Polystom (24 page)

The aides, on either side, nodded.

‘Yes. That will give people time to assemble. Ideally, we want a very large crowd. And photographers, news-book-men, the whole caboodle. Now, the reason I mention this to you is that the best thing, clearly, would be for you to be there. As your uncle’s closest surviving relative, you know.’

‘I see,’ said Polystom. He had no desire to watch men executed by skin-frame; it was the most unappealing way to die he could imagine. But, he told himself, he was a soldier now. He had to harden his sensibilities. Perhaps, he said to himself, putting the wine-glass to his face and sucking down another mouthful of wine, perhaps he could use this as an opportunity to train himself into familiarity with blood. ‘Of course I’ll do it.’

He sent a letter to Nestor, his butler, telling him that he’d be staying on the moon for another three days at least, but that he’d be home as soon as he could get away; and also instructing him to draw up a list of the fifty likeliest soldiers on the estate.
I intend forming a platoon, for the war, with myself as captain
, he wrote.
I’ll leave you in charge of the estate in my absence, of course, but I need good men under me
.

The night before the execution he had trouble sleeping, and in the morning he lay in bed, trying to determine whether it was indeed a sort of squeamishness, a boyish cowardliness, that made him disinclined to watch men put to death. If so, then he needed to purge that weakness.

The squeamishness, if that was what it was, hadn’t dented his appetite however; and he ate heartily at breakfast. Agor, attending him, talked about the crowd. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it, sir. There must be thousands of people.
Most of them slept on the hillsides west of the estate sir; but they’ve all come to see the assassins get their desserts.’

‘It’s an important thing,’ Stom said. ‘An important lesson to be taught. For the whole System.’

‘Yes sir.’

After breakfast, Polystom went with one of the general’s aides to the cellar to visit the condemned men. ‘Do they know they’re facing the skin-frame?’ Stom asked.

‘I’m sure it’s all they expect,’ replied the aide. ‘And if they don’t know, they’ll know it sure enough when the executioner comes to prepare them.’

‘Prepare them?’ Stom asked, half wanting to hear the details, and yet with a fluttery heart.

‘They’ll be basted, as it’s called. A tannin cream rubbed into the skin, which toughens it a little. It’s no good if the skin rips or tears, you’ll understand. And they’ll have been starved, to loosen the subcutaneous fat a little. It’s an old procedure, sir. The executioner knows what he’s doing.’

Stom said nothing. The cellar door was opened by a uniformed guard, and behind it was a small grey room, the stone floor and walls empty and clean except for its occupants. Two men, grimy and sullen, sat in the coign of wall and floor. Their arms were over their heads, chained to a hook halfway up the wall. There was a blank, animal ferocity in their eyes. Stom leaned forward a little, fascinated by what he saw. There were little cuts and marks over their bare legs, up their bare arms, over their faces. They were so dirty it was impossible to tell which blotches were bruises and which were grime. Their hair had been shaved, revealing half-a-dozen or more circular marks of red, like tiny fairy rings, over their stubbly crowns. One of them was opening and closing his mouth, like a man chewing air, and Stom could see that he had no teeth, and was mashing his gums together, although he couldn’t tell why.

‘These men,’ he said, in a hushed voice.

‘Sir?’ returned the aide.

‘How were they . . . I mean, what were they . . .’ But the question wouldn’t frame itself.

‘They’re bad men,’ said the aide. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that. These are no ordinary prisoners of war. Those, naturally, we execute quickly and cleanly. These have done
much
worse than average.’

Bad enough to merit the skin-frame? Stom wanted to ask. But he didn’t say anything. He drank in, again, the unthinking venomous hostility of their eyes, and then turned away.

The skin-frame was an antique execution device, rarely used these days, or so Polystom had always thought. Perhaps it was still usual in military justice. A wooden frame, fifteen feet tall, with two hand-rails at the top, spaced so that a man could support himself by holding them. Two bars, like a piece of gymnastic equipment, but with the difference that three feet below these, fixed to the side, was a metal cradle. The condemned man was suspended in the middle of the frame, his hands tied to the bars and his arms bent a little at the elbows. The skin around his ankles was cut clear about and peeled a little way up his shins, this bloody end of flayed flesh being fixed with many little hooks via springs to the cradle. Then the condemned man was left to hang. As long as he could support himself on his bent arms, he could limit the area of his skin that was pulled from his flesh to two circlets of agony around his ankles. But as his grip weakened, and as he sank, his own bodyweight flayed him: the weight of his body pulling him down and peeling off his own skin as he went. It was an unusually horrible way to die.

‘Have you ever seen a skin-frame used before?’ Stom asked the aide, as they climbed back up to the house.

‘I have,’ replied the aide, benignly. ‘A few times.’

‘It’s a military punishment, then?’

The aide nodded.

‘I’m just wondering,’ said Stom, trying to keep the quaver from his voice. ‘What to expect, you know.’

‘Depends. It depends, for instance,’ the aide said, ‘on the strength of the man. You’ll find that they hold out for a while. Then they drop a little, and the pain of that gives them the strength to pull themselves up again. This could go on for a while, dropping, pulling free more skin from their legs, the agony inspiring their tired muscles with a little more energy, struggling up, drooping again, crying out, struggling up again.’

Stom nodded. He felt sick in his stomach now. He wished the aide were not being so graphic. But perhaps it was better he know in advance. And, anyway, wasn’t he a soldier now? A soldier couldn’t afford squeamishness.

‘Their hands are tied to the rails, of course,’ the aide continued. ‘They can’t just drop completely off the device. That would end it too quickly. Though, actually, I doubt if any man would have the strength of character to just drop off – the pain would be unbearable, all at once. So, they drop lower and lower, and the skin is flayed off up to the middle of the thighs. Eventually they reach a stage where they can’t support themselves, no matter how hard they struggle. Then they do flop down. The executioner makes a slit, running up the skin of the inside of each leg and across the skin of the perineum before the execution, you know, so that at that stage the whole skin should come away quite easily. They’re left hanging, nude, as it were, except for their faces and their arms – still tied above them, you know. The top part of the hanging body is, well, sheathed as it were, so you can’t see the face unless you look down from above.’

‘And they’re dead by then?’

‘It doesn’t take long for them to die then, if they’re not already. I’m only telling you this,’ the aide added, ‘so you know what to expect, sir.’

‘Yes,’ said Stom. ‘Thank you.’

The aide clapped him on the shoulder and laughed abruptly. ‘How pale you look sir! Don’t worry about it, really. They deserve it, these criminals; keep that in mind.
They’re just insects. They’re lower than animals. They’re not anybody.’

‘I’ll try and keep that in mind.’

They wandered out onto the flat ground east of the house, where the frames were being assembled. The two main skin-frames were fully built; and now the long beams of the two lifting scaffolds were being hauled up. ‘One thing occurs to me,’ said Stom.

‘Yes?’

‘What if they shout out that they’re innocent, that they’ve been brought in from the Mudworld. I daresay that people wouldn’t believe them, of course, but it might spoil the effect a little.’

‘Don’t worry about that, sir,’ said the aide, pulling a cigarette white as a bleached finger-bone from a silver packet and slipping it between his lips. ‘Their tongues were pulled out yesterday.’

And, later in the day, in the cool sunlight of another autumnal afternoon, with an enormous, murmuring crowd of onlookers gathered in the open ground east of the house, Stom tried to focus himself. To act like a soldier. The two condemned men were being led out, their bodies naked but unwashed. Stom sat next to the general and his two aides on a platform, raised opposite the execution frame. It was, the aide explained, important they be seen by the crowds. That was a large part of the point of the exercise. And so the four of them sat virtually enthroned, as the condemned men were brought out by the executioner and his uniformed assistants. They were lifted up, dangled in the air from the rear scaffold, the rope under their armpits forcing their arms forward into a gorilla’s pose (that mythical beast), as the executioner positioned them; flashing his large knife around their ankles to cut the skin, fitting their feet into the network of sprung hooks of the cradle, tying their hands to the rails. One last touch
involved him running the point of his knife up the inside of one leg and down the inside of the other, doing this for both men, like a tailor measuring fittings. Blood oozed out, red sap, and dribbled from their pinioned feet to drip to the ground. Then the scaffolds were removed, the executioner untying the supporting ropes, and leaving the men there. The crowd, which had buzzed and shuffled as the elaborate preliminaries were undergone, had fallen absolutely silent. Polystom, too, was rapt, staring at the condemned man nearest him.
I doubt if any man would have the strength of character to just drop off
, the aide had told him.
The pain would be unbearable, all at once
. But, Stom wondered, how could you not? How could you do anything other than try and end it quickly? What would it be like to hang there, knowing what inevitable agonies awaited you? The two scrawny bodies hung, displayed, ribs standing proud of the skin like thick scars, faces crumpled in pain, the surprisingly large genitalia of the nearer man dangling like sausages in a butcher’s window, the other man’s shrunken and snaillike, the circlets of bright red around both sets of ankles surprisingly decorative, like red cloth tied there to brighten the picture. They hung there on their own muscles’ strength, arms crooked out at the sides like lizards, as if frozen in the middle of press-ups. They strained. There was something in them, Stom realised, that refused to give up to the experience. They clung on, quite literally, for their lives.

Turning to the aide immediately on his left, and lowering his voice, he hissed into his ear: ‘These were servants, on the Mudworld, originally, I suppose?’

‘Years ago,’ the aide whispered back, without turning his head. ‘On Aelop, yes. The insurrection is so old now that they’ve long since forgotten servantly ways.’

And yet there was something almost noble, in a grotesque sort of way, about the effort they were putting in. Work was a servant’s only currency, a servant’s only freedom, and these two were working at their last few minutes of existence
with a worthy intensity. Stom tried to think himself into their position; mouth ragged and sore, starved, agony gripping around your ankles, the prospect of worse agony to come, and yet hanging on, hanging there though your muscles were popping and screaming with the effort of it. Everything in the cosmos focused down, reduced to that effort, to the pain and that effort. To pain and will-power. Stom shut his eyes. But the General was saying something to him, leaning across his aide to talk to Stom. ‘This is,’ he was saying, sotto voce, ‘a much better – I mean, by that, much worse – version of the execution than I’m used to. The – lesser gravity of the moon means that they can hold themselves longer, and it also means that the process is that much more drawn out. I wonder,’ the General mused, sitting upright again, ‘if we shouldn’t schedule all such executions for a lower gravity world, rather than a higher?’

‘A good idea, sir,’ said the aide. ‘A good idea.’

The two lieutenants, younger sons of good family, flew down in the same plane. They were called Sophanes and Stetrus, and they were two young men formed from a similar mould: tall, svelte, their uniforms the dark brown with gold trimmings of the Ground Corps. Long-featured faces, long slender noses, wide mouths rimmed with thin lips, lenticular eyes, eyebrows as long as a finger reaching out from the middle of their brows on each side almost to their ears. Handsome, but severe. To Polystom they looked like killers, trained killers. They could have been brothers, although in fact they were only second cousins. They called one another ‘
Sof
’ and ‘
Stet
’, without inviting the same intimacy from Polystom, although he was their superior officer now.

They called him ‘sir’.

They came to train the platoon, the fifty men that Polystom had chosen – or had Nestor choose for him. As the Autumn Year moved towards its close Stom had a barracks built on land east of his house. He hired three tailors from the southern hemisphere, and housed them in his own house. He ordered so much brown bolt-cloth, so much leather and cotton, that a special delivery was made by balloon-boat, landing on the lawn, unloading their bales and departing. The three tailors took a dozen servants under their temporary command, and set about making seventy Ground Corps uniforms; fifty for the men, twenty as spares. The number of spares had been Stom’s own ideas. ‘Sof’ and ‘Stet’, when they arrived into the middle of all this busy-ness, were unimpressed. ‘If the men think there are spare uniforms just sitting around,’ drawled one of them (Stom found it hard, initially, to tell them apart), ‘then
they’ll not treat their clothes with the proper respect. A better way is to have none spare, sir, and punish the men for any raggedness in their own uniforms. That encourages them to keep themselves neat.’

Polystom, still unsure of himself, feeling almost completely unlike a captain, had acquiesced. He didn’t like the lieutenants’ insouciant tone, felt it almost as an affront, but he fretted about it in private rather than challenging them directly. They knew more about war than he did, he told himself. Told the tailors that only fifty uniforms would be needed. Or, rather, fifty-three; because he, as captain, needed three uniforms: one for battle, one for travel, one for dress occasions. A tailor attended Stom in the Velvet Room, measuring every point on his anatomy. When the travel uniform, the first of the three, was completed five days later, Polystom strutted around before a mirror for hours, admiring himself. He did the same with the battle uniform: a more severely styled garment, but still elegant, gold braid covering the stitching between body and arms, gold hemming the rich brown at bottom and top. Stom sent all the servants away and danced around his bedroom with an empty rifle, hiding behind the bed and pretending to shoot at himself in the mirror.