Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

“Make it quick and keep it quiet” was the only instruction for the gang, though that was easier said than done. The winter months had shut the landscape down, hardened it and left it brittle. Even walking through the dead, frost-stiffened vegetation that morning had been far from silent. The ground had snapped and clacked loudly underfoot, protesting at the weight of so much flesh, though so far only telling anyone awake inside the Ark that men and horses were passing by. That was not unusual for these spring mornings, when everyone was impatient to catch first sight of sails. The ships were coming. Any dreaming citizen with any hope was packed and ready for the sea.

Franklin, clumsy and stumbling at the best of times, had made more noise than most as they approached the palisades. He’d been strapped across the neck as punishment and then strapped again when he’d cried out in pain. His masters, he’d discovered, were quick to pick on him and were less eager to punish shorter men. Sometimes, when his anger and his despair became intolerable, he stood and stretched himself and laughed out loud, shaking all his limbs as if his humor knew no bounds. It was a way to shrive himself of all the furies. It was a laugh that did not seem (well, not at first) too impudent. Sometimes his masters laughed along with him, counted him an idiot, called him Donkey. At other times they beat him for his laugh. But usually the beating was good-humored and less painful than not laughing.

Franklin had been relatively fortunate during his captivity. The morning following his separation from Margaret, after a cold, hard night sleeping with the horses and the stolen animals at the fringes of the Dreaming Highway, Franklin, Acton Bose, and the two Joeys had been tugged awake on their leashes at first light and hurried along at the speed of the slowest horse toward Tidewater.

The horsemen did not stop to feed their charges, whose only opportunity to rest and urinate had not been pleasant. The seven rustlers had caught up with a cartload of furniture and farming tools being pulled along the highway by four heavy horses. The three emigrants who owned it, two men — brothers, with identical beards — and one wife, hoped to make themselves invisible by staying absolutely silent and making no eye contact with the newcomers, who had first ridden around them in a circle, whooping like children, and then dismounted to inspect their prey more closely.

The travelers studied their own feet without comment or expression as Franklin and his fellows were forced to sit in a line with their backs toward the cart. The family’s horses were unharnessed and their boxes kicked open and their sacks emptied onto the highway. Only their dog did not understand that nothing could be done to save them or their property. Its barking protests were short-lived. Finally, once all the valuables had been discovered and stolen and anything fragile had been broken, just for the sake of it, the heavy horses were added to the string of mules and the two men were attached to the train of captives with loops of rope around their necks and wrists. But the woman, despite the protests of her husband, who called out her name—“Marie, Marie, Marie”—well beyond hearing distance, was left behind in the attentive care of two of the rustlers. They caught up with their comrades later in the afternoon in high spirits but unaccompanied. When the husband once again called out her name, they shook their fists to silence him and made vulgar gestures. “Make another noise and you’ll be beaten,” they said, and added, “Like the dog. Like sweet Marie. That goes for all of you. We’re in the mood.”

On their fourth day of captivity, exhausted by their pace of travel, by their anger and anxiety, and by the meanness of their rations, the six hostages arrived at an encampment in ancient wasteland to the north of Tidewater. The land was far too widely strewn with rubble and debris for many trees to have survived. Only weeds and a few low scrub bushes made their living among the remains of great stone buildings and the tumbled masonry of a grand, dead city. So deep were the fallen remnants of the now shapeless structures that pools of water, little lakes, were nestling in the marble and concrete piles. The horsemen stopped in a steep-sided canyon of rubble and wreckage where the sunlight hardly penetrated. There the captives were tightly bound and shackled to an antique, purposeless engine of some kind, smelling of decay and rust, and — or so they feared — left for dead, without a jug of water or a scrap of food, any protection against the cold or any word of what their fates might be. Their only freedom, now that their captors were out of earshot, was that they could speak among themselves, exchanging names with the husband and brother-in-law of sweet Marie, who made their oddly formal introductions, observing rules of precedence that could no longer have any value.

“I have to get back to my wife,” Nike, the husband, kept repeating, as if offering an excuse not to join the others in their enforced adventure.

“We all have someone to get back to,” the older Joey said. “I have a wife and other children, too. I don’t know where they are.” He indicated Franklin. “He has a sister, and Acton has his parents and his daughter. That’s how it is for all of us. They’re lost to us, we’re lost to them.”

“You’re older than the rest of us,” replied Nike, as if age devalued Joey’s pessimism.

The younger Joey spent his time either crying or sighing deeply. He was in shock: the beating of the dog had been the cruelest act he’d ever witnessed, and inexplicable to a boy of his age. He’d no idea that anyone could be so heartless as to treat a dog as if it were…well, just an animal. But the men, once they had heard the horsemen depart and tested the silence for a while, saw this unexpected abandonment as their only chance to get away with their lives. If there was anyone to get back to, if the wife, the child, the sister, and the parents had survived, then this was the opportunity to seek them out.

The men were too tightly bound to attempt to untie any knots, but with a little wiggling each could sink his chin onto his chest and get his teeth around one of the thinner ropes. It tasted of sweat and smelled of horses and wood. But it was feasible, though not easy, to snap or chew the thin strands. Given time, it now seemed possible that they could bite through this rope, though whether that would set them free or merely damage their mouths and lips remained to be seen. They worked away, no longer wasting any energy on talk. They sounded like six feeding rats.

The best of them had broken through only a fraction of the rope when three of the rustlers, including their short and overdressed leader, still wearing Jackson’s coat, returned. They were accompanied by an elderly man who rode his horse sidesaddle and his two armed retainers. They helped him to dismount. He walked along the line of captives, nodding, shaking his head, behaving like a trader inspecting barrels of apples or bolts of cloth.

“Very well,” he said. “My offer stands. I’ll take those three.” He pointed at the brothers and at Acton Bose, but shook his head at the middle-aged potman. “And I’ll take the boy. We’ll make good use of him until he grows. What name?”

“I’m Junior Joey, mister.”

“And this one, too.” He placed his finger on the end of Franklin’s chin, buried in the hair and the threads of chewed rope. “We’ll have them digging coal.”

“No, the mountain’s not for sale,” the small man said. “We’re keeping him.”

“Well, keep him, then. The more fool you. I would have paid extra for him.” He shook hands with the rustlers, handed over the price they’d negotiated, remounted his horse, with help, and led his retainers and his four newly roped purchases out of the encampment.