City Under the Stars by Gardner Dozois

Author:Gardner Dozois
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

6

THERE WAS A WINDOW in one wall of his cell. Without it, Hanson later thought, he might have gone insane.

It was a narrow slit window, open to the air but set with stout iron bars, a horizontal slash in the pale stone in the eastern wall of his cell, and although it let the cold wind in, and sometimes snow in winter, Hanson treasured it for the air and light it also let through into the gloomy darkness of his cell. The cell wall bulged inward slightly here, and with a little scrambling, it was possible to reach the window and hook your arms around the bars. Hanson would hang there for a long time, until the muscles in his big arms screamed in protest, relishing the cold wind on his face, drinking in the sight of trees and birds and low rolling hills, sometimes looking out toward the eastern horizon where, just out of sight, waited the shining immensity of the Wall of the City of God. Sometimes at night you could see its sullen glow lighting up the dark underbellies of the clouds.

When his arms could stand the strain no longer, he would slump back into the smothering, claustrophobic darkness of his cell, where he had a hard narrow cot, a few rough blankets, a pot to relieve himself in. They rarely came for him anymore, and most of his days and nights were spent alone, his meals—rough but substantial fare, bread that he could smell baking somewhere on the premises early in the morning, big hunks of new cheese, sometimes an unidentifiable piece of meat or a bit of fruit in the summer—shoved in through a slot in the iron-bound oaken door twice a day; at least they hadn’t tried starving him yet, although they’d tried everything else. He rarely saw his captors anymore, although he could hear them passing in the corridor outside and had learned to recognize the individualities of their gaits, and to identify one guard by his habit of whistling jigs and cheerful little schottisches as he made his rounds. He hadn’t seen any of the other prisoners for months, and never had seen much of them, although occasionally he could hear them screaming, or crying hopelessly in the night, and one evening someone had begun wailing “What is this place? I don’t belong here! Let me out of here! Get me out of here!” over and over again for hours in a hideously wavering high-pitched voice, like a lost soul crying out from some deep pit of Hell, until finally it was cut off in mid-cry, followed by an ominous silence.

Hanson almost—almost—regretted that they didn’t come to take him for questioning anymore.

His first day here, after soldiers quick-marched him from the City of God, which he had been caught coming out of, returning from a place no man had ever successfully entered in who knew how many hundreds or even thousands of years, they had dragged him to the warden’s office. The

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