Chapter 24: Manó – Sentenced
A single soldier came to Fabec from Debur. He had a cut on his forehead that had not yet completely healed. His name was Manó.
Two kinds of people were sent to Fabec: the drawn and the sentenced. King Henrique’s predecessors hanged and dismembered criminals in public, but Henrique didn’t like violence, the stink from the corpses, the vultures. Besides, Maëlle had told him that the death penalty had been abolished in Sátiron before the War. So Henrique made a fine speech about Satironese values, about the evolution of mankind. But he did not put an end to the death penalty, he simply gave it another name: the Mouth of War. Those who were sentenced for heinous crimes were sent to die at the Mouth.
Manó crossed Fabec’s gates and was taken to the Square House, where Captain Neville had a small and clean office, with a wooden desk, two chairs and a window that let in a grey light, which didn’t fan out but fell as a block on the wooden floor. Manó had been one of the thirteen soldiers to kneel at the Emerald’s courtyard with Neville and Robert on the day Lecoeurge’s green dragon turned red in the Tent of Performers. Manó had also been in the tent that day. He saw the dragon change color. It wasn’t sudden, like lightning splitting the sky, but neither was it slow, like a change of clothes. The dragon changed color as though Manó had lifted a red lens in front of one eye and closed the other. The dragon was obvious, impossible not to see, but the whole world stayed behind that new lens.
It still remained so today. Manó knew, as everybody did, that magic had taken place. He left the Tent of Performers with wobbly legs, feet that did not trust the solidity of the ground they stepped upon. More than once did Manó wonder if the Land of the Banished had been a blessing, if the end of all that technological sorcery was some kind of salvation. The things that could take place: just look at Leonard, the Accident. Four hundred years after the end of sorcery someone still carried the consequences of an accident that happened to an ancestor.
Manó stood straight in front of the captain. Neville was inside the block of grey light, the walls behind him had torches, but from the ceiling there hung an intricate, iron chandelier, with holes for lamps. There was one lamp, covered in dust, greyer than the light coming in from the Mouth of War.
When Manó stepped in, he noticed that the captain was surprised. It was a fleeting surprise, for which Manó was grateful. It meant Neville didn’t think him capable of commiting a heinous crime. Manó considered not delivering the letter from Henrique to Neville, pretending it had been lost, taken away by the wind, but when Neville reached out his hand, Manó gave him the letter and stood still.
The letter said only that Manó had been judged and sentenced for the death of thirteen civilians. The letter said it was his fault, but it didn’t describe what had happened; it didn’t mention the pamphlets that appeared after Neville’s departure. Stuck to walls and timber, running the street like crazed mice. Manó took one of them, but he couldn’t read. He looked for one of the soldiers who could, Robert, who gathered all the curious warriors and read the pamphlet. The big, red letters read: HENRIQUE, TRAITOR. The small letters said the king had betrayed his old captain, sending his plans of invasion to Patire. More than that, the pamphlet explained those plans. Until that day, nobody really knew what had happened at the Bridge Battle, where Neville’s father had lost his legs. The pamphlet told them everything: the captain’s plans of building a bridge to cross the Loefern and invade Patire; that Fulbert knew their exact location.
‘Rumors,’ shouted some.
‘Truth,’ shouted others.
Manó couldn’t tell if the pamphlet was true or false. All facts fit, and Henrique, when he heard about the pamphlet, didn’t leave the Emerald for a whole week. He walked between his room and his greenhouse, carrying a copy of the pamphlet with him, though he, too, couldn’t read. What was the meaning of that silence? Guilt?
Finally, the king sent for Maëlle, the librarian, to be interrogated. Manó was one of the soldiers who escorted the legless captain’s wife. The soldiers weren’t necessary, Maëlle was even surprised to see them waiting outside the library.
‘Did you think I was going to run?’
Then Henrique sent for Olivier of Tuen. The king waited thirteen days with Maëlle locked in the Emerald, but Olivier sent a written message to the king. Manó didn’t know what the message said, for Henrique couldn’t read and he didn’t ask anyone to read it for him. At least not in front of Manó or anyone Manó knew.
Henrique himself interrogated Maëlle, but not in public. The Emerald’s throne room was never used. In fact, it was a clock: a round, empty space in the middle of the castle, with thin, high gashes on the walls, which captured the sun’s trajectory. Sliced sun rays marked the time on the floor. This clock tower turned throne room was not made from the same green stone brought from Sátiron. The clock tower was older than the Empire, and the Emerald had been carefully built around it so as not to cast shadows on the gashes. In the middle of that tower they put a throne and there sat Henrique on the day he interrogated Maëlle.
Manó and two other soldiers watched. Manó had seen Olivier of Tuen interrogating prisoners before. The handling of words, the nuance of voice, the complexity and ambiguity of every sentence. Manó always got lost and so did the prisoner. Manó was under the impression that judgment had already happened inside Olivier’s head. If he had judged the person innocent, the interrogation would lead to that. If Olivier thought the person was guilty, he used those words, sharper than swords, until the prisoner himself believed he was guilty.
Henrique asked only:
‘Was it you?’
Maëlle replied:
‘No.’
‘Do you know who did it?’
‘No.’
‘Who has a press? All machines died with Sátiron.’
‘You only need a slab of wood with the letters in relief, and a lot of patience to print so many pamphlets.’
‘What should I do?’ asked the king.
Manó had had little contact with the librarian because he had no contact at all with books, but the little he had seen of her was different from what he saw that day, when she was striped in sun and shadow in front of Henrique. She seemed...withered.
‘You need to speak with your people, Henrique. They need to know that they matter more than flowers. You have to pay attention to them.’
Henrique diminished in his throne, held his forehead with his hand. Maëlle remained prisoner at the Emerald for a few more days, in case Olivier decided to come, but Henrique gave her a room. Manó didn’t say any of that to Neville. He told the captain about the other woman, the one with the chair.
From the road of Tuen came the rain and, with it, a woman darker than Maëlle. Her skin had a bluish hue, her curly hair was cut close to the skull, her large lips opened to a throat red with revenge. She walked into Debur pulling a chair by its back, leaving two lines on the dirt road. The rain, instead of erasing the lines, darkened them.
The woman passed in front of the Eslarian’s bakery. He came to the door to see what was making that noise, that ra-ta-tac ra-ta-tac on the cobbles of Debur. To the gates of the Emerald the woman pulled her chair. Ra-ta-tac ra-ta-tac. Then she stopped, put the chair on the ground, and stood on it.
‘My children,’ cried the woman. ‘Henrique of Baynard, king of flowers but not of people, where are my children? You sent them to darkness, that’s where they are. Their names drawn for death. A draw,’ she shouted. ‘A draw! And for what? For nothing? My children have died for flowers. Send your flowers to the Mouth of War. Go yourself to the Mouth of War.’
The black woman shouted and shouted. The grey rain, the black woman, the red throat. People stopped to listen, though she cried to the Emerald, to the king, not to the people. Even so, people began to gather at the feet of the chair. When the rain was over, the space between the bakery and the Emerald was crowded.
Manó, from the top of the wall, sent for Henrique, so the king could calm his people down. The king didn’t come.
‘Why?’ asked Manó.
‘He didn’t say,’ said the soldier.
Manó tried to calm the woman down.
‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Disperse.’
The black woman on the chair began to shout again. Such strength had that throat!
‘Dead by draw,’ she shouted. ‘Feeding the Mouth so Henrique can keep his flowers. Sons of mine, fertilizer for the Emerald’s gardens.’
A man raised his arm and shouted:
‘My sister died in Fabec.’
‘My father.’
‘My boy. My girl.’
Suddenly, the whole crowd was shouting. Manó could make no more words, only the howl of a thousand voices, all crying for the drawn dead. Across the square, the Eslarian closed the bakery’s doors and windows. Manó sent another soldier to fetch the king. Henrique needed to be there, to be seen. He had to say something, anything. You need to speak with your people, Maëlle had said. She was right, but the king didn’t come.
The chair was swallowed by the crowd, all Manó could see was the imponent woman, black as an empress of Sátiron, floating above the heads, howling deaths with the placidity of a prophet.
‘I then sent for the archers,’ Manó told Neville.
In the past, the Emerald had no archers. It was Neville who insisted that a group was trained, with smaller bows, for his was too difficult to handle. Since the royal authority didn’t show up, Manó tried to quiet things down with military authority. Death always calms people down.
When threatened, however, the crowd shouted louder, became angry. Manó, at the top of the gate, shouted back, but no one heard him. He might as well be moving only his lips, without saying anything. His voice was a drop against an ocean of anger from all those who had lost someone to Henrique’s draw.
Someone threw a stone. It hit the green wall. Soon, hundreds, thousands of stones were being thrown. Manó and the archers were safe at the top, where the stones didn’t reach. He kept on gesturing, sometimes with open palms in peace, sometimes with fists. The archers had their bows ready, but Manó signaled for them not to shoot.
The woman on the chair removed her belt, held the ends, then placed a stone in the middle. She swung the belt in the air, then released one of the ends. The stone hit Manó on the forehead. He fell back, momentarily unconscious.
‘That’s when it happened,’ said Manó. ‘I don’t know who shot the first arrow. It doesn’t make a difference. Once the first arrow was shot, others followed.’
When he got up, Manó ordered them to stop shooting. The square was empty, silent. Across the square, the Eslarian and his daughter came out from the bakery. Between Manó and the bakery there were thirteen bodies and a chair. The woman was gone.
‘What have I done?’ asked Manó. Then, to Neville, ‘I took responsibility for all deaths.’
‘Do you expect a medal?’ asked Neville. ‘You were in command, of course you were responsible.’
There was a pause. A drop of something ran down Manó’s face. Sweat or blood from the wound?
‘The king,’ said Neville.
Manó didn’t know exactly what the captain was asking. The day following the trial, Robert came to Manós cell. A new pamphlet had flooded the streets of Debur. Robert read it for him:
MANÓ WAS SENTENCED, BUT WHERE WAS KING HENRIQUE?
Was Neville asking the same thing? Manó said only:
‘The king.’
Others came to visit Manó in his cell. Many others. Manó didn’t know he had so many friends. He probably didn’t: it was the king who had enemies.
Neville stood up and Manó went rigid.
‘Fabec is not the death penalty,’ said the captain. ‘You will live. You will fight and atone for your crime.’
‘I will resist,’ murmured Manó.
Neville raised his eyebrows to the choice of the word resist, but he dismissed Manó without further ado. One of the people who visited Manó was Thaila, the Eslarian baker’s daughter. Manó thought he saw something red on her blouse. It could be strawberry jam, it could be ink. She hid the stain with her jacket.
‘Resist,’ she said. ‘Live.’
Neville closed the door after Manó left, then he sat at his desk.
‘The king,’ Manó had said. His tone of voice very similar to how Neville’s father had said the very same words years ago. Neville couldn’t interpret the king in his father’s voice. He was afraid to understand the king in Manó’s.
He wondered who started with the pamphlets. Was it his mother, after all that talk about bushido? Robert and Thaila? It didn’t matter. The path they chose now was their own. Neville belonged to Fabec.
