Casca 18: The Cursed Read online

  He awoke refreshed, alert, and hungry. He tried to sit up, but found that he was restrained.

  His head was wedged in a wooden block and a leather strap across his eyes and nose prevented any movement of his head; a broad leather strap secured his arms and chest to the bench, and another strap secured his legs.

  He heard a movement beside the bench, then footsteps leaving the chamber.

  Well, dammit, he thought, I'm alive, and I feel much better. But I guess there's some sort of rough time coming.

  He heard returning footsteps and guessed two men. He heard Baron Ying's voice: "Well, Hu Wei or Cas Ca Sho, or whatever you care to call yourself, do you care to talk to us?"

  "I do not like to be tortured, and if I could think of something that might interest you, I would tell it freely. My name I have already told you. I went to Shou Chang village to sell silks and satins and ran into trouble with Zhang Jintao's tax collector and had to kill him. My horse stumbled while I was escaping, and it seems you arrived while I was unconscious. What else can I tell you?"

  "Something true would be satisfactory. I have known many merchants who lie as stupidly as you do, but I have never known one to fight as well.

  "Be warned, big man. Our method of interrogation never fails. But those who resist too long suffer permanently impaired minds.

  "Start the treatment, Tian Yuanlong. Call me when he starts to babble."

  Footsteps receded. Casca sensed that the man he had called Tian had stayed beside the bench. He could hear him doing something above his head.

  Babble? Why should I start to babble? Casca wondered. So I can’t move. Well I can stand that. I can stand that forever. He closed his eyes under the strap and concentrated on emptying his mind of all thoughts and sensations so that he might enjoy this confinement, even profit from it.

  A drop of water struck him on the forehead.

  Damned nuisance, he thought. Is there condensation dripping from the ceiling? Did they move me to a dungeon while I slept?

  Another drop seemed to confirm this idea, and Casca's mind shrugged. Not important. He renewed his concentration.

  But transcendence eluded him. He could not empty his mind. The drops of water fell intermittently, each one jolting him back to an awareness of the strap across his eyes, of his confinement, of his captivity. He would determinedly put all of this away from him, focusing his closed eyes inward, concentrating all of his being on the single point between his eyebrows, the location of the third eye that looked into the mystic realm.

  Which was exactly where these damned drops were hitting.

  Not a coincidence. The thought came to him strikingly. Not a casual accident. Wherever the drops came from, he had been carefully placed so as to receive them at just this point.

  Chinese water torture.

  Well, so what? I can stand a little rain. I can stand this forever. He spoke aloud to the person beside the bench. "Can I have some water?"

  "Of course." He had not heard the voice before. So the tough old doctor had been replaced by some sort of torturer. Well, the voice was pleasant enough.

  He felt a cup at his lips and sipped a little water, then resettled his mind to handle the small problem of the drops falling on his forehead.

  Hours passed and Casca was almost enjoying the game. The drops came not quite regularly, defying all Casca's attempts to count the time interval. Well, it made the game more interesting. Regular drops would have bored him unmercifully.

  His torturer sat immobile beside him, breathing quietly, making no attempt to question or worry him.

  "One, two, three, four, five, six ... " Splat. "So, that one was early. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight ..." Splat. "Ah ha. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, where is it? nine, where ..." Splat. "Okay, one, two, three, four, five ..." Splat. "Real early that time. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, come on, ten ..." Splat. "Of course. Two, three ..."

  Casca continued the count. It ceased to be amusing, but there was nothing else to do. Perhaps he could bait his jailer? "You think this crap is going to make me talk?"

  "Of course."

  "Horseshit. I can take this forever."

  "Really?" The voice was interested.

  "Sure I can. What's the theory behind this torture anyway?"

  "No theory. Only practice. Everybody talks."

  "Well, meet the first who doesn't. Oh, and by the way, I don't have anything to tell."

  "Not important. Many think they have nothing to tell." Then he heard the footsteps leaving the room and he was left alone.

  "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, where is it? nine, ten, eleven, oh come on, twelve ..." Splat. "One, two, three, four, five ..." Splat. "What a stupid game.

  Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, come on dammit, eleven, what no drop? thirteen ..." Splat. "One, two, three ..." Splat. "One, two, three, four, five, six, drop? eight nine not yet eleven twelve, longest yet, fourteen ... " Splat.

  The sound of the returning footsteps was welcome. He heard the baron's voice: "Has he said anything of interest?" And the answer: "Soon now."

  Soon? Not likely, Casca thought.

  He heard the scraping of wood on stone and guessed the two men had sat down, but neither of them spoke.

  "Six, seven, eight, can't be much longer, ten, eleven, where's that drop? thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, what?" Splat.

  "One, two, three listen to me you dumb bastards. This primitive fucking crap is not going to work on Casca Rufio Longinus. Let me tell you, you're not going to get one fucking word out of me. You hear me? Not one ..." Splat.

  "Okay, where were we? Three, four, five, six if you think I could withstand Torquemada's rack and can't stand a little water ... " Splat.

  The baron spoke quietly. "Leave us now, Tian. I would hear his confessions alone." Casca heard the other man leave.

  "One, two, three, four, five, six if you imagine this is tough, you've never done cookhouse fatigue in the British army. Or a full dress ceremonial parade in the noon sun. Or .....” Splat.

  "Doesn't this fucking water ever stop!?" The scream sounded strange in Casca's ears. Was it his own voice? He went determinedly back to his count.

  "Five, six, seven, eight let me tell you, this isn't torture, this is just fucking boredom, twelve, their…" Splat.

  "One, two, three if you keep me here for a month, I've got nothing to tell you. What is there to tell? The British are worried about an uprising. That's hardly news to you. The consul..." Splat.

  "Fuck. Two, three, four, five and another thing, if I babbled my head off for days, it wouldn't help you. If I told you the truth about myself, you simply wouldn't believe..." Splat.

  "Stop that fucking water." His screech seemed to come right out of the top of his head.

  "Don't think it's getting to me. I took more punishment in the Roman legions for having an untidy bunk. This water crap is only a minor nuisance. Look at the scars on my thumbs..." Splat.

  "Oh, shit. Three, four, five, six, I'm not going to Break, nine, ten, don't care if it never comes, thirteen, four…" Splat.

  "Okay. One, two, three..."

  The baron sat impassively while Casca resolutely counted away the seconds between the drops. He neither questioned him nor spoke at all, nor answered Casca's attempts to provoke him into conversation until Casca suddenly shouted: "Nunco Deco nihil, not correct."

  "Eras, not correct," said the baron, and the conversation continued in that Latin.

  The baron sat and listened, only speaking quietly in Latin when Casca spoke in that language.

  Casca told of his early life, his time in the Roman legions, and of the day on Golgotha when he put the Jewish guru out of his last misery. The stunned baron heard the dying Christ's curse and understood why Casca had adopted the name Sho long life. Now, for the first time, Ying could understand how one body could have collected Casca's multitude of scars.

  Then Casca's ravings changed to languages that the Cambridge
educated baron recognized but did not speak – Norse and German. Then Casca spoke for a long time in Chinese, then Japanese, then in the strange, guttural tongue of the Aztecs, then the harsh, percussive Mayan language.

  Hours passed and Casca talked on. He spoke in French and in Spanish and in some of the melodic lilts of the South Pacific.

  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.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  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.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  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.