Anarchaos

XV

I cannot tell how much time went by. Weeks. Months.

If a man is treated like an animal, he will become an animal. There is something inside every human being that craves mindlessness, that aches to give up the nagging responsibility of being a creature with a rational brain, that yearns to be merely instinct and appetite and blindness. Those who join a rioting mob have given in to this animality within themselves; alcoholics and drug addicts are perpetually in search of it.

I became an animal. I became as stupid, as obedient, as unthinking, as placid as any plowhorse.

The early part of the transition is clear, but the last of the decline blends into unending sameness: the straw of my bed, the damp darkness of the mine, the looming mountains, Hell at perpetual evening on the western rim of the sky.

Alfie and the other two didn’t keep me long. They walked me to a large wooden building, one story high but rambling, apparently a kind of meeting house or place for the bartering of goods. Here they sold me to two heavily bearded men in clothing made of furs, who bound me even more tightly than the others had and dumped me into the back of a rough-made wagon with two other new slaves. A fourth was tossed in after us later on, and then we rode out of Ulik, our two captors sitting together at the front of the wagon, calling to their hairhorses and talking together in guttural voices.

I passed out from time to time, and was probably unconscious for most of the trip. At the end of it, one of the two climbed into the back of the wagon, cut the ropes off us, and threw us one at a time out onto the ground, where we were all at first too weak to move. But they forced us to stand up, kicking us and pulling our hair, until finally three of us were on our feet. The fourth turned out to be dead, which enraged them. One of them, in his fury, beat at the dead body with a rock until the other one told him he was wasting time. Then they marched us through rocks and granite and sharp projections to a wooden fence. A man in a green uniform gave them money there and they went away. I watched the transaction, though I was too dazed then to fully understand it.

The light was more Earthlike here, with Hell far away on the horizon, but the landscape was forbidding and unnatural. Jagged rocks and boulders were everywhere; shale rustled beneath one’s feet; the sharp teeth of hills and mountains sprang up on all sides. Much of this had been cleared and flattened inside the compound, in the area circumscribed by that wooden fence. We were marched, the three of us, across the compound to a shed, where we were examined by a doctor.

I said to the doctor, “You aren’t from this world.” Because it was true, it could be seen in his face. But he acted as though I hadn’t spoken.

I tried to observe everything, thinking of escape, but I saw nothing to give me hope. Only the compound, enclosed by the tall wooden fence everywhere except at the face of the mountain, where the mine entrance gaped like an open mouth. Inside the compound were several sheds, some for the administrators, the rest meant to house the slaves. The one I slept in had straw on a dirt floor, that was all. Fifteen of us slept in it. Because it was so cold here, at the edge of the Evening Mountains, we huddled together like cattle every sleep period, and our communal stench came to be precious to me, representing warmth and rest and our closest approximation to comfort. I don’t know if any of the others were women, and it couldn’t have mattered; brute exhaustion had desexed us.

Without the solar rhythm of day and night it was impossible to keep hold of the concept of the passage of time, so that we lived our lives to a pattern we could not comprehend. We were awakened by shouts, and the sun read evening. We ate gruel from a trough and then trotted into the mine, and behind us as we went the sun still read evening. We worked, scraping out a vein of some pale metal through the interior of the mountain, and at a shouted order we put down our tools and trotted back to the compound along the cold damp tunnels, and when we emerged the sun said evening still. We ate again at the trough, and crowded into our shed, and closed our eyes against the light of the evening sun, and slept.

At first I tried to keep hold of that within me which was rational and human, but it was impossible. My brain atrophied; in any realistic sense, I had ceased to exist.

I was brought out of this nothingness twice, the first time temporarily, in a brief incident that stands out in my memory like a single star in an otherwise black sky. I was at the trough with the others, and laughter made me raise my head. Some distance off, talking with a mine official, were two large muscular men with shaved bald heads. Seeing them, it came into my mind that I had been looking for these two, and I very nearly moved away from the trough in their direction, as though there was something I had to say to them. But then fear struck me, and my back twinged with pain, and I became very afraid — without knowing why — that they would see me. I ducked my head down again, and continued to eat, and kept my face hidden when a little while later we trotted past them on our way to work.

But the incident had driven me to self-awareness, and I remained nervous and upset for some time after that, until the monotonous routine of the work lulled me back to indifference.

The second incident was much stronger, and jolted me back to myself violently and permanently. That was when they cut off my hand.

Infection had set in where my finger had been bitten. Gradually the entire hand had become discolored and I felt increasing waves of pain. Apparently I had begun to howl, both while awake and in my sleep, until finally one of the guards took a look at my hand and I was taken to the doctor who had examined me back at the beginning.

It is possible the hand could have been saved by a doctor disposed to expend time and effort on the problem, but I think it more likely that the infection had been left to itself too long and there was by now nothing left to do but amputate. In any case, I was strapped into a chair, my left arm was tied to a kind of board, and a knife came down on my wrist.

I screamed myself back to life. First the knife, and then the cauterizing fire, and when the stony-faced doctor was done I was trembling and weak and half-mad with pain, but I was alive again, and I would know no more deaths until the last one.