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THE PUNISHMENT
It was more than the bastinado, the thrashing of the soles of the feet. They took the two men and broke them on the slab. Why? The Crown Prince had spent time in the Queen's tent, they had emerged disheveled, and he had been apprehended while she had been assigned to her ladies-in-waiting. Before this dénouement, I was helping my parents move house. With all their belongings packed in an old and not-quite-roadworthy bus, we followed the rough coastal road, and when we turned inland and began to climb, the road worsened, becoming no better than a sheep track. My father and I took turns at the wheel, the vehicle tilting and lurching and eventually half rolling, half sliding off the trail and ending on its side, sinking in an oily black peat bog. It was a matter of picking up the baggage, scattered on the side of the hill. I helped my father gather what was most valuable to him: the roots, bulbs, corms, tubers of the flowers he would plant in his new home. This seems to be our prime—our only—function: to transport our pollen over the planet. But the Crown Prince was denied this mission. They took him, the most powerful in the land, and they took the good Captain with him, and they broke them both. I followed their screams—which were inevitable— and found they had placed them on the slab— the Prince at one end, the Captain at the other— side by side, and their legs were already purple from the clubbing. Soon knee-caps and shins were exposed, pink through the pulped flesh. But the beating did not stop. At the end, the prince was utterly destroyed, thighbones, pelvis fractured, thorax caved in as if a bomb had hit him. They had not struck his head, they said, because that was where he lived. Now there was no question. They must have continued to smash him long after he died under their hands. But the good Captain Midnight? They had destroyed only his legs, their shredded remains inextricably tangled with those of his master. Somehow they had propped his torso so that he could pick at the wreckage of muscle and bone. "You'll be all right," they said, shedding their spattered aprons, peeling off their red- stained gloves. He grinned and nodded. "Yes," he said. "And now I think I will go home."
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