Casca 18: The Cursed (8 page)

At last, at the end of many more hours, he was speaking in English and detailing his arrival in China, his execution of the lieutenant for the murder of Fei Jiyun, and his present assignment as spy.

It was some time before Casca realized that the drops had ceased. The strap was removed from his eyes, his head was gently freed from the restraining block, and he saw Ying removing the goatskin
water bag that had been suspended above his head. Casca had no urgent inclination to move. He felt drained.

The baron spoke quietly.
"You have told me much, ancient one. And what you have told me has very much changed my opinion of you. I am very pleased that I spared your life." He smiled. "Just as I am pleased that you didn't succeed in taking mine. I regret that you made it necessary for me to torture you to make you reveal your true history.

"The minds of some men recover from the water treatment. I hope you are such a one for your own sake, and for mine. There is much use I could make of your talents, and in an enterprise that would reward you well.

"You impress me as an honest man, or as close to one as one ever finds. Certainly you are a capable man. And I see that you are no real enemy of my people, although you are in the army of the foreign devils. I hope we may yet work together."

He turned and left the chamber. Casca lay and looked at the stone ceiling.
What the hell did he mean? He could not remember anything since the commencement of the water treatment. He certainly couldn't remember telling anything.

He tried to recall what he might have told him, but his mind remained a blank. He could remember no more than what the baron had just told him. He was in China in the pay of the British army.

And there was somewhere in his mind the memory of a voice saying that he should remain always a soldier.

He stared at the stone ceiling and wondered.

The door opened, but Casca heard only the lightest of footfalls. He turned his head to see a tiny nun in a black habit and a coif. Only her face and hands showed. One hand carried a feather duster.

She came to the bench and peered down at Casca through thick pebble spectacles.
"Have you escaped us, you fiend?" she scowled at him.

Casca smiled at her concentrated malevolence. "Escaped?"

"Well, you can talk anyway. Can you think, I wonder?"

Casca stared up at her.
Think? About what?
"I think you're a nun. A Christian nun." He felt faintly pleased, but also disturbed. He couldn't quite think what a nun was, or a Christian. Something to do with a teacher called Christ. And Christ had something to do with his being a soldier.

"Oh, Christ," he muttered aloud.

Swish.
The cane handle of the feather duster came down across his face, making him yelp in pain. "Don't you take the name of the Lord in vain, you swine."

"Oh, my God," Casca groaned and earned another cruel slash with the cane. This one caught him across the chest, but it still hurt.
"Hey, take it easy with that thing, Sister."

"What? Does the Roman executioner beg for mercy? You showed none to the Lamb of God."

What the hell is this old broad talking about? Roman? Executioner? Who does she think I am?

Then a surge of panic.
Who am I? Where am I?

He could feel a thousand thoughts trying to make
themselves felt, but out of the conflict he could only isolate a few unrelated specks of memory.

A fall from a horse.
An elegant Chinese. A comic image of a man at the end of a rope flapping about like a bird. A man on a cross...

"Jesus."

Another swish of the cane and Casca yelled again. "Hey, hold it there, Sister. What the hell are you doing? Just who do you think I am?"

"I know who you are. I don't know what you call yourself, but I know you, Casca Rufio Longinus, torturer of the Son of God.
Accursed to soldier forever."

So I'm a soldier. But I think I'm in the British army. And it's a hell of a long time since Christ died. So how old am I?

The nun's face came nearer. She stared into Casca's eyes, concern showing on her face. "Then you have lost your mind? You have escaped us and the curse."

More confused flashes of memory came to Casca.
Women. Lots of women. They came rolling through his mind in rapid succession like strumpets tumbling together in a bed. And fighting. Fighting, fighting, fighting. He saw in his mind's eye one enemy after another. This one wielding a great ax, this one on horseback with a long lance, a horde of tribesmen with spears and shields, a giant with a huge, two handed sword. And all of them dying. Dying on his sword, his knife, between his hands.

Then came flashes of himself being hacked open with an
ax, run through with a sword, being strangled, a hand chopped off.

He felt pain in his left wrist. He remembered the mad eyes of the man who had hacked off his hand.
The same mad eyes as this nun. "Dacort!"

"Aha! So you remember
Dacort."

Do I?
Casca wondered. He had somehow recalled the name, as he remembered losing his hand, and his mutilator's crazy face. But that was all.

He lifted his head and could just see his bandaged wrist with the hand intact. And functioning, he was relieved to see as he moved the fingers. But all else was confusion.
Perhaps this crazy nun can tell me.

But the nun had fallen to her knees, and was
prattling some sort of prayer: "Oh, Blessed Lamb, is this the end of all our hopes? If this hulking body no longer has a mind, is not Your curse at an end? How shall the Brotherhood of the Lamb now find You when You come again?"

Brotherhood of the Lamb?
Casca remembered a sort of religious ceremony when the Elder Dacort had taken his hand. But he could not connect the recollection into any web of memory.

The nun had come to the end of her lament and was standing beside the bench.

"Can a woman belong to a brotherhood?"

The nun struck him again.
"I am a nun. I am handmaiden to the brotherhood, as I am to the Church."

"And this brotherhood?
What have these men to do with me?"

The feather duster fell again.
"They are not men, not filthy, lecherous monsters like you. They are sanctified, dedicated to the Lamb of God. They wait for His second coming to welcome Him in His majesty. For more than eighteen hundred years they have kept a watch on you, for Christ said that you would meet when He came again."

"And these men ...
aarrgh!" Casca screamed in earnest as the cane struck him in the crotch.

"Brothers, not men.
Men are a bad lot."

"Wasn't Christ a man?"

This time the cane caught him in the throat and left him gasping for breath. "You blasphemous beast. Jesus Christ was the Son of God. No mere man."

"Well, he died like a man."

The nun's eyes widened behind her spectacles. "You remember His death, then?"

"Yes."

Suddenly Casca did remember. He remembered the thrust of his spear, and the storm that broke a moment later. And the Jewish prophet speaking from the cross with his last breath. "Soldier, you are content with what you are. Then that you shall remain until we meet again. As I go now to my Father, you must one day come to me."

He remembered wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, and the one drop of the Nazarene's blood touching his tongue, burning him, sending him into a poisoned fit. "Yes, I do remember."

"And you remember the Elder Dacort, who took your hand as punishment for profaning the holy spear."

He did remember. The Brotherhood had kept his spear, and he had felt impelled to touch it.
"It was my spear, anyway."

The rain of blows fell furiously, raising bright red welts all over Casca's body. He writhed inside the straps that restrained him.
"The spear we keep to this day. We reverence it every night.

"My spear?
Here?"

The fanatic continued the whipping, panting out her words between the strokes.
"Not your spear. Our holy relic. The symbol of the watch we keep."

The violent pain was almost doing Casca good. He could feel his mind coming back to him out of the remote blankness that had succeeded the water torture, the endless hours of nothing but his own breathing and his voice counting the seconds between those relentless drops of water. By contrast, being tortured by this lunatic was almost pleasurable.

And he could feel the pain firing parts of his brain, electrifying his senses. Perhaps he could learn something, even if it meant some pain. "What is this watch you keep?"

"We watch for you, for you will lead us to Him when He comes. Father
Mulcahy is our elder. He sent me here. The Brotherhood in America told us that you were coming to the East. A brother found you in Hong Kong, but then we lost you. Then Father heard of the huge barbarian prisoner and he sent me to check. I knew you as soon as I saw you by that scar that runs from your right eye to your mouth."

Another memory came back to Casca. A whore from Achaea who had not been amused when Casca told her, after he had had her, that he had no money.
He was brought back to the present by another whack of the cane on his balls.

"And I know it's no wound of
honor, too."

Casca felt her hand on his leg.

"And here, I can feel the arrowhead that you collected in the battle for Ctesiphon on the plains of Parthia by the banks of the River Tigris. Forty five thousand men died that day, but the curse of the Blessed Lamb kept you alive. I cannot imagine why."

The touch of a woman's hand on his thigh was pleasant.

And it stayed there. The fingers stopped probing for the arrowhead, but the old virgin left her hand on his thigh, almost caressing it. It was the first time in her life she had fondled a man's leg.

Several levels above where Casca lay, Baron Ying Ruochen sat sprawled on a silk upholstered couch. There were teacups and a pot on a tray on the low table before him, and a beautiful girl squatted opposite him, waiting for his command to pour, or for whatever else he might care to command.

But the baron sat unmoving. From time to time his forehead would knit in a puzzled frown, or he would stare out of the window at the distant hills.

Of a sudden he leaped to his feet, startling the girl. "Peace, little one," he calmed her. "Tell me, have you studied the thinking of the sage Lao Tze?"

"But of course, lord."

"And in his writings, Liang Yongming, do you remember something of a white barbarian whom he met in the far realms of Rome and who became his disciple?"

"Ah yes" Liang smiled "the myth of the mortal who slew the Christian demigod and became himself some sort of immortal. It is one of Lao
Tze's few flights of fantasy. No doubt he invented the legend as some sort of moral lesson."

So I have always thought
, the baron mused, until now. He gestured for the girl to pour his tea and sat down again.

His secretary entered and bowed respectfully.
"Baron Ying," the young man said, "Dr. Hollington Teng has arrived in Tsungkow. His messenger has just arrived, and he says that Dr. Teng is even now approaching this palace."

"Ah ha, the very best of news.
Make ready to welcome our esteemed visitor. And send our own doctor to the barbarian prisoner. Tell Poon Fong I would have Hollington Teng talk with this prisoner if there is enough of his mentality left intact to make it worthwhile."

The door to the doctor's room opened and the old nun jerked her hand away from Casca's leg. The old doctor stood in the doorway. She spoke to him in Chinese that made Casca's teeth grate.

"Good afternoon, Poon Fong,
I have been giving your prisoner some spiritual guidance at the bidding of Father Mulcahy. I will go now and tell him of his condition."

She quickly left the room. The old man approached the bench. Casca saw his eyes widen as he took in the dozens of raised red welts that crisscrossed Casca's body like highlights on the network of old wound scars.

"I see that Sister Martina has been using the same form of spiritual stimulant she exercises on the boys at the Catholic school. She has great faith in the efficacy of her feather duster to inculcate spirituality." He laughed heartily. "Fortunately she is not very strong."

Poon Fong stood staring at the red welts.
"They should still be worsening, but they are fading as I watch." He ran a finger along the great scar where Casca's chest had once been opened on an Aztec pyramid. "Baron Ying has told me that under the water treatment you told him much of mystery. I see much mystery here in these scars. This cut alone should have killed you, and I see others as bad."

"I don't know what I told them."

"The truth, of course."

"But I have withstood much greater torture."

"Perhaps. But the objective of the water treatment is not to injure the prisoner, but only to learn what he knows. It is in the nature of man to tell what he knows, and the water treatment merely removes the restraints of self-interest, loyalty, duty, and frees the tongue to relieve the mind." He stopped undoing the straps and stooped to stare into Casca's eyes.

"Unfortunately, when there is much resistance the eventual effect is very powerful, and the mind is left exhausted. Can you remember anything?"

"A little. But it doesn't seem to fit together too well."

"Perhaps we can do something with a little help from the gods."
He went to the small altar that stood in the corner of the room, bowed to the brass idol, and lit two joss sticks. "Perhaps Pao Sheng Ta Ti, the god of healing, will assist our efforts."

He opened a wooden box and selected a very long gold needle. He pushed it deep into Casca's abdomen. Casca looked down to see the needle penetrating deeper and deeper as the doctor twirled it. He began to feel very much at ease.

"That feels good, Doctor, but may I remind you that the problem is in my head."

"Ah yes, I have heard of this quaint Western superstition that memory resides in the brain."
Unconcernedly he went on twirling the long needle. The crazy jumble of memories started once more to flash through Casca's mind.

The romping, giggling, cavorting women gave way to one woman lying asleep, a small smile on her lips as he kissed her and slipped out of their bed.

Neda the first woman he had really loved, and he had left her because he loved her. There were others whose faces he saw that he felt similarly for, but not too many. Mostly he saw asses and tits and felt vague stirrings of lust.

And all the men he had killed.
And here and there a woman, too. There seemed to be no end to the dead. And his own deaths. He shuddered as he relived each one. Mercifully they mostly ran together like different versions of the same experience.

He recalled enlisting in the Seventh Legion under the Emperor Augustus, then serving in the Tenth. And then he recalled that day on Golgotha when Jesus cursed him to live until he came again.

He recalled the fight with his sergeant over his whore that same night. They had killed each other, but Casca had survived. And since then he had survived countless deaths.

He had flashes of when he was a gladiator, a slave in a copper mine, a galley slave, a great chief, a warlord, a god.

He slipped into a tranquil sleep and the doctor withdrew the needle. He had done all that he could to restore the vanished memory. Sometimes it worked. Perhaps the curse that kept this strange one's body alive would also restore his mind.