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If I measure it in time, it has been five years, and half a summer. If I measure it in lives lost, the count is sixty-seven.
One of those is mine.
If I measure by the broken backs around me, there are forty-one men, eleven women, and seven whom we still keep as children. Of course, this is only if we count ourselves as human beings—not cattle, not dogs.
I downed a man with my chin and my right fist, three nights ago. His skull was hard. He was stubborn. My jaw is all afire, barely good for eating. I went hungry two nights before this one, forced down a little bread at last supper. My knuckles are black, splitting open ten times over before the morning is through.
We get these roofs on, I think, we rest easier.
“Just a little longer,” pants Haldar. “Right, Gwindor?” Twitch, we call him, most days. He can’t stop talking. Can’t stop counting, and no one else but me knows that the numbers run through my mind, too. I’m not fool enough to say them aloud; not young enough to.
“Quiet,” I growl. Haldar would be seventeen, if he weren’t here.
The haste or not-haste of these roofs, the reason for it, doesn’t mean much to me. It isn’t meant to. All I know is the last roof I hauled up was burned to black ash. That was Utumno; far from here. Months ago, now.
Two months nearing three. We tell what we know of that story like a curse.
I am strong. One of the strongest. One of the quickest.
Strength means travel. Travel means necks as well as ankles chained, means we can’t be apart from each other even to sleep or piss. I have been out six times to lay rails. Each time we spoiled the clean air and quiet wind with the stink of paint and oil and iron, with the ring of our hammers.
I would choose laying rails over raising roofs, but it is not for me to choose. Just as it is not for me to question when I have to climb up into hell, making walls where there shouldn’t be walls, chipping at stone and soil as should never been made uneasy.
Today I think of all of this, because today I see a stranger, and I know him.
I first saw him in the main hall. I was plastering new walls that day, a trying thing to manage when the walls in question are all stood up uneven. Perhaps the men who built them are dead. I am not dead, and not for lack of counting. Outside the room, outside those walls, I heard a ruckus. Chains dragging. He passed like a ghost by the doorway: this prisoner, tall and looking sickly. His body was wrapped in bandages.
I’ve scarce known the comfort of a bandage, these years and months, save what I could scrape together myself. His hair was cropped ragged about his head, but what there was of it was flaming copper.
It’s by both hair and height I know him now. It’s by his hair I distrust him, even more than the steel trap he has closed over his mouth. His eyes are wild, bruised round. His hair is slicked down—still bright.
“Look lively,” calls Knox. “The lot of you. You’ve a new dog to kick when you’re down.”
That’s when I smell it; when he comes close, shoved forward to join our unwelcoming ranks. I smell funeral pine.
Only one man I know who wears the gunk of pine-gum in his hair. Only one monster.
And here is a dog, already kicked. A dog that will run back to its master with its tail between its legs, if given half a chance.
I can count half-chances; I’ll not be one.
I look the dog in his pale wild eyes, and I hate him.