The Coal House

The trial was held in the Coal House. The walls were grey and grimy from the black dust, and in the suffocating air the guards' faces streaked grey with their sweat. The heat of the place was almost more than Orem could bear, and the relief of it made his legs shake so that the guards had to hold him up. The dark morning room was lit only by small high windows and a few torches on the walls. It didn't matter; it was only the floor that Orem watched as it wheeled and spun.

The guards let him fall in the middle of the room. Orem lay gratefully on the unbarred floor and listened as a magistrate's voice intoned, "Crime?"

"Passless and unclaimed."

"Sex and age?"

"Male and younghorned."

"Prisoner, what do you have to say?"

It took Orem a moment to realize that speech was expected of him, and a moment more to remember how it was done. Don't cut me, he wanted to say. I killed the Wizard's women and deserve anything you do to me, he almost said.

"I'm a farmboy from the north, and I lost my pass," he said at last.

A guard pulled him up to his knees and turned his head to show his cheek to the magistrates.

"Months healed if it's a day," said the guard.

"How did you stay out of the way of the guards all this time?" asked a magistrate.

Orem looked at them for the first time, now that the guard was holding him up enough to see.

There were three magistrates on a high dais with a wire screen between them and him. They wore masks, terrible white and green masks like putrefaction, and looked at him as relentlessly as God, for the masks did not blink. "I was careful," Orem said.

"We caught him out in the open, shirt torn and near naked in the snow," said the guard. "Careful ones don't do that."

"Bring him nearer," said one of the magistrates. Since none of the heads moved, there was no way of knowing which one had spoken. As the guard pulled him staggering forward, another magisterial voice said, "The Hole, no doubt, and a false pass. Who gave you your pass, boy? Or do you want your testicles crushed and served to you in a pudding?"

It was not that Orem was courageous then—courage was beyond him after two nights in the open cage. He did not tell all he knew of the passage through the Hole because at that moment one of the magistrates let out a small cry and said, "Look at his face."

One of them motioned to the guards, who pulled Orem through a small door in the cage and brought him directly before the magistrates' table. They let him lean on the desk as the masked faces looked steadily at him. Orem was now close enough to see the whites of the eyes inside the masks, to see the lips and teeth and tongues of the speakers.

"How did you come by that scar across your throat?" asked a magistrate.

He had forgotten the mark the dream left on him. How could he answer? Only the truth would come to mind, only the truth would bend to fit: "I'm a farmer's son. I cut it as a child on the edge of a plow."

They fell silent, regarding him. Then the middle one nodded, and the others also nodded. "The Queen's dream, all right," said one.

"And come to us from the cages," said another.

"What's your name, boy?"

Orem thought for a moment, remembered. "Orem."

"Orem what?"

He couldn't remember. Hadn't he been called Scanthips? Or Banningside? Or ap Avonap?

Which?

"He's in no case to make answers."

"Made one that's good enough."

"Well, what now? She said no harm to him, and look."

"How much will he remember?"

"Too much."

"How could we have known? This one was arrested before she ever told us."

The middle one made a decision of sorts. "Don't call off the search. Keep it going, and take him somewhere to sleep. Only when he's in better shape than this. Then we stop the search."

"Fool. She knows now."

"And damned little good to her until we restore him. Blankets and broth and a fire in his room.

Hurry up about it! And bring in the next one, quick, quick!"

Orem found himself borne off again, but this time in more courteous hands, and when they came to a small hot room with a fire in it, they unshackled his arms and laid him on a feather cushion in a corner and covered him. He slept before they left the room, and barely woke for the broth they brought him, and again for the pisspot. Finally he awoke of his own accord and crawled from the blanket because he was sweating and the blanket stuck to him prickly with wool. Where the shackle had torn his skin he felt the stinging of the wound; his joints all ached, and he shuddered several times, then vomited the broth onto the bricks of the hearth.

He felt better then, and crawled off to a corner and leaned his head against the walls and watched the fire through half-closed eyes. The scene with the magistrates stayed with him as clearly as a dream not fully wakened from. She had set the guards to looking for him. She could see even now.

She had seen his face in a dream. She could only be Queen Beauty, and now Orem understood that he would have to pay a price for having challenged her attack on Palicrovol only a few nights ago. Yet after what he had already been through, he did not bother to be afraid. What could she do to him now to hurt him further? He still had not fully returned to his body; the sensations of it still were not wholly his own again. Let her torture, let her kill, it was all one to him, all one.

Servants came with a tub, stripped his wrap from him and plunged him into the warm water.

Some carried out his clothes; others mopped and scrubbed the floor while his back was harshly scrubbed and his hair was sudsed and wrung clean like the mop. The dried urine and crusted spittle of the cages came off into the water; they bore the tub away and came with another and washed him all over again, then toweled him before the fire, cut his hair and combed it, and dressed him in a simple shirt with an elaborately figured chain belt that glowed yellow as gold. Yellow as gold, thought Orem, but even then it did not occur to him that it might be gold. He would not have been able to tell real from sham anyway.

The magistrates looked at him one more time, to be sure. Orem did not care what they decided.

It was enough to have felt the smooth cloth on his clean and aching skin, to have felt the heat of the fire, to have touched the warm brick with every finger and found that each one tingled alive, to test his feet and have them respond, living and warm.

Apparently he was the man they were looking for. "Yes. Yes, that will do. The best we can do."

They brusquely apologized to him. "A terrible mistake, Orem, my boy. Just a mistake, could happen to anyone, you won't complain of this, will you?"

Complain? What did he have to complain of? Only keep me warm, he said, only keep me warm and clean and dry and I have no complaint at all. He fell asleep again before the magistrates left.