Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

She enters the tent and sees his body’s imprint on the sheets and has to turn away. She eats the bread and drinks the water, then lies down and waits, as if an easy death is one more luxury some nameless servant will provide.

She cannot believe that anyone is able to bear this kind of pain. She thinks of shepherds sleepless in the blue snow, their furs pulled tight around their shoulders, waiting for the wolves, armed only with a slingshot. She thinks of the soldiers who come back from every summer’s campaign with legs and arms missing, the stumps like melted wax. She thinks of women giving birth in stone sheds with leaking roofs and mud floors. She thinks about what it must take to lead such lives, and she starts to understand that wealth has deprived her of the one skill that she needs now.

The light begins to die and the dark thickens slowly to a colour she has never seen before. Then the shearwaters come, two hundred thousand birds returning from a day at sea to run the gauntlet of the black-backed gulls, and suddenly the tent is inside a hurricane of screams, the noise that makes young sailors think they have drifted near the mouth of hell. She dares not go outside for fear of what she might find. She covers her ears and curls into a ball in the centre of the single rug and waits for claws and teeth to tear the flimsy canvas walls and shred her body like a deer’s. She waits, and waits, and when the silence finally comes it is worse, for she has been stripped of everything that used to shield her from a hard world where every action has a consequence. She has no one else to blame. This is her punishment. She helped him kill her brother. Now it is her turn. When her bones are picked clean the scales will be level once again.

She should have listened to her maids and walked around the palace grounds, but she had walked around the palace grounds a thousand times. She knew in tedious detail every carved fountain, every lavender bush with its halo of bees, every shaded bower. She wanted the bustle of the quays, those overflowing baskets of squid and mackerel, the stacked crates and coiled ropes, the shouting and the knock of tarred hulls, that childhood fantasy of walking up a gangplank, casting off and slipping through the cupped hands of the breakwater into the white light of a world outside her family’s orbit.

They came at every summer’s end, a war-price Athens paid to keep the peace, just one more ceremony in a calendar of ceremonies, the Leaping of the Bulls, the Festival of Poppies. Twelve young men and women taken from their ship and housed in the barn above the orchard while this year’s pit was dug beside the last, then led out and lined up to have their throats slit and die on top of one another. They were human cattle, and they knew this, shuffling with heads down, already half dead. She gave them no more thought than she gave the enemies her father and her cousins killed in battle.

But her eyes locked briefly with the eyes of the one man who held his head high and she realised that there were many worlds beyond this world and that her own was very small indeed.

Later that night she woke repeatedly, thinking he was standing in the room or lying beside her. She was terrified at first, then disappointed. She felt alive in a way that she had never felt alive before. The cold flags on the floor, the cicadas, the pocked coin of the moon, her own skin…She had never seen these things clearly until now.

Shortly after dawn she slipped past the maids in the outer room and walked round the orchard to the stables. She told the guards she wanted to talk to the prisoners and they could think of no adequate reply to this unexpected request. The last of the night was pooling in the big stone rooms, the window slits no wider than a hand. There was sand on the floor and the sound of breathing. She felt the stir her presence caused, warm bodies shifting nervously in the dark. It was a small thing to be brave about but she had never needed to be brave before and mastering her fear was thrilling.

His face materialised behind the bars of the little window. “You came.”

She had spent her whole life waiting for this moment and never realised it. She thought stories only happened to men. Now her own was beginning.

“My father is the king,” he said. “In time I will become king. If you save us I will make you my queen.”

She gave him her ring and he told her what to do. She slid her hands between the bars, let him grip her wrists and cried out for help. When the guard came running and reached through to free her the prince grabbed him. He wrapped one hand around the man’s mouth and the other around his neck. He put a foot on the bars and heaved as if he were pulling a rope. The man kicked and thrashed for a long time before he sagged and slid to the floor. She took the keys from his belt and unlocked the door. She had never seen a man being killed. It looked no different from the games her cousins played when they were young.

He took the man’s sword and met the second guard running in. He swung it into his belly and lifted him on the point to force it deeper, then let him drop. He put his boot on the man’s chest and pulled the blade out with a sucking gurgle. By this time his friends were pouring out of the stables, the men arming themselves with makeshift weapons from the walls — staves, pitchforks, iron bars.

He told them to take her to the harbour and treat her well. For a moment she thought he was going to murder her parents. He laid a hand on her cheek and told her that they would be safe.

He chose two men to accompany him and they ran towards the palace.

They said her mother had been raped by a bull and had given birth to a monster who lay chained and snarling in a nest of straw and dung at the centre of a maze beneath the palace, waiting for the young men and women from Athens to be offered to him as fresh meat. Let the peasants keep their stories, her father said. They had precious little else. And it was safer to be feared than to be pitied.

There was some truth in the story for her brother sometimes seemed like a monster, his bloated head, his rages, the way he lashed out at the men who went into the cellar to sluice him with buckets of water every week, to carry off the foul straw and fill his trough with the same food they gave to the pigs — kitchen scraps, greasy bones, wine gone sour.

They thought he could not speak. They never asked him a question so he never gave them a reply. But she knew. She went down to the cellar most days and sat with him in the light of that single, guttering torch and held his hand. He would lay his head on her lap and tell her about the things the men did to him for their amusement. She gave him fruit and bread which she had hidden under her skirt and while he ate she told him about the world outside, about the ocean that was like the water in the bucket but deeper and broader than he could possibly imagine, about boats that were like floating houses, about music that was sound shaped to make you happy, about the pines outside her window and the woodcutters in the summer.

He wept sometimes but he never asked for help. When he was younger and she was more naïve she suggested that he try to escape, but he did not understand what she was saying for he had never seen anything beyond these damp walls, and thought her stories of oceans and boats and music were simply games to make the darkness bearable. He was right, of course. He could not live outside. The sun would blind him. He would be mocked and taunted and stoned.