[An abandoned start to a novel]

Chapter 1

He had promised himself that this time he would not scream. He had sworn a sacred oath, or tried to anyway, since he no longer held anything sacred enough to swear upon. But the scream would not be denied. A hot, no, a scalding cascade, it gushed from the wellspring of his soul, poured upwards along his throat, swirled insistently around and around behind his teeth. He fought to keep his jaw clamped tight shut, struggled to still rippling lips recoiling from the boiling torrent within. But the scream would not be denied.
They had come for him again in the middle of the night, so soon, so agonisingly soon after the last time. He had been sleeping, or at least doing what passed for sleeping in that place, curled in a ball on the floor amid his own filth, his mind endlessly reliving the torments of recent days and the worse torments of days long past.

They dragged him from his tiny, lightless cell toward the place of torture. His feet would not have carried him even if he had been willing. So callous hands seized him and lifted him and dragged him. He was weak and thin now, it was an easy task. Not like before, the first time, when he had the strength of both body and spirit to resist, to fight back. Now he could not even forbear to scream.

He screamed.

His captors ignored him. They were inured to it, this subhuman plea for pity. They scarcely heard it at all. It reflected from their stolid bodies just as it did from the wet stone walls, both equally impervious.

But others responded. From below and above and all around voices echoed his own, some mingling it with sympathetic sobbing, some mocking it with cruel laughter, others screaming their own pain regardless. A blasphemous congregation of responses followed him in procession down steps, through narrow archways and along dismal corridors, until at last he came to the torture room itself. There at the threshold the accompanying voices ceased, suddenly silent, as if all knew the moment of his arrival at that place of dread.

Deep they were now, deep inside the fortress, far away from warming sunlight and blue skies and good clean air. Here torches guttered weakly in the stale gloom, their reluctant light shrinking from contact with the dank, dripping masonry. Healthy men choked, sick men died in the mere act of drawing breath. Here in this unnatural subterranean cavern nothing thrived, nothing lived voluntarily. Even the guards, more animate clay than thinking, feeling human beings, were glad to deliver their burden and hurry back to the more wholesome upper regions.

Marcus waited, a hunched shadow amidst shadows, shivering and alone but not alone. Now other figures moved in the sickly gloom. The sound of grinding metal and tightening ropes, clanking ratchets and straining timbers. The torturers had arrived. Businesslike, they attended to their machines and ignored the frail bundle for whose benefit they worked. To them he was just another job, another task to be accomplished, nothing more. They were in no hurry to seize him, to bind him, to strap him down. They were professionals and did not rush their preparations. And besides, they knew he would not, could not escape. So they let him lie.

He curled himself into a tight ball, seeking to minimise surface contact with this awful place, these awful people. Their bland matter-of-factness was more terrifying than any threats; their deliberate neglect a more concrete portent of the horrors to come. He shrunk himself into a negligible dot, his mind contracting, regressing to childhood, to babyhood. He would have gone further still, escaping back into the warm oblivion of his mother’s womb, if they had not come for him then. Somehow they knew precisely the right moment, the time when he was most nakedly vulnerable. That was when they took him up and bound him backwards across the wheel. Expert hands positioned him exactly. The torture began.

Excruciating pain incised into his every fibre: his muscles and tendons, his nerves, his flesh and bones. He tried to scream again, but he had no screams left within. He had used all his quota. Instead, he mouthed silently, gulping fishlike, his eyes rolling over white then red then white again. His spirit left his body, fled and hid in the darkest corner. Routinely his torturers ran the gamut of their implements, neither knowing nor caring that they tortured an empty shell.

The wheel, the rack, the pincers, the spikes, the hot irons. They bent him and stretched him and clawed him and burnt him. But they were careful not to kill him, nor to damage him beyond the possibility of healing. He must have time to recover. He would visit them again soon, very soon.

When all the prescribed machines had committed their individual outrages on his torso, his limbs, his head, they unbound him and abandoned him to lie once more, shivering and alone. He lost consciousness at last, blessed relief. There had been no interrogation, no questions asked, nothing said.

Later, how much later he did not know, he awoke in his own cell again, although it could have been any cell, for they were all the same featureless windowless boxes. Consciousness came and went intermittently. Pain weakened him almost to the point of paralysis. He could taste sticky blood in his mouth, feel it congealing on his body. He could not see, but in the complete darkness of his cell did not know if the torture had blinded him or not.

A shaft of light, searing white light, stung him so suddenly that he cried out in shock and surprise, though his voice was but a feeble, pitiful whimper. Guards with lanterns entered, lifted him. Another shock, liquid splashed on his face, a bucket of freezing water thrown over him. The cold stopped his breath for several heartbeats. Then searing heat as a cup was pressed to his mouth, burning liquor forced down his throat. He coughed, choked, spluttered. But there was a new warmth inside, reviving. The guards retreated as quickly as they had come, leaving behind a wooden plate with bread and cheese, a wooden cup with more of the fiery liquor, and a single sputtering taper. He had only minutes of light in which to eat and drink before the darkness would claim him again.

But he could not eat, felt sick. Dry heaving sobs seized him. No more screams, nor any tears either. He prayed for death then. But just like all the other gods, Death ignored his prayers. He was alone.

* * *

She dreamt about the fortress every night. She knew every external contour of its craggy walls, fashioned from ugly grey lumps of rock; she could feel the prickly sharp surfaces of the carelessly hewn stone beneath her fingers; she felt their reflected heat as the irregular blocks baked in the baleful glare of the noonday sun. It was a crude, misshapen edifice, not so much constructed as piled up, as if the stones had been thrown down from heaven in disgust by the hand of some furious god and had almost incidentally formed themselves into the shape of a castle.

Strange, though, in her dream she could find no entrance. The fortress seemed to have no doors nor windows. As she traversed its external circuit she met with only endless blank stonework, every yard almost indistinguishable from that which followed or preceded it. Yet this place certainly was inhabited, of that there could be no doubt. For from within there arose the wailing of a thousand tortured souls, whose voices combined to hymn the skies with an anguished lament. And one of these unseen choristers was her husband.
Where and how eluded her. Within the insubstantial dream-state the only graspable certainty was the fortress itself; everything else slid frustratingly away from her understanding. Where was this place? How did her husband come to be a prisoner here? Each night the dream mocked her with its very solidity.

Penelope awoke more tired than when she had gone to sleep. Her back ached, her limbs felt numb, her bladder was painfully full again. The baby was restless, moving in sympathetic response to its mother’s anxiety. She pressed her hands to her stomach, fantastically large now, and felt the tiny life pulsing within. Soon, any day now, it would be ready. She should be happy, or at least relieved. Instead, too weary to be sad, she felt only the barren emptiness of the abandoned. He had gone to war with such great optimism, such fatal optimism, so carefree and excited like a little boy at the prospect of adventure, so joyfully oblivious to her entreaties. But he had not come back. He was incarcerated in that terrible place. And now she was alone.