His hand smelled of fish when it struck me across the face.

  “Get him, Virgil!” Chaucer said from the sideline.

  Blood ran down my temples and the crowd jeered and the fat man ran at me with balled fists.

  What was it we had for dinner? Mackeral?

  I fell. My body twisted, my palms sprawled out and my legs touched together as I landed on the table behind me. My arms shook just gripping the table edges, to my rear the wooden plates and the long silver-bellied filets and the two bulbous, dead-white eyes that looked back at me with mouth in half-gape. Fish. I grabbed one by its tail and in one swoop turned and slapped back. The fat man fell on his back on the floor, on top of a fallen pantry of fish and oats that seeded the black brick floor with brown specks. The men cheered. The fish slipped out of my hand, slimed and wet and half-raw. I took a step, almost slipped off the gruel and pushed out my arms in opposite directions looking for balance.

  The old man huffed and nodded his head and all the grime fell off his face like brown-gray snot. Rubbing my own chin, there wasn't much but blood. Blood and pain and the feeling that this wasn't foreign. I’m not one to fight. But I’ll fight. Even on behalf of Chaucer, of all people. For a misunderstanding, of all things. The unlikely stacking on top of unlikelies and ending here, with me half-slipping on the mess we made and an anonymous fat man half-stood. I looked to the crowd, the bobbing heads with clasped hands who in their riled shouts looked like one big amalgam of human flesh and I found in that wall of flesh, Chaucer. He was smiling. Impressed, even. Mouthing the word: sorry, eating the stolen filet of fish that the old man had accused me of doing myself. That’s how it went.

  Sorry? Oh buddy, I could tell you were sorry.

  The old man turned to me. I flexed stiff, hands forward. He came rushing in and me the stricken matador, flying back and pinned against his broad shoulder. He slammed me on to a wooden table, it flipped and turned and breathing once I could feel a sharp pain in my lungs and the wheeze that followed. If he had horns I would have dead. But all this old man had were the white bristles flared on the sides of his scalp, dry stiff paintbrush hair with the blotches of black blotted in between haphazard. The fish flesh interred in his fingernails and now into me from punches that scratched from his lengthened nails. I stood, each muscle struggling with the other into a sad flounder. I grabbed him with one hand by the hair, grabbed a wooden cup with the other. And in one. Two. Three. Brought them both together. Cup against skull. Cup shattering, skull shattering. Flesh cut. Blood jettisoned out to my face.

  God, it tasted awful.

  “Fuck!” My greased hands worked against the fast-drying blood, getting it out of my eyelids.

  The man roared. Tightened his fist. Twisted (I could see that much at least, the ballerina twirl of a man two hundred pounds past a healthy weight) and the pain shot into my face with a suddenness like a firework. On the floor, I looked up with slits for eyes. I grabbed my nose. There was so much blood between us two that I couldn’t tell whose was whose though the bigger pool, I guessed, was mine. His knuckles had red on it, fresh. He was still in that stance, holding position like I was some kind of artist meant to paint his glory.

  My front tooth wobbled. I flicked it with my tongue. Winced. He grabbed me by the collar.

  “You're going to learn not to take another man's food, ey.” He slapped me.

  “You’re not starving any time soon.” He slapped me, left, right and my face was back in position.

  “That’s not the point. You stole.” He said. “You steal. You get hurt. You let yourself get stolen from, you keep getting stolen from. Them’s the rules here.”

  “I didn’t steal and I sure as hell never agreed to those rules.”

  By the collar, he dug me into the floor. Drilled me in. The wooden fragments of a splintered table dug into me, the fish bones scraped against my back.

  “Why’d you grab my mackerel, boy?”

  I couldn't help but chuckle blood. Mackeral, fucking mackeral.

  He looked down at me with his big nostrils flared and I looked away, to the side, where I saw the little redhead weaving within the crowd with his cotton brown sack out and his breath winded from talking. Screaming. Shrieking, almost; "Place your bets, place your bets here and now." Fatigue struck me then. I closed my eyes in self-tribute.

  “I didn’t take anything.” I said.

  “Then who did?”

  “Don’t know. Wasn’t me though.”

  He stayed quiet, lips pursed for a moment like the words were still being processed and any truth in them sifted. There was nothing. He screamed down at me with his asteroids of oat-gruel-slobber, half digested.

  Then he struck me across the face. My head bobbed back.

  “No use fighting back now.” He said. I shook my head and let my arms fall.

  “I agree.”

  “What?” He inclined his head just a bit.

  “Yeah. I give up.” I said. “I ain’t fighting this. No point in exhausting myself for a fucking fish.”

  “G-give up?”

  “Yep.”

  My eyes drifted. The crowd died at my words, their coined grips lowered and their faces looking amongst themselves as I laid my arms down and lowered my shoulders and let my body rest in the grip of the fat man. Men make plenty stupid things a kind of currency. Blood, gold, fish even. And I figured I'd be a very stupid man to fight for that. For anything, really. That’s what I thought at least. I guess the fat man figured as much, because he was just in shock as everyone else. We all laid suspended there in the whispers and the murmurs and the rocking candle chandelier. All of us in that stupid moment, confused at ourselves and the mess on the floor as if it could have been done by anyone else. No one culprit, everyone a victim. Bedlam messes don't make themselves though.

  “Enough! Enough!” Two men came around and shoved their heel into the fat man’s side, he fell to my rear.

  “Oh. I think we were already done.” I wobbled upright.

  The boot came down on my chest. I fell back, body slunk and sliding off a table as my hands extended out trying to grip a seat. I stood myself midway before they hooked my arm pits with their iron gloved grip. My body felt compressed, all the way up to my nose where the release of mucus and blood felt like the long exhaust of an geyser hole. One discordant note, a third-cough and a third-wheeze and a third-whistle.

  “Do you think he’s broken?” One of the two said.

  “No.” I recognized that voice, the one that sounded low and slow and deep. It was the kind of voice you’d expect out of a monster from the trench. Gunther, the warden. “This one doesn’t break that easily.”

  My head throbbed and every effort to move brought me back looking face down onto the floor. My right eye swelled, my left eye went lazy and it rose halfway such that Gunther, to me at least, appeared more silhouette than man. Little more than a shadow against the light and within the cavities of his high raised cheeks and the underlids of his eyes I could see nothing but two dark caverns. He gripped the back of my hair and pulled up and I went along with a weak neck, wincing but not trying anything else.

  “I saved you.” He said. “What do we say?”

  My head spun.

  Hmm, he went, shaking me like prey in his maws.

  “Where are your manners?” Still shaking me. My eyes centered. "What do we say?"

  “Thank you.”

  “Good.” He let go. So did the two guards. The noise was hollow when my body struck the floor. My eyes opened, I panned across the room still on the floor and saw the receding feet of men; some scratched, others swollen purple, most of them nail-less or crosshatched with the years of abuse as if the prison branded them.

  “What are you waiting for?" Gunther looked down at me, his boot at my cheek. "You have a visitor. Come now.”

  I hiked my shoulders up and tried to push up and fell and two guards came moaning and made the sound of suckling leeches as they gripped and dragged me across the grime on the floor. I made streaks, two thin lines where my feet dragged. Everyone passed me with varying expressions of the same kind of dread. A meeting for me? Chaucer, with the drooping sack still in his hand, was still and as I turned the corner I heard him say “Be careful.”

 

 

  They lifted me through Shrieker’s Veil, my feet bumping past every crack and elevated brick, through and past dozens of barred doors with lonely haggard faces that squeezed themselves and passed me sidelong glares. Down and up and sideways and through small holes and up stairs, past every wretch who hid in corners, all the way to the center of this endless oubliette. The sound of rain came finally, a bit muted behind two wooden doors where the four of us waited behind.

  “Take him the rest of the way, Hannibal's summoned me.” Gunther said. The two guards nodded with their protruded lower teeth and passed me through the gates with mechanical movement like two automatons going through their routine. Automatons? What were those? I looked up to one of them. I couldn’t quite see his face behind the helmet and perhaps there was wiring.

  Wires? What was wiring again?

  I forget. Most things are forgotten to me and the things I want to forget I tend to remember. Things like this.

  The gates opened. Cold air struck me, the torch fires went horizontal and snuffed themselves, dew and sprinkle shower tapped along my body and the floor and I turned away from the rain. One eye opened as they stepped forward, I caught a glimpse of it. Dead Man's Walk, the center hole here at Shrieker's Veil and the main passage through this prison. Which, as I've been told, started as a Colosseum. Most of it laid in water, destroyed in a flood, they say. All that remained were the dungeons because the arena and the stands and the pillars were all dragged out into deep sea and now all that replaced it was the giant hole leading down the ocean floor. That’s where we were. My eyes widened. Below the waters we're black, and the pitch of crashing waves just a murmur. We were halfway between the water floor and halfway up towards the top most circle where an ossature of wooden beams seized hundreds of metal gears into position and I guessed, the prison too. The water dripped down and slipped into my mouth. Tasted of copper. Acrid. I spat. If misery could be mechanized and manufactured then this was the Goldberg machine of all human suffering. Here at the center of Shrieker’s Veil with it's dull and grey skyline and the imposed whines of rusty gears as they turned and came to diseased life. This was just a small stretch.

  My feet dangled as two guards lifted me. We traveled across stairs. The planks of different woods and colors turning and rolling beneath us with each setting our feet. We swayed. Above us, other guards moved, their own plans and their own prisoners. Some of them had their elbows against the guard rails looking down at me. Wind passed through us. We paused. The bridge rattled. My stomach turned and I balled myself and closed my eyes for the bridge to stop its stutter. My hands went as I held hard to one of the ropes by my side. They tried to pry me, but I was too strong.

  “Settle down or we’ll throw you over.” One of the two said, the shorter one.

  Above me, loud machinations ticked and cracked and snapped into place. Cogs and bevels and chains all turning or shaking. With the sounds came rising cages where the limp arms and legs of pygmies dangled, high past all our heads to floors above. The guards carried me up. One held my arms and the other for my leg. A cage came down and they pushed me into the space, wrapping a bungee rope around my waist and the cage. I rose and fell with the pull of chains, and my body yanked and tightened with every tick of steel.

  It was a short walk from Dead Man's Walk to my cell, but it felt the longest.

  "Quit your pissing. We're already here." We - me and two new guards. They wore different faces but had the same look about their eyes. Thin and hateful and a bit sad of it all. One of them grabbed my collar and the other my feet, both threw me into my cell.

  “Wait here.” The door slammed behind me. I pushed myself up from the floor, arms shaking and face still swollen. I dragged my whole body to the corner of my cell, opposite my bucket of refuse, to a little haystack where I laid my body.

  It must have been minutes but it felt like hours, hearing every foot step around me, hearing neighbors screaming and then being struck and shushed. Water dripped from the side like the walls were crying for me. I dragged my palms against the sleek stone. It was cold. Above me, small porous holes leaked. This dingy shit hole always made me wonder, if this prison had so many holes in it why hadn’t it collapsed yet? Why hadn’t it been broken out of?

  And as wondered and head my wandered, footsteps approached.

  Who would be talking to me? He who knows nothing but his name?

  Virgil the amnesiac they say. The man with a missing head.

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” Each heavy step sent a reverberation through my body.

  Quiet - I had to tell myself, sometimes otherwise I forget. I closed my mouth and breathed in slow until my heart eased. But the steps grew louder and his leg appeared.

  He came in full wide stride, with his body imposed on the torch fire behind him and with nothing but his shadowy form in my immediate view.

  “Pay your respects to the Prince of Lavos.” A guard behind him said. “Leader of the Rose Knights, heir to the throne. Prince Ritcher Wolfe.”

  He stepped up in front of the bars, the torch behind him flickering. The light outside the barred windows and through the little holes in the walls dimmed. Night came. Ritcher brought it with him. A chair came up, held by one of the knights. They all wore the same colored and dressed armor, where the seams and gaps were decorated gold with raised thorn designs around their steel. A prince and half a dozen knights waiting some distance from my field of view.

  “Leave us.” Ritcher said. Two knights looked at him and put their heads down and walked away and Ritcher stared down that hall until the clank of their armor faded to silence. To one leg of the chair, a bag. To the other, a bucket. He put one finger across his mouth and I held my breath and curiosities to silence. Ritcher’s eyes grew and the sinews of his throat bulged and he raised the bucket over to his mouth.

  His body jerked, he fell on his knees and vomited.

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