The masquerade ball was a grand affair in a village that could barely feed itself. Under a blanket of stars on a warm, windless night, close to two hundred men and women ate enough roasted goose and asparagus for four hundred, emptying the wine kegs as fast as the steward could bring them up from the cellar while stray dogs pulled at the remains. Paraffin wafted on the air, and torches mounted on the walls and pillars chased away all but the deepest shadows. After dinner, the relentless pounding of drums accompanied by the sweet sound of violins drove the dancers into a frenzy. It was a perfect night and passions ran high as the empire tottered.
Miles below the twinkling stars in the courtyard of Castle Thades, the Devil swept Jesus across the cobblestones, a pair of angels fluttered around a warlock in a sheer black robe, and Candace Rushing, the dressmaker, stood behind a potted urn making matches where nature was better off left alone. People indulged in fantasies they had long ago suppressed, and even the old-fashioned carried on in ways they would never dare if not for their laughably thin disguises. While the inner bailey of the castle seemed to reach toward heaven, its dozens of lightly guarded archways and deep recesses afforded superb hiding places for people whose motives were likelier to lead them into hell.
The mysterious lighting, the music and the mood made people realize that a great, thrilling event was taking place. Dark, emotional, theatrical words graced their thoughts—words such as fuck, tits and orgasm—until they remembered their aristocratic place in life and put their masks back on. A wild, gypsy guitar sprang to life and an old-looking young man in a leopard skin sang of a far-off place with sand dunes and painted ladies. The Maestro slipped past just beyond mauling distance in a great swirl of fabric, gliding from one archway to the next and casting an amused glance their way.
The noise and the glitter and the return to primal instincts were the climax of a celebration marking the Feast of Saint Thadean. At one time it was a three-day festival and the whole village took part, until the beating death of a guard in an alley. Now the holiday was strictly for the members of the government—as a kind of remembrance. But even after all these years, guards dressed in the blue and gold of the Maestro’s coat of arms stood in the archways, waiting for the trouble to begin. Meanwhile, just beyond the wall, the villagers rolled over in their beds. They were having trouble sleeping.
The bailiff rested a hand on the cold, stone podium and took measure of the crowd that swelled the courtyard thirty feet below. He was about to leave on a tour of the great halls and apartments and pay the Salvador girl a visit but hesitated. The kind of scent worn by men and women who were much larger than the space they occupied widened his nostrils and made his chest expand, and he suddenly became aware of another presence. It was a visitor he knew well—a friend and an enemy both—and he prepared to make small talk to conceal the animosity that had recently come between them. With his eyes sweeping the crowd below, the most dangerous man in Thades stiffened his back and greeted carefully the most powerful.
“It’s going to turn cold tonight.”
The Maestro fell in beside him, placed a hand on his shoulder and greeted him in a gentle tone of voice. “What a lonely man you are, Mr. Hawthorne.”
The bailiff frowned. “Why do you assume that the alone are lonely?”
“A flower needs light in order to grow.”
“And a man?”
A serving girl came along with tobacco and a platter of drinks. She offered to light a cigarette for the bailiff and dropped the box of matches. As she bent over to pick them up, the Maestro patted her bottom. “The flesh is a heavy cross, Mr. Hawthorne.” The Maestro sighed as the girl straightened up and offered the tray with her head lowered. “It gets in the way of our ideals.”
“I beg to differ. It’s the cravings of the flesh that build empires like this one.”
The two men stood at the balustrade reading motives into the choices of costume worn by the revelers. The Maestro—a billowing figure in a blue silk robe—and the bailiff—tall and martial—were very different men with different ideas on how to run the village. While the Maestro took whatever measures were needed to continue the people’s love affair with him, the bailiff used fear as his weapon and was himself fearless. Ruthless men could be respected when they were predictable, but Hawthorne’s kind could never be loved. When his moods swung, he became harsh and cruel in his judgments. He’d let a thief go free and feed an ally to the dogs. During those spells, nothing was sacred and nobody’s heart pure.
“Whiskey?” the Maestro offered. “Rum gets friendly too quickly and vodka keeps its distance, like a frigid woman.”
The Maestro glanced at the bailiff for a reaction, but Hawthorne kept his counsel as he waved at the vodka bottle. What most people considered light-heartedness on the part of the Maestro was a mocking but dangerous form of interrogation. Rather than waste words, the Maestro played with a man’s emotions until he snapped like a violin string. An awkward laugh or an untimely response were for him like the silences between the musical notes of a symphony. They said as much or more than the notes themselves.
Hawthorne offered up a subject. “Eleven people are to stand trial.”
“For what?”
“Mostly theft.”
“What do you recommend?”
“Punish them, of course.”
“Hmmm.” The Maestro pretended to search for a worthy alternative to the bailiff’s cure for rebellion. “But if we punish those few, they’ll laugh at us and say we were outfoxed.”
Hawthorne’s face was handsome, except when he twisted his lips into a sneer. “Then let’s punish none and hand it all over to the peasants.”
“If we punish none, they’ll say we backed down.”
“Raise the damned tithe, then.”
“By punishing everyone, Bailiff, we will lose the respect of the law-abiding citizens—the Ned Pullmans of the village we count on to keep the others in line. Would it not serve to leave them with a little guilt rather than drive them to desperation? We could let them outsmart the great Maestro and yet want to get back into his good graces.”
Hawthorne leaned out over the balustrade looking for trouble while he tried to follow the Maestro’s logic. They could punish all, punish none or punish some—all rejected by the Maestro. Was there a fourth option besides plus, minus or equals? Hawthorne wanted to bite off his own tongue.
After a pause to let the bailiff catch up, the Maestro patted his sleeve and leaned in close, as if to impart a great secret. “Ours is a troubled land. Are people not happy? What do they want?”
“It’s just their low nature. Show them a cage with a warm blanket and see how long it stays empty.”
“Are they eating enough, Mr. Hawthorne? Eating is a very personal matter. Not eating can cause resentment.”
The bailiff cast a strange sideways glance at the Maestro. “The talisman has set the tithe just so. If a man wastes a tally on a poker game that his wife should have used to buy a peck of potatoes, his family will suffer for it.”
The Maestro clapped his hands like a child. “Fine words, Bailiff.”
“There’s talk in the marketplace. Our uneducated farmers have figured out that the people inside these walls—their government—have doubled in number in one generation. That leaves them working twice as hard to feed another hundred who’ve taken to idleness and gluttony. They are turning into a mob.”
“They are in pain from being stabbed in the same wound over and over.”
Hawthorne offered a rare smile. “Then we’ll have to think up new ways to torture them.”
The Maestro’s eyes widened, as if he’d just discovered after all these years that the bailiff was insane. “Governments are supposed to rule their people, not beat them up.”
“What’s the difference? The threat is the same.”
Once they finished their drinks, the Maestro tapped the bailiff’s shoulder and they hurried along the hall like warriors heading into battle. Hawthorne was silent as they mounted the narrow, winding staircase of Cuckold’s Tower past the armory. The stairwell was unlit and, over the years, he’d pictured situations exactly like this one, where it would have been all too easy to pull a piece of cord out of his pocket in the pitch dark, slip it over the Maestro’s head, and pull on both ends until everything was his. Only one thing stopped him. At the pig races one time, the Maestro stepped comfortably into the ring, grabbed the losing pig by the head and slit its throat with a short, curved knife nobody knew he carried because the winner of the race was feeling squeamish, and the Maestro wanted to show the people his ordinary side to increase their love for him.
“Why don’t they have more babies?”
“For the same reason they don’t build houses, plant gardens and open businesses. There`s no hope—nothing to build and nowhere to build it. We own most of their labor and all their land.” The bailiff tried out one of the Maestro’s trademark expressions in jest. “Isn’t it marvelous?”
“Oh, Lord. Where did we go wrong?”
They reached the top of the stairs, and the Maestro stood aside to let the bailiff look for assassins. The door groaned and gave way into a rounded chamber bare of furnishings and wall hangings other than a straw mattress on the floor. There was still plenty of night left, and beyond the short reach of the torches mounted along the outer wall and the drawbridge, all lay deep in shadow. Once the sun came up, there would be a magnificent view of the tobacco fields, the black hills and even the smokestacks beyond the wall.
“Where is she?”
“With Potch, I’d say.”
The Maestro reached inside his tunic and made a great ceremony of pulling out a faded and shredded piece of parchment. “Do you remember this, Bailiff?”
“Barely.”
“It’s the flag of our former great nation. When our forefathers came here to escape the tyranny of income tax, we had a vision. We believed in freedom and the meritocracy, respect and the bill of rights. We even enshrined private property in our constitution. People could reinvent themselves as they saw fit—as monks or as magnates. Hell, they could stop time and become immortal if they wanted.”
“Sounds like a religious cult.”
“Yes, but where we once surrendered to grand principles, we now submit to men and their fickle appetites. The villagers rise up and the courtiers flout the comforts of our welfare state. We protect them from nature’s extremes, but they get bored and challenge the moral code without a second thought—gambling, gobbling potions and engaging in bizarre pleasures. The women sleep with the women and the children carry weapons. It’s as if the galaxy were flying off into oblivion and this were the last dance. The appetites must be permitted to swing, Bailiff, but why do these people have to act out every fantasy that comes into their heads? Can they not dance around the fire without jumping in?”
Hawthorne leaned out the window and inhaled the cold, invigorating air. It was an odd change in the weather, from milky warm to damp cold in the space of four hours. He was running the word hypocrisy through his mind when he felt the piercing blue eyes of the Maestro on his back. “Every animal must be allowed to feel pain. Otherwise, it will eventually feel nothing.”
“So, what do you recommend, Mr. Hawthorne? We are broken. Fix us.”
“I recommend more pain. Send half of the courtiers back into the fields and grant a general amnesty. Mete out no punishment at the Tribute. Forgive everything this one time, but raise the tithe another tenth and lower it when the trouble stops.”
“Dear, oh dear! The same knife in the same old wound. Tax and regulate unto enslavement and inhumanity.” The Maestro dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. “The human spirit is on its death bed and the beast in us returns.”
Hawthorne’s look of bewilderment was wasted in the darkness. “How else…?”
The Maestro fanned his face. “The meanness of it… I tremble.”
“But there’s only fear and greed. We have no other weapons.”
“Wait!” The Maestro’s eyes lit up like a child’s. “If they must inhabit a cage, why not offer them a choice at the least—perhaps a red blanket rather than a blue blanket? We could introduce political parties.”
“Democracy? Everyone sees through that sham.”
The Maestro sighed like a child who had been crying for a long time. “You once said people would follow us into hell, Bailiff, if they believed they were free to choose. Is this hell? Am I the Devil?”
****
A long, terrifying scream in the middle of the night wrenched the Salvador girl out of one nightmare and into another. Her mother was finally dead—tortured for a book of secrets it had taken her a lifetime to compose—and there was no dignity in her passing. The great universe of good and bad luck, reward and punishment, hadn’t granted her that.
The book was a legacy Rachel Salvador died to pass on to her people, and it was in Jane’s hands now. It was an account of the history of Thades, of the crimes committed by its founders, of the castle’s defensive weaknesses, and of the justice that reigned beyond the wall. It was knowledge that could change the lives of a thousand people, and it would stay bottled up inside her though it left her guts screaming for revenge. It was knowledge she would, at all costs, keep secret from the man who would come in the night to rape her.
Outside her prison window, the sun was a ball of fire and it was sitting on the rocks above the barren black landscape where the coal spilled out over the ground and, even after seven or eight decades, rusted hulks of automobiles and industrial machines from a different era still littered the landscape. In a normal world, they would have been relics of the past, but not in Thades. Here they were relics of a future that had left them behind. Far off toward the south, beyond the miles of tobacco, she could just see the flames from three smokestacks shooting toward the sky.
As the ugly truth slowly dawned on her, the desire to take the pain of her mother’s death out on the stone walls of her prison almost overwhelmed her. Tears would have eased her burden, but the anger festering inside her had dried them up. During the worst moments of that dark day, while reading the final entry in her mother’s book of the castle’s darkest secrets, the pain between her brows was so severe that she had to bang her head against the window casing for relief.
Her mother made wild claims in those last pages of the diary, during her final days on earth—stories about a world beyond the wall where food was plentiful and people were free, a world that abhorred the violent impulses of men and wrote volumes of laws to reign them in, but produced pills that could keep them useful in bed. Had she cracked under the pressure? Did she know the end was near? What could it have been like knowing she was going to die? Jane pushed her hair out of her face and flipped the page, desperate for more words from her only friend in the world.
While the great stinking masses starve to death or work themselves into an early grave, the chosen ones—the government as they call themselves—eat and drink until they vomit. And instead of butchering them in their sleep, we lay out the red carpet and bow our heads as they pass. What dumb brutes we are. What a cold, barren existence we live. These were some of the words the sex slave Rachel Salvador recorded just before the end in the great book that came to be known as the Salvador Manifesto.
A dark, greasy stain on the page blotted out the next few lines.
She thought hard about those words before turning the page. In my place, you women of the world, she wrote, will carry the torch… moral reconstruction… The stain cut off the rest of the message. Except for a wild scrawl partially concealed where the stain had seeped through the paper, the page was blank, and she used up the rest of her daylight piecing together that final desperate message. It was the last thing Rachel Salvador ever wrote, and the emptiness of the page that followed was enormous.
Jane felt desperately lonely, and fear began to wrap itself around her like a shroud. From her well-worn seat in a window of the tower where she was imprisoned, she surveyed the countryside that seemed so different from the way her mother described it in her book. The day had dawned perfectly, and all afternoon and evening—just before she was to be raped again—the faint smell of ocean that sometimes visited Thades was carried in on a warm breeze that gave no hint of the cold night to come.
Distracted by the cawing of a crow, she twisted around in the window well and leaned out over the moat. Across the river, a boy was swinging a wounded bird by the feet, smashing its head against a clothesline pole just to watch it die. Timothy Pope was only thirteen but he was already a man… a half-brother from another world. Even from sixty feet up in the dimming light, she could see the broken nose from defending his honor once too often. She climbed off the sill, slid down the wall in a heap and curled up on her side. Silent tears ran down her face while she slipped once again into a deep but disquieting sleep full of pounding drums and screaming violins.
For the next three quarters of an hour, she dreamed about a witch staggering around a bonfire carrying a huge Buddhist cross on her back, and a band of soldiers from the gender unification project who had overrun the village and chased the men back into a cave. Once in power, they eliminated the three causes of all the misery in the world—sex, violence and inequality. They were well into a mass crying event when she was jolted awake by fireworks from the castle courtyard.
Her eyes flitted from the door to the window and back again. Instinct told her to run, but there was nowhere to go—no other way out of the tower except the window, but the sixty-foot fall would kill her. There was no time to even think up a lie. Time and again over the years, she’d connived to fend him off, mostly in vain, and she didn’t know how she’d stop him this time, either. But he was not having her today, not on this of all days. She’d rather die. The remnants of her nightmare receded and she woke up for real. She was alone.
Yesterday’s obsession returned with a vengeance. She had to save the book and get it into the hands of the next generation. In twenty long years of imprisonment and sexual slavery, she had built up a fragile and distant acquaintance with one solitary villager. He was Ned Pullman, the man who cleaned the moat, and she had to get the diary to him before the sun came up. Her desire to achieve that one small purpose was so intense that it gripped the back of her eyeballs.
Night fell. A wave of darkness like despair came first. Then, after some hours, a numbness began creeping over her—a disregard for her own welfare and a deep, dark and calm desire for revenge. A hatred. Now she knew it to be true—he’d left no doubt, no room for her to imagine otherwise. Her mother was dead, really dead, and now she knew where the body lay. The talisman stayed away the whole night after her mother died, yet they were some of the darkest hours she’d spent in seven ugly, terrifying years as his slave, when she would have preferred to be dead than alive. And the night was just beginning.
For Jane, it was then that the clock started ticking. They would check on her once the masquerade ball ended. That gave her only a few hours to work out how to get the diary into the hands of the villagers. If they found it, there would be a mock trial at sunrise, just before the season’s Tribute, in order to draw as many villagers as possible to the spectacle. They would hang her in the courtyard as public entertainment and to set an example for others. She felt no guilt about her crime and only wished the crime had been more gratifying. She could have enticed the talisman onto the window ledge and pushed him out of the tower, or stabbed the bailiff in his cold, cold heart. There would have been much more satisfaction in that. At dawn, she would be offered one last chance to confess that she’d stolen the diary and smuggled it out of the castle. And if she handed it over, they might kill her, anyway.
Except it would never happen that way. She was too full of spite to permit herself to be murdered for entertainment. It was better to claw the hangman’s eyes out, or get shot or beaten to death than to walk voluntarily to the scaffold. She was anything but contrite, which left her with the one solution she’d been shunning for a lifetime. She had to jump out of the tower.
While angels and devils swirled in masquerade that hot and cold night, Jane Salvador spent long hours wracked by fear and doubt while making preparations for her dramatic escape or death. She posed countless questions that had no answers. Would she hit the wall on the way down, or a drainpipe? Would she break her neck hitting the water or the riverbed? She remembered seeing one of the guards survive a fall long ago, which meant that there were deep pockets of water in the moat. Where she sat, though, was twice as high as the parapet.
Would they shoot her in the back as she crawled out of the water and ran for her life? How would she get away under their noses? What about the spikes downriver—and who could she trust in the village, where would she stay and what would she eat? She’d never met a villager in her life. There were many more questions—too many to deal with. But terrified though she was, she felt with unreasonable certainty that she would not die hanging from a rope.
From her perch high up in the southwest tower, she peered through the darkness from the wall to the river and back to the wall again. The night was quickly turning cold, which happened sometimes in September. She wrapped her arms around her, shivering nervously and wondering mainly if she would die when she hit bottom. With her preparations completed, it was the only question that mattered. Death in the public square the next day had a sensuous kind of appeal when compared to death that was just a couple of hours away, but that was the same instinct that had kept her people in shackles for a hundred years… seeking out temporary relief and depending on tomorrow for lucky accidents that would rescue them from poverty and desperation.
On the floor by the door was a bag of trash Jane had rounded up. There were old rags and meat wrappers and whatever she could find that would burn fast. She’d even stolen some sugar. Beside the bag were two matches. She was waiting for the first faint sign of a brightening sky and for the fear to subside so she could set her plan in motion, but the longer she sat in the window mesmerized by the torches along the wall and the dark swath of river below and shivering with the fear and the cold, the harder it was to imagine herself a free woman. It was the longest night of her life. Whenever she began to worry that her fear would paralyze her, she climbed down off the sill and walked around the room to get her courage up again. The few odds and ends she needed for her escape were already on hand, so there was nothing to do but wait for the yardman, who would arrive like clockwork at the break of dawn.
After many long, numb hours, she slipped out the door and took the stairs down to the armory one floor below. There was a door that opened onto the stairwell from her cell, and it was open because they had no reason to lock her up. They completely expected her to remain within the four walls of the castle and, the way they looked at it, there was nowhere to hide and nowhere to run, anyway. Nobody had ever escaped either the castle or the village. The wall was just as effective in keeping the workers of the plantation inside as it was in keeping unwanted intruders out. The bailiff never expected anybody to be crazy enough to jump out of a tower window.
In his cruelty, the talisman wanted to show her that her mother really was dead, so he’d broken a cardinal rule and left the armory door open for the afternoon. But she had taken the opportunity while he was fondling her to steal the key that hung around his neck and he’d been forced to leave it unlocked. That was what had made him so frantic. Jane pushed the door open and crept into the darkness. A shiver ran down her spine and she swallowed hard. Her dead mother was lying on a rug to one side of the room. She couldn’t afford to lose her nerve, so she quickly closed the door and pulled the sheet off the body.
The death of her one and only friend was devastating, but a powerful new force had taken hold of her. The death of her mother had become part of a bigger picture, one that affected many lives. You said it yourself, Mama. Women and men are as different as equality and liberty. They gag on violence and then come begging for our model of society—for beauty, peace and prosperity. I tell you now, so hear me. He will pay the highest price for this. They will all pay in a way they cannot even imagine. No tears rolled down her cheeks this time.
All around her, barely illuminated by the torches outside, were rows and rows of guns, oiled and ready for killing, along with crates of ammunition stacked up against the walls. It would have been easy to take one of the guns, load it, and put a bullet into the talisman or the bailiff, or even the Maestro himself. How deeply satisfying that would have been. But she wouldn’t do that. Her mother Rachel, who was educated in the old ways, might have done it that way, but not her daughter. Jane had been brought up by the masters of the plantation—people who clearly had a knack for coming out on top. These people planned for the long term, and it seemed to be a key to their success, so that is exactly what she would do. The havoc she could wreak in one night would pale in comparison. They’d see.
Dragging her dead mother’s body up the stairs to her cell put a terrible strain on her bruised and battered body, and she paused often along the way. It was the middle of the night, so there was little risk of getting caught. She set her mother down inside the south window of the tower and leaned out to retrieve the diary from the drainpipe. Against all common sense, she expected it to be gone, but it was still there. She laid it on the floor beside her. From inside the hem of her dress, she extracted a needle that was already threaded. She needed a patch of cloth now. Her dress was the only outfit she had left, so she left it intact and tore a strip off the bed sheet instead. Then she pulled off her dress while her body screamed in pain from the talisman’s beating. She sewed a crude pocket on the inside of the dress and stitched it all around a second time just to make sure. At last she was ready.
With a heavy heart, she picked up the quill and concluded the story of her mother’s life where she’d left off before she died. After twenty long years, there would be one final entry in the book and then they would stop. The entries would stop because her mother was dead, and Jane had plans for the book—plans that would begin unfolding in a matter of hours when the people of Thades finally heard what a horrible lie they had been living all these years. They’d want to know more, and she would tell them more if she lived. Then they would go on a rampage. Even sheep had a threshold of pain. But she had to be patient and take things one step at a time if she was to bring a long, cruel story to an end.
During the last hours of the last day of entries in her mother’s manifesto, just before she said goodbye to her one friend and jumped out the tower window, Jane Salvador leaned on the stone windowsill of her prison and wrote a dedication to the anonymous woman who would take up the torch after her in case they found her dead when the sun came up:
Here is everything you need to escape the injustice of the old world order. Take this gift—to help you believe—and use it to rebuild your lives. You may never get another chance.
With the quill poised over her shoulder, she considered adding a final flourish to the bizarre claims she was making, something the yardman and the other villagers could verify. Something practical. It was fine to toss the key into the moat and fight a war of ideas, but she had decided on second thought that it was better to get the men riled up one more time to bring the revolution to pass, and they needed to get inside the castle to seize power from the criminals and their predecessors who’d held it for a century. To that end, she draped the key on its leather thong around her neck where the yardman could find it.
Under the water, you will find a door that opens into the south wall of the castle. It’s a relic from a time when there was no moat and has since been sealed up and forgotten. The door will grant you access to the nearest and farthest reaches of the castle, including the armory.
Jane’s heart thundered in her chest as she caught sight of the yardman in the distance. He was lumbering down the road on his way to the moat to begin his day’s work, and she wished she were in his, or anyone else’s, shoes rather than her own right now. All of her years of dreaming and planning had come to an abrupt end. The time for action had arrived.
After a final, small ceremony to say farewell to the woman who’d comforted her for twenty years even at the height of her own misery, she sewed the pocket shut and put her dress back on. This time, she couldn’t stop the tears of terror and regret.
“Goodbye, Mama,” she cried. “May they do you justice.” With a rusty nail she’d hidden in a crack in the wall, she gouged a Buddhist cross into a large, soft stone. It would be the symbol of her new religion.
She struck a match and it flared. She held it to the bran bag and the rough, dry material caught fire instantly. She threw open the door. The bag of trash was burning so fast that she had trouble picking it up. Panic was beginning to grip her, so she thrust her hands into the flames and gasped with the pain. In the five steps it took to reach the landing, the fire singed her hair, and her dress caught fire. She almost screamed. With as much strength as she could muster, she flung the bag through the stairwell window toward the parapet. Two guards on the wall nearest the tower unslung their rifles but were confounded by the burning bag and blinded by the light. They didn’t see her throw it, which had been the point. Jane ran back up to her room. Her fear was so bad that she had to fight back tears as she stepped out onto the window ledge. It might have been better to close her eyes, but she didn’t dare. Two drainpipes extended from the wall at different points, and she had to avoid those. With absolute terror in her heart, she squeezed her eyes shut and begged God for mercy. Her heart was exploding inside her rib cage. “God help me, please!” She crouched like an animal and sprang outward from the tower as far as she could, plunging into the blackness and passing out with the violent panic that took hold of her body.
