The Bats of Elvidner

by Danielle L. Parker

part 6

Henrik Loeske had lived three lifetimes in mortal flesh. This fleshly envelope, too, was growing too feeble for use. Loeske was the only immigrant from Kolonie — and there had been few enough of those immigrants, in any form — who had lived all his lives as unenhanced, mortal flesh.

He treasured — he loved, most intensely — the natural arc of life. He had long ago sensed how the fleshy frailty of old age and looming mortality interacted subtly with the mind. On the looming edge of senility he always seemed to sense, tantalizingly over the horizon, the cosmic wisdom that had so far evaded him. Perhaps only true death would take him there.

He had begun to seriously consider the question. Was his cowardly failure to face that final threshold no more than a larva refusing to turn into a butterfly? Was he, in the final weighing, no braver than the amoral wizards of Kolonie, despisers of both the frailties of old age and their lost humanity?

He wiped his streaming eyes with the edge of his jerkin. He cried so easily now. Old age did that, too. For a moment, the irony of the weeping ancient, comforted by a young boy’s shaking hand and panting, inarticulate distress, made Loeske snort choked-back laughter. Laughter and tears could be so painfully close. He had learned that, too.

The cell was deathly silent, now that he had ceased his own foolish sobbing. The silence had the dank feel of lost hope.

The boy seized his hand and held it, painfully tight. The little fingers were trembling and cold. Loeske squeezed back. I’m done now, boy. I’m back to playing the adult. I’ve got too much work to do before I die, this time.

“Right,” he announced with forced cheerfulness. “Anyone for checking out?”

No one answered immediately. Then the pig farmer grunted derisively. “Oh aye,” he said. “I’m with ye, old man. I’d rather die with me ears bleeding out me head, or e’en the mother sucking out me veins, than live six years like a mushroom in this dark!”

“That’s the spirit.” Loeske felt for the wall with his free hand. The boy was not letting loose of the other one. “Markin,” he addressed himself to the former woodcutter, “How long does it take the mother to feed her clave when she returns from a big hunt?”

The rusty voice from the corner of the cell ruminated to itself for a time. “Two or three feedings, maybe,” it replied at last in its slow, hoarse way. “I get hungry, sometimes.”

“Oh aye, and what do they feed ye, then?”

The woodcutter made no reply. Loeske cleared his throat. “Ah, best not to ask that now, Hagar.” Best not to ever ask that question, was his opinion. “I need you to do something else. Turn out your pockets. Markin, Bram — you do the same thing. I need to know everything — and I mean everything — we have to work with.”

In the end, they had a surprising array of possibilities. The boy, like boys of his age, yielded a crow’s collection of a wood fragment, a crushed nest of some kind, a handful of sweet drops and a ball of twine wrapped around a small stick, probably used for fishing.

The pig farmer owned a collection of small iron rings jangling on a larger (“I put ’em in their noses”), a pocketful of elastic bands (“I tie elastics ’round their johnnies when they’re young, see, and pretty soon, their balls drop right off. Cleaner than cutting”), and a long leather belt and its iron buckle supporting his considerable girth.

There were three buckets, all waxed leather, for water, waste, and food, in the cell. Loeske sniffed the contents of the food bucket and decided to leave that one alone. There was something fungal in there, by the smell, but what was mixed with the fungus was probably exactly what he was afraid it might be.

But they could eat the boy’s sweets. Maura knew there was no reason to save them back. Eat, drink, indeed, for tomorrow they could surely expect to die. And there was unexpected comfort, then, listening to the farmer’s loud smacking as he agitated his sweet in his mouth. It was a human contact, of a kind, in the utter separation of the dark.

But Markin was a different matter. Foul as they three smelled, the woodcutter reeked rotten enough to gag a buzzard. There was a terrible, chilling listlessness to that rusty, broken voice, speaking out of the nightmare of its unending burial. Loeske had no way to be sure the former woodcutter was even sane human, after six years of lightlessness, slave labor, and cannibal food. Then again, how could he blame him?

“Aye,” the farmer announced, swallowing his sweet noisily, “Got me back to the door, I think. I’ll feel about, now, and see what can be done.” There was a wheeze in the dark, as the big man compressed himself to investigate. “Stone. No gettin’ through that. No latch I can feel. Dirt here... aye, hard dirt about a third of the way down. Might be dug out, aye, if we have time. Feel, old man!”

Loeske hitched himself one-armed along the dirt floor toward the voice, towing the boy in his wake. Sausage-huge fingers fumbled his shoulder; slid down; grasped his free hand. “Feel. Dirt. Can scratch it out with me nails. Think ye, old one?”

The old man ran his hand along surfaces. The door was stone. There was no inner handle of any kind — no surprise, that. But about a third of the way from the bottom the solid edge of rock crumbled into something friable. Not that it was likely they could ever manipulate the unseen bolt or latch through any hole they made.

But it was all they had to work with now, and anything was better than waiting, in the listlessness of all hopes lost, for the bitter taste of the mother’s final kiss.

“Get out that iron buckle, Hagar,” he said through stiff lips. “Markin. Get over here! You can use the stick. Dig. Dig, boys!”

He squeezed the boy’s thin hand. “Bram,” he said. “Squeeze my hand for no if you hear them near. She’ll be feeding them, now. Feeding her fliers and her warriors and her drones... We have a chance, at least a chance to die like men fighting for freedom, and not prey... Dig! Markin, you slug, dig! And don’t stop!”

To be continued...