Anarchaos

XXI

I said, “Am I on Earth?”

He turned to look at me. “You’re awake, eh?” He’d been sewing hides together, and he now put them down on the table, got to his feet and came over to look at me. “How do you feel?”

“Better. But weak.”

“You want to try the stew again?”

“I think so. And a biscuit with it, to help it stay down.”

“Just the thing.”

I managed to sit up by myself this time, and prop myself against the wall, while he got a bowl of stew and two more biscuits and brought them over to me. I took the bowl in my cupped right hand again, but then there was no way for me to hold a biscuit. He saw my difficulty and said, “That’s all right; just a minute.” He brought a chair over and sat down beside me and said, “When you want some biscuit, hand me the bowl.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ll have to get you strong,” he said, and smiled within his beard.

I chewed meat, and swallowed it, and said, “My name is Malone.”

“Torgmund,” he said. “That’s me, Torgmund. Nobody ever gave me a name to go in front of it.” He laughed, and took the bowl while I ate some biscuit. Watching me eat, he said, “Why’d you ask about Earth? You’re on Anarchaos, where you’ve always been.”

“Not always,” I said.

He was surprised. “You came here from someplace else?”

“Earth.”

“And that out there, that looked like Earth?”

“Because of the moon,” I said. “I didn’t know Anarchaos had a moon.”

“A lot of them don’t,” he said. “Daysiders,” he added, contemptuously. “They never see it, because they’ve got daylight all the time. But we on the rim, we see it.” He chuckled, and gave me back the bowl. “Gives us a kind of day and night,” he said. “You take a look out that door now, it’s black as the bottom of a hole; you can’t see your hand in front of your face.” Then he glanced at my stump, and seemed embarrassed.

I said, “We must be farther east. A lot farther than where you found me.”

“A full day,” he said. “I was coming back from Ulik when I found you. I put you in the back of the wagon and took you home.”

I said, “A full day? What sort of day?”

He laughed again, and pointed skyward, and said, “Rim sort. By the moon. Twenty-seven hours, fifteen minutes, Earth Standard. Little longer than an Earth day, isn’t it?”

“Yes. You’re a trapper.”

“That’s what I am. And you’re a slave.”

“Yes.”

“Got away from one of those mines they have around there.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I never heard of one of you escaping,” he said. “How’d you do it?”

Between mouthfuls of food I told him about working in the mine, and the loss of my hand, and the change of jobs, and how I’d found a way to escape and did it. He listened, bright-eyed, interested in what I had to tell him about a slave’s life and enjoying the story of my escape and also. I think, pleased merely at the prospect of someone else in the cabin to talk to. Looking around, I could see that no thought had ever been given to more than one person occupying this place. His had to be a very lonely life.

When I was done eating and telling my story, he took the bowl away and then came back and said, “How’s it sitting?”

“Better,” I said. I felt warm and comfortable and totally at ease. My eyelids kept closing of their own weight.

“Go ahead and sleep,” he said. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I can talk now.” But even as I said it my eyes shut themselves down and I felt sleep covering me like a net.

When I awoke, the cabin was empty. I rolled over and dozed some more, but lightly, so that I heard Torgmund when he came in. I rolled over again and saw him beating snow off his coat and out of his hair. He saw me looking at him and called, “Snow! A good one!”

“So I see.”

“I’ll make us something to eat,” he said. “You watch me; you’ll want to know where I keep things.”

He fried eggs this time, and made up something hot that looked like coffee and tasted like charcoal. The eggs, too, were somewhat different in taste to what I remembered from Earth.

After we ate, Torgmund sat beside me again and said, “So you’re not a local product, eh?”

“No, I’m from Earth.”

“Funny place for a foreigner to come,” he said.

“I wanted to study the social structure,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned Gar or my reasons for being here or anything that had happened before my enslavement, and I felt obscurely it was best to keep all of that to myself.

He accepted my answer at once, nodding and saying, “Student. You fellows think you’re immune, nothing’ll touch you. I guess you know different now.”

“I guess I do,” I said.

He got to his feet and pushed the chair against the wall, saying, “Time for me to get back to work.”

“Outside?”

“Naturally. Got to get your room done.”

I frowned at him. “My room?”

He pointed at the far wall. “Right there. When I get the roof on I’ll put a door through there; you’ll be able to come back and forth without going outside.”

I said, “You think I’ll be sick so very long?”

He laughed and said, “I sure hope not. I never had a slave before. I wouldn’t want one that was sick all the time.”

“Slave?”

“You,” he said, pointing at me. “What’s the matter with you? You addled in your wits?”

I said, “You want to keep me here?”

“You’re my slave,” he said. “I found you, you’re mine.”

“I’m not a slave.”

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “You already admitted it. Slave in a mine, ran away.” He laughed again and said, “You won’t want to run away from here; I’ll treat you right. Besides, you’d never get back to dayside on foot.” He went over to the door and called back, “You take it easy now, rest up. Two or three days you should be able to get up from there, start earning your keep.” He went on out.

I lay in the bed for a long while after he left, staring into the fire across the way. He had been kind to me. More than kind; he had saved my life. And yet, and yet, I couldn’t stay.

I knew what I had to do, knew it from the beginning, but I lay there anyway and stared into the fire as though no answer would come to me. Partly that was because I was still so physically weak and such a bad match for the obvious strength of Torgmund, but partly also it was because I did owe him my life, and he was operating out of a simple view of the world, doing nothing that seemed to him wrong. A trapper was a trapper. Daysiders were daysiders. And slaves were slaves. Forever.

Still there was what had to be done. I fell asleep knowing it.

When I awoke he was indoors again, making more stew. When he brought me my bowl he said, “How you coming?”

“Slow but steady,” I said, although I was much improved.

During dinner and for a while afterwards Torgmund spoke to me of trapping, and of skinning the hides, and of those other activities of his life in which he expected me from now on to take part. But eventually he stretched out on his makeshift bed — furs spread out on the floor — across the room, and I pretended at once to fall back asleep.

But I had never been more awake. My eyes were closed but my ears were open, listening to the sound of his breath going in and out of his body. When the unchanging evenness of that sound convinced me he was fully asleep I crept slowly from my bed.

I was still weak, very weak. Standing made me dizzy, and I wasn’t entirely sure I had the strength to do what had to be done.

If I were to wait till I was stronger…

No. In another two or three days he would know I was stronger and he would no longer expose himself so freely to me. He would most likely lock me away in the room he was building when it was time for him to sleep. So if it was going to be, it had to be now.

I made no noise. I inched around the room, hanging to the walls, my bare feet moving forward tentatively at every step, my hand clutching the wall. It had to be somewhere.

It was. The knife he used in skinning his catch, a long curving steel blade in a sheath hanging on a nail beside the door. Slowly I grasped the hilt and drew the blade out of its sheath, and then I moved to Torgmund.

I had neither the time nor the strength for any sort of stroking cut. All I could do was drive the blade straight down into and through his throat.

It didn’t kill him all at once, but the point of the knife was into the floor, pinning him there, and his thrashings finished the job, while I leaned spread-eagled against the wall, gasping and terrified, watching.

When it was over, I pulled the knife free and dragged the body outside into the snow. Then I went back in and latched the door and staggered to my bed, too exhausted to do any more.

For hours, the firelight played nightmares around the room.