by Jeffrey J. Carey
As Serrilius mechanically executed the sorting rules, his parchment thin skin glowed sallow in the candlelight. He had once been quite muscular, but had grown lean and sinewy over the years. His blonde hair hung in greasy strips over his face and had turned a dingy yellow from the omnipresent smoke from the torches.
Serrilius’ position afforded him some luxuries. His room was a spacious twelve by twelve feet. In the corner furthest from the solid, but unlocked, metal door was his palate of straw and woven wool. The only other furnishings in the room were a small chest and the desk and chair he worked at.
In the bowels of Barber Castle, enemies of the kingdom, foreign and domestic, were processed. Every day, Serrilius was given a manifest with the names of each of the new arrivals. The able-bodied were sent to the death camps and enslaved to the King. The rest fueled the pyre.
The royal city was alive each quarter phase of the moon with bloodlust and alcohol. Many of the prisoners were killed for sport in the arena. The remainder were ceremonially tossed into a white-hot pit while the drunken crowd chanted in unison.
One day, just before the last third quarter moon of the fall, a fateful list was delivered.
Writing the names of those destined for the pit was a mindless activity. Serrilius kept himself entertained by concentrating on his penmanship. By lunch, he started the more time consuming task of sorting the relatively healthy prisoners to the appropriate work camp lists. Life in the camps was short and mean. Their blood fueled the King’s war efforts and paved the wilderness.
After assigning a few dozen prisoners, he passed upon a name and froze. At length, he read it a second time and shook his head. Annayus Taricus was a close friend from childhood. He had heard rumors that he joined the rebellion. He moved on through the remainder of the list, unable to bring himself to write his friend’s name down. With an even greater weight on his mind, the final names were assigned. There was only one left.
Serrilius’ thoughts turned to their youth in the countryside. During the summers, more often than not, you would find them in the stream running through the woods between their family plantations. They had the kind of friendship where the answer to any request was implied.
With his thoughts elsewhere, he did not notice his quill shaking over the paper, splattering tiny drops of viscous ink. When his mind re-focused on the present, Serrilius dropped the pen and gathered his resolve to go see Annayus. He dreaded, however, running the gauntlet of the damned.
Serrilius donned his robes and lit the torch by the door with his desktop candle. His cell was isolated and he had to climb a short flight of stone stairs to reach the main hallway. As he walked through the corridors toward his friend’s cellblock, the flames cast a ghostly light over the inhabitants of the holding cells. Some plead for mercy that would never come, but most merely stared at him dejectedly. They would never know his name, but he knew all of theirs. It was always hardest when he saw the families. Nothing crushed him more than the protective pleas, or desperate bargaining, of a mother. He kept his head forward and his pace brisk.
He arrived at a checkpoint in a circular room flooded with torchlight. By design, his eyes were slow to adjust. Any prisoner that managed to make it into this room would be dead before their eyes focused. Beyond a locked metal door, to the right, was the solitary confinement wing.
“No one passes!” the leather clad guard stated emphatically. His arms were crossed over a beefy chest and clasped a double bladed axe. His tattooed skull was shaved clean.
“Do you know,” Serrilius hissed at the man, “who I am?”
“You are Serrilius, the King’s scrivener,” the guard replied warily.
“And do you know – what happens to people on my lists?” Serrilius asked with threatening overtones.
“Beg your pardon,” he said, standing slightly straighter. “What is your desire? I have some that haven‘t been touched yet.”
“I want nothing of the sort, you imbecile. I need to interrogate a prisoner to find out if he is suitable for the camps.”
“Yes sir,” the guard said hastily as he opened the metal door. It was clear that he couldn’t wait to be clear of Serrilius’ company. Serrilius didn’t blame him.
The granite hallway extended far beyond the light of his torch, lined on both sides with arched doors. At length, Serrilius came to his destination. He opened the iron-barred window at eye height and pushed the torch through. There was a man huddled in the corner, draped in rags. The smell of stale urine poured out into the hallway.
“Annayus Tarricus,” he called out. The man pulled his arms over his face reflexively upon hearing his name. “It’s Serrilius Varius, come to see what’s become of his old friend.” At this, the man pushed himself unsteadily onto his feet and came to the door.
“Traitor!” he spat at Serrilius. “I see you wear the purple robe of a lapdog.” Annayus’ enraged face was swollen and bruised.
“It is I,” Serrilius said with resignation.
“How can you serve that monster?” Annayus asked with incredulity.
“What makes you think I have a choice?”
“You have a choice with every breath you take, Serrilius. You choose whether or not to oppose him.”
“Choices? The only choice I can make is whether the other prisoners here go to the death camps or the arena,” Serrilius said as he gazed at the floor.
“How could you? The Serrilius I know could never condemn an innocent man,” Annayus said, obviously hurt.
“I tried to tell you, I don’t serve him willingly anymore.” Serrilius said defensively.
“You serve him all the same. That is a capital offense among my people,” Annayus stated simply.
“Please listen to me, I am as much of a prisoner here as you are. I want to try to help you.”
“There is some small luck,” Annayus said with an uneasy laugh, “presuming I may at least ask you to give me a chance at life in the camps.”
“The camps are no reprieve,” Serrilius replied through clenched teeth. “Within a month, you will willingly serve the King for a scrap of bread. Before you die, the camps will destroy your humanity.”
“I know the compounds you are speaking of,” Annayas said, “You can always find them from the carrion birds. There is hope with each new dawn. My friends are gaining ground every day. I may be liberated. I will never be broken.“
Serrilius ignored the absurdity of the last statement. Everyone was broken, some merely suffered more than others before it happened. “Tell me how you came to be captured.”
Annayus was still wary but started to open up. “There’s not much to tell. The King is killing his people as fast as the foreigners. I joined the resistance a few years after you left for the army. We had a secret camp in an abandoned quarry. We must have had a spy in our midst. The King‘s men took out our sentries silently and descended on the camp during the night with ten times our force. They had me in chains before I could get to a weapon. That life is behind me, for now. What is this about you being a prisoner?”
“I haven’t talked about it with anyone in the five years I’ve been here,” Annayus said before he paused and gathered his thoughts. “You remember that I joined the army at sixteen. My head was filled with romantic visions of fighting the enemies of the Kingdom. The enemies of the Kingdom, I learned, were more likely to take the form of starving villagers.”
“Why didn’t you defect, the rebellion could have used you?”
“The rebellion will never win. Your victory would begin the end of all the kingdoms. No matter the hatred the kings may have for each other, they would align all of the world’s armies if you became a serious threat. I hoped that good men serving the King could begin to change things. One night, however, my delusions were crushed.” Serrilius looked up and down the hall uneasily.
“We need some privacy,” he said, “I’m going to let myself in. Don’t think about trying to escape. There are a dozen locked checkpoints before you reach the only door to the next fortified level above us. I don’t have a key to the checkpoints and haven’t been above this level since I was sent here. We‘re at least three levels below the first exit to the outside.” He inserted his master cell key, opened the creaking door, and tried to close it quietly behind him.
Once inside the tiny room, Serrilius lowered his voice. “An agent of the King posed as a rebel and offered a poor farmer quadruple the King’s price for ten bushels of wheat. The man struck the deal and took the gold. We were sent to arrest his family and bring them here.” He gestured for Annayus to sit.
“I led the patrol,” Serrilius continued, “that burst through the door of their thatch-roofed hut. The man sat at a wooden table with his wife and two young boys with blond hair. The woman was holding a bolt of cloth wrapped in a silk bow. The children each had a new wooden horse, brightly painted. When I told them that they were being arrested for aiding the rebellion, the farmer ran toward us with a butcher’s knife. My first lieutenant ran him through mid-stride. His wife tried to get to his side, but was cut down by the second step.” His voice became hoarse.
“The boys started crying, they couldn’t have been more than six and eight. The oldest leapt down from his chair and hugged his mother. The youngest was just rocking back and forth, clutching his toy horse. There was nothing left to do but load them in the wagon and bring them to the castle.”
“It sickens me that the worm executes children,” Annayus interrupted. “They aren’t criminals.”
“When the King takes you, he takes your whole family. He knows that survivors become enemies. He kills them before they have a chance to oppose him.”
“It is that thinking, Serrilius, that will be the end of him.”
“Perhaps,” Serrilius said half-heartedly. “After they were loaded, the children were sobbing in the back of the wagon and I was fighting tears in front of my men. Halfway here, I snapped. I told my lieutenant that I had orders to take them to a different keep and I sent the rest of the company back to the castle.”
“After they were out of sight, I headed in the opposite direction of the keep toward the border. I felt that my only hope was speed and stayed to the main roads. The wagon, however, was too slow. I imagined spies at every cross-trail. I pulled the wagon behind some underbrush and saddled the lead horse.”
“I loaded the children on the second horse and continued through the woods toward Kharman. It was perhaps twenty miles to the border.”
“Why didn’t you make it?” Annayus asked.
“I nearly did. My first lieutenant was both perceptive and ambitious. He sensed my deception and doubled back to alert the border patrol. When I came into a clearing a few hundred yards from the line, two sentries caught us.”
“They brought the three of us here. To prove the futility of my resistance, the King had the children tortured. I was locked in the room with them while the deed was done. When they were given short reprieves, they would crawl to me and seek comfort. I was so full of impotent shame as I tried to tell them everything would be alright. It took them three days to die,” Serrilius said as he began to sob. “I was left alive as a cautionary tale to those that would defy the King. I was locked down here and given the sorting rules and a quill. Every day brings a new list. He makes me write every name, even the ones obviously headed for the pit. His cruelty is surpassed only by his ingenuity.”
“Why don’t you just refuse?” Annayus asked.
“I tried that. He had all of them tortured. Their screams echoed through the halls until dawn. The horror etched a simple lesson into my mind. Life is pain, ceaseless and sure. All I can hope to do is pass them through this place without raising his ire.”
“Help me escape,” Annayus blurted out suddenly. “They can do no worse than kill us.”
“Annayus, my friend, they can and will do far, far worse. Besides, there is no escape. I’ve thought of every possible way.”
“How can you find your way from this place when you have given up hope? You have fallen into the King’s trap. There is always a way. I tell you, by the Gods, that his evil reign will end at the hands of his people. I will see that day or die in the struggle.”
Serrilius wondered at the idealistic fervor that grasped his friend. Through the bruises, he saw the laughing boy that Annayus had been. It was as if he glowed with an internal light. In the depths of hell, Serrilius found himself beginning to believe in hope. He even thought of a possible escape. He would need a lot of help. Were there others that hated the King as badly as he did? He imagined the two of them running through the night beyond the castle’s walls, dewy grass beneath his feet and the wind on his face. He started to believe in hope, no matter how slim. As he indulged in his fantasy, a woman’s blood curdling scream pierced his psyche. The mirage was broken.
“Annayus, how have we come to such a low place?” Serrilius asked as he reached down to embrace his friend. As they sat silently in each other’s arms, Annayus started to sob on his shoulder. Serrilius knew that the reality of his future was sinking in. “It’s going to be alright,” Serrilius said gently as he pulled his hands away from the embrace to his friend’s battered face and looked into his eyes with love and kindness. He backed away slightly and wrapped his wiry hands, strengthened from millions of strokes of his quill, tightly around his friend’s neck. Annayus was too weak to resist, but pleaded with his eyes. Serrilius kept his gaze until the end. The death was silent and swift.
Serrilius fell to the ground, with Annayus’ lifeless body in his embrace and began to weep. He wept for joy, because his friend escaped this world without knowing its true depths. He wept with shame that he was too much of a coward to follow him.
About the Author
Jeffrey J. Carey is an attorney and writer living in Kansas City, Missouri. He is an active contributor and reviewer at Fantasy Writers Online.
©2010 Jeffrey J. Carey
