Havemercy Read online

  “Oh, no one was hurt too badly,” said Balfour cheerfully. “But I do think Merritt is going to need a new pair.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Ghislain dropped them out the window,” Balfour explained. “It was better than if Rook had done it, any case.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, because Rook would have thrown them, you see, with Merritt in them,” Balfour finished. “No, all in all, I believe it was good Ghislain was the one who dealt with it first.”

  “Ah,” I said, as though I understood, which I didn’t at all. The general meaning I did take, though, was that not all the airmen were as unnecessarily cruel as Rook. They were products of the same system, perhaps—and therefore spent some time interacting with no more social grace than the zoo animals Balfour had suggested—but they were different, still. Better somehow, as though in them there was still the basic human instinct of decency, long buried perhaps, but in existence nonetheless. Nothing I had seen from Airman Rook gave me any indication that he had a soul, let alone any sense of human decency.

  Still, this indicated some sort of a system among the men, under which it was recognized that it was better to have some men deal with certain problems than others. It was a start, at least, and pointed toward what knowledge they might have as to each member’s strengths and weaknesses.

  I realized then that I’d been writing instead of speaking, and that Balfour was patiently waiting for me to finish.

  “At the ’Versity, we learn to write things down as we’re thinking them because you never know what you might forget or what might end up as important later,” I explained.

  Balfour nodded, then seemed to hesitate over something. “I’d find a safe place to put those notes,” he said at last.

  My dismay must have shown on my face, for he quickly smiled, reassuring and nervous at once.

  “Not that I think—Not that there’s any reason for you to be paranoid, certainly,” he went on, in a tone telling me that paranoia would be a very wise choice at this juncture, trapped in the jaws of the dragon as I was. “It’s only, if they’re important to you, you should keep them safe.”

  That night, I began writing double copies of everything. This served a dual purpose in that it also kept me awake much more effectively than I’d expected. The gentle hum of the strip lighting even became somehow comforting, though I jumped much more easily than I’d have liked to admit when Luvander kicked down the door to the common room, announcing he was going to bed. He didn’t look at me as he passed my couch, where I’d set my cases one on top of the other that I might use them as a makeshift desk.

  The building was suddenly much noisier with the door open.

  I hadn’t realized quite how much sound was blocked by those particular doors, nor had I really even given it much thought, though of course any man who’d met the airmen would have certainly thought to provide them with as much insulation as possible. I didn’t want to think of what they’d have done to one another in the ’Versity, where the walls were thin as paper and everyone observed a strict noise curfew so as not to curtail studying.

  Balfour had said things were different at night, and indeed they seemed so. The sound of a piano floated down the hallway, scattered and abstract as though it were a tune someone was picking out of his very own head, which explained why I didn’t recognize it. Over the music were layered voices: the airmen, in what seemed to be either fourteen different conversations, or one very large and tenuous argument. Every now and then, the voices would be punctuated by a bout of raucous laughter, and someone called something to do with points, which I understood to mean they were playing some sort of game.

  More than anything—for the sake of completeness and my notes—I wished there were some way to observe them in this state, obviously much closer than the separate irritability of the morning. I wasn’t foolish enough to think, however, that my presence would be welcomed, or even tolerated, and I had no more of a mind to invite a show of open hostility than I did to tear up my notes and sleep like a baby.

  I stayed where I was, on the couch as if rooted there, though my progress in transcribing went much more slowly with the noise. Once or twice I thought I heard a feminine voice, high and tittering along with the rest, for of course there were no rules regarding a female presence in the Airman. I wondered if any of the ladies present that night was the owner of the undergarments I’d nearly tripped over my first day. I wondered how any woman could come here and not be disgusted by the utter male essence of the place, and how they didn’t feel, upon entering, like foreigners on the brink of some strange and distant land of squalor.

  Either they were exceedingly silly, or I was missing something—some small and hidden quality that made the airmen appealing.

  At that moment, a voice unmistakable in its arrogance crowed victoriously above the rest. “Winner takes the redhead!”

  The common room erupted in noise, booted feet stamping the floor, hands slapping the walls or the tables, or any surface they could reach by the sound of things.

  I finished my notes, final punctuation jabbed with slightly more emphasis than was needed. The first set I folded, placed them inside a notebook so that they wouldn’t crease. The second set I slipped into an opening I’d sliced into the lining of my very first suitcase, which I’d come into possession of when I’d still been living in Molly. A safe hiding place could mean the difference between whether you ate or not the next day. I didn’t know how effective the tricks would be, but the best experiment was a live one, I felt.

  Then, despite my best efforts and the noise emanating from the common room, I eventually drifted into a restless sleep.

  When I awoke, my first set of notes had been transformed into a rather generous pair of papier-mâché breasts affixed to my chest. The breasts themselves proved rather difficult to remove, the properties of flourplaster not being adapted for the curious particularities of human skin. The sound of giggling haunted me all morning.

  “You’ve got to sign up in advance for a shower,” Ghislain pointed out when I exited, feeling soggy and humiliated.

  They’d told me and I’d completely forgotten, I realized with a pang of shame. There was no point in doing this at all if I wasn’t going to do it right, or if I was going to lose what little regard they held for me by making them wait for showers.

  “My apologies,” I said, in what I hoped was a tone that conveyed my sincerity. Ghislain was very large and seemed quite clever enough that he could kill me and have it look an accident. “I hope you’ve not been waiting long.”

  He shrugged broad shoulders before he smiled with a flash of white teeth, bright and mocking. “I thought they looked rather nice on you,” he said.

  The next morning when I awoke, my hand felt strange, and a little wet. Following Balfour’s advice however, did not lend me that much help, as further examination found a large pan of what might conceivably have started out as warm water at my bedside—well, couchside—and my hand submersed in it.

  “Oh no,” I said, quiet and desperate for this all to be a dream. Surely it was a dream, and grown men did not indulge in this circus-ring behavior. “No, no, no.”

  A crack of laughter, sharp like a whip, snapped past my head from above. If this were truly a nightmare, it was doing its job with marvelous attention to detail.

  “He’s pissed himself.” Rook stood over the couch, eyes glinting with such a malicious amusement that I had to look away. “He’s not even twelve; he’s a baby.”

  Shortly thereafter I found myself in the unenviable position of having a long discussion with Chief Sergeant Adamo regarding the laundry services for the Airman, what constituted a true “emergency,” and no, I could not have my own room with a door that locked.

  “Fourteen rooms, fourteen men,” Adamo said gruffly, in a tone that brooked no argument.

  For the sake of my dignity, I had to try anyway. “Well, well what about the common room? That private one. It’s got a locking door on it.�
�

  He leaned forward, raised one thick eyebrow. “If you want to be the one to tell the men what’s the reason they can’t bring their entertainment home with them. Of course, if it were me, I’d consider the fact that might make them mad enough to take the whole door down.”

  “Ah,” I said weakly. I hadn’t considered that.

  “Door won’t stop them,” he continued. From his tone alone, I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to be kind, merely informative, or whether he was trying to scare me. “Not if they’ve really got a mind for doing whatever they’ve got into their heads.”

  “I see. Yes.” I was starting to get a clearer picture of what my stay in the Airman would be like, and the picture had very bleak colors.

  “Nothing,” Adamo said finally, “stops them. Not in the air, not on the ground. Best to remember it.”

  I nodded, eager to excuse myself from the conversation. It was a piece of information I would have to remember, write down, even as I wanted to protest that I was not a Ke-Han campaign, that such blind hammering force was not acceptable with civilians as it was with the Ke-Han warriors.

  The problem with the airmen, I noted, seated in a welter of blankets on the floor while the couch was out being cleaned, seemed to be simply that they were men who had been trained in a specialized kind of behavior, for a specialized kind of environment, and no one had thought to mention that such behavior was unacceptable outside the bounds of that environment itself. It was a common enough phenomenon among soldiers returning from the war, or prisoners released from long captivity.

  I began to realize the extent of what I’d been charged with—the rehabilitation of a group of men who had no idea they were in need of rehabilitation at all. As I couldn’t very well quit, I had two options open to me. Either I’d soon be very successful, lauded throughout the city as a man who’d accomplished the unprecedented, or I’d soon be dead, from my own shame or something more immediately physical. And then it wouldn’t matter.

  When I woke up on the fifth day, they’d stolen my clothes and put them under the showers.

  On the sixth day, there were beetles.

  It was maddening to catch these glimpses—cruel and detrimental to me as they were—because in some ways they were picture-perfect examples of what I’d so desperately sought after: an indication that these men could work together as a seamless team to accomplish a common goal. Of course, the common goal of beetles in my hair was considerably less exemplary than, say, saving the city from the invading Ke-Han, but in some things it was just as important to examine the abstracts as it was to accustom oneself to the specifics.

  I showered twice and shook out all my clothes and both suitcases, discovering another wealth of beetles in the second trunk. I sent them tumbling in a shiny black rain out the window, some of them too dazed even to take flight.

  I was completely and utterly miserable, but when I thought about all I was learning, all I’d been privy to, and all the mystery that surrounded the Dragon Corps—when I thought of what a thunderclap my dissertation would be to the academic world, to say nothing of th’Esar’s fiat—I concluded I had to stay. Often this conclusion was accompanied by the impulse to retch, whereupon I would casually make my way to the nearest bathroom in case of disaster. Often I ended up staying longer than was strictly necessary, knees drawn up to my chest and staring with dull fixation at the tiled walls, as though they could somehow offer a solution to my problems.

  On the eighth day I made the mistake Balfour warned me against, bringing my wet hand to my face in confusion, and spent the rest of the day with a blue handprint stamped across my nose and cheek.

  “I am sorry,” Balfour told me privately. “I thought I warned you—”

  “I think it’s dashing,” said Luvander, as he strode by.

  “I am sorry,” Balfour repeated.

  I believed him, and I was sorry for him, but I was even sorrier for myself, and spent the rest of the evening hiding by one of the toilets trying to remember a time I’d been unhappier than this. Try though I might, I couldn’t think of a single one.

  ROYSTON

  A week had passed since the incident of the dining-room table, and by that point I’d discovered two things about myself. The first was that—despite all evidence to the contrary—I was in fact the epitome of self-restraint and there should have been a portraiture of me in the encyclopedia entry on the subject.

  The second, which was rather more troubling, was that I was only a man and not a god, that I was completely besotted, and that eventually I was going to crack and do something very, very unadvisable.

  We’d been spending a great deal of time together in the past week, Hal and I, whether out of loneliness and a mutual need or some deeper connection, I couldn’t tell. I taught him about the Basquiat, about the Esar’s bastion, about the Well itself, and I learned soon enough what I’d been too blind to notice straightaway: that the way to Hal’s heart was through my veritable archive of stories. Soon enough I found myself surreptitiously sending letters to my friends in Thremedon requesting the latest romans—those they would in their infinite wisdom recommend for a relatively young but voracious reader—and I anticipated their arrival with a keen and almost laughable excitement.

  Beyond that, my daily walks with Hal grew longer and longer each time through my own careful machinations. I must have appeared to have discovered a new lease on my life, as well as a new hunger for exercise, when in reality I was keen and all too eager to increase our time together. He was companionable; our silences were comfortable. Now and then we were caught in a brief afternoon shower, on the tail of the heavier rains, and we took shelter beneath hanging willows, during which time I tried my best not to parade all my war successes in front of him the way William would display his favorite toys to impress one of his local friends.

  In all, I felt something like a child again. Now and then I was struck by the sight of Hal, his kind mouth, his warm eyes, the uneven splash of freckles over his nose and the gentle, vulnerable line of his jaw and throat. His hair was still too long; it was always getting into his eyes. Walking beside him, I had more than one occasion to see him drift into some cloudless daydream, or chew the nail on his thumb, or gaze off at the tree-cluttered horizon as if it held the secrets to some unanswered question. I didn’t dare break into such reveries and treated them with my own private reverence, until he noticed he’d fallen silent and flushed to the tips of his ears, cheeks pink and eyes shy.

  I thought I could be content simply to walk beside him, to listen to his thoughts on what books he had read, to know he sought my opinion and my approval on the theories he’d formed. We agreed on poetry—which was an unexpected detail, considering my obstinate spirit and his dreamier one—and I spent much of my time before finally catching up with sleep lecturing myself on how little this meant.

  He was young. He was good-natured. He was kind to spend such time with me, starved for the attention I gave him, more like my student and friend than anything else. It was circumstance alone that brought us together, and kept us side by side on the twisting paths alongside Locque Nevers. It was luck, not fate, and there was a resounding difference between the two.

  I’d cause no more trouble in my brother’s house.

  However, I hadn’t counted on the tenacity of the rainy season. And I hadn’t counted on the storm that trapped us beneath a willow tree, soaking wet and shivering, but nevertheless laughing together happily, out of breath from running so fast for some kind of shelter.

  “Do you get caught in the rain this often?” I asked him, over the pounding of the rain, the howling of the wind, and the occasional booming clap of thunder.

  “Not really,” he replied. “I think—I think it might be you, actually.”

  “Accept my most sincere of apologies,” I told him, near giddy, feeling my teeth chatter. “Your lips are quite blue. How long do you think this will last?”

  “It’s difficult to say,” Hal admitted. He wrapped his arms arou
nd his chest, chafed them with the palms of his hands, and stamped his feet to keep warm, though the weather was turning to winter, and we were both soaked through to the bone. “It could be ten minutes or it could be an hour.”

  “We’ll have to get back to the house,” I cautioned, “else you’ll catch another cold.”

  “Oh,” Hal said, worrying his lower lip—a habit he had, and a very distracting one. “Well, we’re rather far from the castle.”

  “And you feel it would be rather impractical to take our chances and return now?”

  “I do,” he said, and the sound of his voice, blue-tinged as his lips were with the wet and the cold, made me shiver, too, though for a different reason.

  “Is there anything you’d suggest, then?” I asked.

  He paused for a moment, still chewing at his lower lip; and then all at once his eyes lit up, and I found my breath catching on something rough and untoward in my throat. “Well,” he said, some of that light fading, “it isn’t used very much now, but it would be warmer than standing here under this tree and waiting for the rain to pass. That is, the boathouse. If I remember it right, it’s not too far from here.”

  “Not so far that we could make a dash for it?” I asked.

  Such a situation as this one—the two of us wet and wild from the rush and new heat that surged in our veins—had never swept me up before. I was like a child no older than William again; anyone who knew me from my old life would never have let me hear the end of it.

  Luckily there was no one here but Hal and me.

  He reached forward, across the space between us, and grasped my hand in one of his own. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s make a dash for it.”