Prospero's Half-Life (29 page)

The stranger
threw the whiskey bag onto the table and it bounced slightly, with
a wet, heavy thud. The apostles glared at it with no small
discomfort, and none of them reached out to touch it.

“
Open the bag,” the stranger ordered. None of them moved to do
so, their lips quivering and their eyes growing moist. Richard
waited to see if any of them would screw their courage at the last
minute; when none of them did, he reached forward and did it
himself. When he revealed the contents he recoiled with disgust.
There was a greying severed head inside, boiling with maggots. The
eyes were gone, but Richard knew who it was without even looking at
it. His secret emissary had returned.

“
This is our answer to you,” the stranger continued, his voice
urbane, amused, and bone-chillingly devoid of emotion. “You thought
that you could treat with us as equals, that you were somehow on
the same level as the Republic. You are wrong. You are merely an
obstacle to the glorious will of the people. You are of the least
concern to the House. You will be given the same choice that all
people in the Dominion are given: you will adhere to the legal
auspices of the Republic, or you will be branded enemies and shot
in the street. You have one week to decide. If you do not send word
of your surrender within one week, you will be assaulted and
everything that you have built will be torn down”. He smiled that
shark’s smile again, and clasped his hands together. “I trust you
will make the right choice”.

The stranger
looked to the black robes guarding him and nodded. They turned
around and began to escort him out of the lounge. Brother Bentley
rose from his seat, his eyes bulging wildly, spittle flying from
his aged lips.

“
We will make the
righteous
choice!” he screamed at the departing ambassador.
“We will side with the Almighty Lord, who will shepherd us from
tyranny of the forces of darkness! YOU WILL BOW TO HIS
WILL!”

The stranger
did not turn back to argue, defend himself, or reply in any way. He
left without even acknowledging that he had heard Bentley in any
way. Bentley collapsed back into his chair, breathing heavily and
clutching at the table. Richard eyed him coolly; if the man had a
heart attack and died, he was not likely to live out the night.
Although, he realized, it didn’t quite matter; Bentley had
seemingly made the choice for them, and none of them were likely to
live beyond the next week anyway. As the apostles gibbered with
fright amongst themselves, he affixed his sardonic smile to his
lips and traced random designs on the table with the tip of his
index finger. None of what they had to say mattered in the
slightest anyway.

The mood at the house of the conspiracy was just as grim.
Richard avoided looking at Carolyn, detesting the smug look on her
face that screamed
I told you so
in the loudest possible voice. He knew that she
was right, but he didn’t feel the need to admit it. The others were
arguing loudly, throwing increasingly ridiculous scenarios and
ideas back and forth with the intensity of Olympic tennis players.
Richard was ignoring all of it; he was in a black funk and he
hadn’t heard one idea that he considered workable. He abandoned
them to their discussions and went upstairs, to the dingy little
room on the right hand side of the hallway.

A few minutes
later Carolyn came into the room, her movements soft and her face
concerned. Richard’s irritation crumbled when he saw her and she
gathered him into a deep embrace.

“
There’s no chance,” he whispered, “no chance at all. Bentley
will never budge. This Republic will never give up. We’re going to
be crushed between them”.

“
There is a chance,” she whispered softly. “We can
leave”.

Richard pulled
away from her and stared at her incredulously.

“
We’ve already discussed this,” he said sharply. “The black
robes will never let us leave. You know Bentley’s plan. Every
single last one of us will be rounded up and told to fight these
men from the Republic. They’ll never let us go because they need
all of us to die for their madness. We either die escaping or die
fighting”.

“
There’s a third way,” Carolyn said firmly, and caught him by
the chin. “What have we been doing up until now?”

“
Precious little,” Richard sneered, but when he tried to move
away from Carolyn’s grasp he found that he could not. Her grip on
his chin seemed to be forged from steel.

“
One of the plans that was floated by the apostles was to try
to rig the bridge across the river with explosives and then blow it
before the invaders could cross it. The black robes would cross the
bridge, fight the invaders, and then pull back to the other side
and pull the trigger”.

“
That just sounds like a delay,” Richard said doubtfully.
Carolyn let go of his chin and smiled mysteriously.

“
It is,” she replied, and her voice seemed a trifle smug to
him. “It will take them forever to find another way across the
river, and by that time the apostles hope to finish the
fortifications on the Keep”.

“
Those fortifications will never hold. None of them have a clue
as to what they’re doing. I’ve never set up defences before and
even I can see that they’re just wasting their time”.

Carolyn shook her head sadly. “Let me finish,” she admonished
him. He held his hand out and put on an expression that said
go on, then
. Carolyn drew
herself up to her full height.

“
What
I
propose, if you can be patient enough to listen, is that we
blow the bridge early”.

Richard
blinked for a moment, temporarily uncomprehending. Then it hit
him.

“
While the black robes are on the other side warming them
up”.

“
Exactly”.

“
And we take everyone and get away in the ensuing
chaos”.

“
You got it”.

“
That’s...I’m not sure how to describe it”.

“
Devious?”

“
Close enough, I guess”. He rubbed his chin gingerly. He
thought that she might have bruised it. “Where would we go?” he
mused. Carolyn shrugged.

“
Who cares? East? South? Away from here. I have a feeling that,
whatever happens, this Republic will be tied up here for quite some
time. I think we’ll have more than enough time to get away and find
somewhere safe”.

He felt a
cautious feeling bubble up from somewhere near his solar plexus. He
wondered if it was hope. It had been a long time since he had felt
it.

“
Is that a plan, then?” he asked slowly. She nodded her
head.

“
The part about mining the bridge is already underway, or so
the apostles tell me”. She grinned wickedly. “They don’t seem to
realize how dangerous pillow talk is”.

Richard
scowled at this. He did not like to be reminded of the role that
Carolyn played officially. He was able to swallow his pride and
realize that it was the perfect position for her to be in, but it
didn’t mean that he had to like it. Carolyn caught his expression
and laughed ruefully.

“
My poor, jealous Richard,” she said soothingly. “You know that
there are many that love me. You also know that there is only one
person that I give my love to”.

She put her
hand to his lips with a much gentler touch than before; he tried to
maintain the scowl, failed, and kissed her fingertips with passion.
She smiled and it seemed to Richard that all of creation might be
bound up within the curve of those two lips. He nibbled at a
fingertip and she snatched it away, a playful expression on her
face. A wave of pure feeling came up inside of him like a volcano
and the words tumbled out of his mouth seemingly without any
thought on his part at all.

“
I love you,” he said, and felt only mild shock at the fact
that he’d said it. She smiled broadly and her eyes lit up. There
was something knowing on her face that Richard could not quite
read.

“
That’s an awfully good thing,” she replied teasingly, “since I
love you too”. She entwined her hand into his, and it felt as
though it had always been there. “Let’s go up on the roof and hold
each other while the moon comes up,” she said imploringly. Richard
considered it.

“
I don’t know,” he replied, “what if the black robes happen to
see us?”

“
Fuck the black robes,” she replied, with considerable heat.
“One way or another, they aren’t going to matter one
bit”.

Richard
considered this, chewed it over, and realized that she was right.
The breaking point had arrived. Once the moon rose, the endgame
would begin. He felt an awed terror at the prospect, but swallowed
it and led Carolyn up to the roof, where a gigantic orange moon
rose up from the horizon to light their embrace with its own
ancient blessing.

TWELVE

It was a
matter of no difficulty for Richard to convince Brother Bentley
that he, Brother Isaiah, should be an integral part of the defence
of their community. Richard delved into his deepest studies and
convinced the old man that the most favoured of God should be the
ones to lead in the battle, to ensure the certainty of victory. The
leader’s response had been confused, and from the look in his eyes
Richard was unsure of whether he understood anything that Richard
had said. He felt somewhat ashamed at his callous manipulation of
what was obviously a man suffering from a quickly advancing case of
dementia. The feeling was mitigated by the looks on the faces of
his fellow apostles when Bentley announced who would be in charge
of the planned manoeuvres at the bridge. Many of them looked
shocked, and at least one rose up and asked how Richard even knew
of the plans. Richard leaned back in his chair and grinned
viciously at the man, and Bentley lectured them all back into
silence.

Richard and
Carolyn spent the grace period granted by the Republic’s ambassador
engaged in carefully filtering instructions out into the general
community. To this end they utilized the remainder of the
conspiracy, issuing instructions as to how to efficiently and
silently get the plan out to everyone that mattered. The idea
itself was simple, but the community had grown quite large over the
last few months. Getting the word out to everyone was a much harder
thing to do in reality than their discussions had lead them to
believe. Many of the recent refugees were still shell-shocked from
their encounters with the Republic; the idea of picking up and
running from them again sent them into a spiral of shock. Richard
and Carolyn instructed their messengers to be gentle, but in
private they discussed the idea that there were going to be some
members of the community that simply wouldn’t be coming along with
them. Some of the refugees would be too exhausted to flee along
with them. Some of the original community would be too loyal to
Bentley to flee; after all of the time he’d been there it still
deeply surprised Richard that anyone believed in the madman’s
vision.

“
The people who don’t come along can cover while the rest of us
run,” Carolyn said, one night after the moon had gone down.
“They’ll be in complete chaos and once anyone realizes what’s going
on we’ll be well on our way”.

“
That’s a terrible thought,” Richard admonished her. He was
somewhat more vehement than he normally was with her, since he’d
been having dark thoughts of his own that ran along the same
paths.

“
It’s a true one, though,” Carolyn replied levelly. Richard
tried to think of something to say to prove them both wrong, but in
the dead of night there were no such words coming to his mind. It
was as she intimated; the milling about of the confused would aid
in the escape of the rest. Its veracity did nothing to alleviate
the sinking feeling he felt in his stomach when he considered
it.

Another
problem that Richard was having was the fact that he’d never even
considered how to command an armed conflict before, even in
simulated video game form. He’d played chess (and Risk) from time
to time in the past, but such abstractions were nothing like the
task that lay before him now. When he wasn’t subtly feeling out
threads of secret communication with the community, he was meeting
with senior members of the black robes and discussing the plans of
battle with them. Richard felt like a child thrown into a
construction site with a hammer and told to build things. He tried
his best to sound as though he knew what he was talking about, but
he knew from their faces that the black-robe leaders were well
aware of the limitations of his knowledge. In the end he decided to
leave the meat of the details up to them. He was only leading the
endeavour in order to sabotage it, after all, and the more
complacent the black robes were about their own leadership in the
matter, the easier it would be to pull off their plot.

Still, the
idea of leading men into battle gave him great consternation, and
he lay awake for several nights before, staring at the ceiling
while all around him his estranged fellow apostles snored softly.
It would be a simple matter, he tried telling himself. Black robes
in front, grey robes behind, so that the enemy would think they
were coming out to engage in a full battle. The black robes would
cross the bridge, the grey robes would stay behind. The black robes
would engage with the enemy for a time, and then, at a pre-arranged
signal, they would retreat across the bridge. Once they were
across, the trigger would be pulled and the bridge would come
collapsing down, hopefully drowning some of the enemy in the
process. That was the official plan, anyway, which Richard had
solemnly agreed to in the presence of Bentley and the other
apostles. The real plan would be much more truncated, of course,
and would involve the drowning of both black robes and the men of
this strange Republic. Then, freedom – at least, so Richard
fervently hoped. As he’d lain awake, he’d counted his days in a
rudimentary fashion; he had been shocked and deeply appalled to
realize that he’d been a member of Bentley’s cult for just under a
year. His past yawned behind him, and when he did sleep he dreamt
that it was an abyss trailing him, one that he would fall into and
scream endlessly through for a long time before he would finally
awaken, sweating and shaking.