her own imprisonment so short compared to this man who knew nothing else and had been here in that sense all his life. She did not know if he was telling the truth about what he saw for the future but she knew he had helped her and there was little else to bet on. And looking at him there in the jail she knew he was not lying about what he remembered, or at least did not know that he was.
And that had to be enough.
She worked then and forgot the time. Everything was just the movement of the file. Back and forth endlessly and each stroke seeming to accomplish nothing, but the cut in the link growing deeper all the time. She heard the guards often and they never came in and he did not even glance toward the door when they passed, so sure was he that they would not.
She began to climb and she felt as if she were being born anew, the violence and struggle to emerge into air and life. Each handhold loose with grime and dust. Slipping once the first time and falling back to the ground from only the third step and all the air out of her and lying there by her husband's bones and the old man standing over her and saying nothing but blinking rapidly and waiting for her to recover.
And then she stood and climbed again. For it was the only way and the thing she must do.
Now it was not only for herself. It was for the people who still thought she led them. Her people. She could die falling from the top of this ladder or squeezing through the small gap in the bars or running down the street to find archers on the walls. But she must do it and she would risk that for at least in death no one could blame her for her failure.
And she could not blame herself.
For how many would die if her son took them to war? The men and boys would die in the fields, lying in mud made from dirt and their own blood. War was glorious when the army stood flashing in the sun and marched out in a long and invincible column, but it became its true self when men were cut down by others they hadn't seen, the battle raging. Lying in the fields and gasping for breath that would not come, staggering with a cut throat and a shower of blood no one could quell, calling out for lovers or mothers as they tried to hold their slick entrails in with a hand and could not.
The rest would die in the villages. Run under by advancing armies that took food, clothing, women. Leaving the towns stripped bare. Other villages burned as examples or because they harbored soldiers. Still others destroyed as battles swarmed over them, men and horses and a torrent of bloodshed to leave only broken buildings and shattered bodies behind.
Her people would suffer, and they would die. In greater numbers than she could count. To be written out in the next history by the victors, a forgotten and faceless multitude of the dead.
And so she climbed. For them, she climbed.
He watched her from below and did not speak. She knew somewhere within her that he would be killed and she thought he knew it also and so she'd told him of the war. He had not asked nor responded, but she wanted him to know. It made it easier to think he was risking his life for the people and not for her alone. She clung to that, not knowing if it was true or not.