Gregory Grey and the Fugitive in Helika

CHAPTER 9.2

  Lesley's Diary - Crime and Punishment - July 21, 1909

  Cassius is a man with a plan.

  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, the kids of the camp get together to get a little drunk, and sweat out a few rounds of Euchre. This happens in Cassius’s tent. He’s paid off a few Spooks, who are now a somewhat lax about enforcing curfew. Somehow he manages to arrange for moonshine for everybody.

  In between all this fun and good times though, there’s a lot of rhetoric.

  Let me draw out the situation for you:

  The kids are all between thirteen and twenty-two. Cassius himself is only twenty-one, but he acts a lot older. They’re bored of their camp chores, angry at everybody for their situation, always ready to fight.

  It’s when everyone starts whining about their little problems that Cassius really lays it on thick. He sympathises and empathises with everyone’s problems, real or imagined. He tells them they all deserve better. He encourages them to share their stories of ill-treatment or loss at the hands of Spooks. At the end of one of these sessions, the air of self-pity, martyrdom, and vulnerability in the tent is so thick I want to strangle someone.

  In his rhetoric though, Cassius keeps hinting about a plan, about change to come, about how it won’t always be like this, and how when this is all over, we’d ‘come into our own’, and ‘forge our own destinies’, instead of letting others tell us what to do. He’s been going on like this for a week now.

  I thought I’d write about it today, because he was a lot more concrete and clear about what he says we want, rather than the vague and ambiguous reassurances we’d heard all week.

  There was a catalyst for this:

  Jeffery is seventeen years old. He’s tall, and red-haired, and likes to put on a devil-may-care face. He’s tried to flirt with me a few times, and I told him no in the soft way, and a little later, in the hard way (I think he hates me a little now, because everyone was laughing at him when he curled up on the floor; but he can’t fault me – I gave him fair warning).

  Well, for once, the devil did care. The idiot crossed over to the Observant side of the camp and got caught. It wasn’t the first time he’d done it; a couple of nights ago he brought back some really good chocolate liqueurs. He tried to do it again the day before, and we’d wondered why he hadn’t turned up last night. Today we found out – he’d spent last night in a cell. And this morning, while I was at the Gate handling the Incoming, they strung him up to the Pole at the stockade, and laid a cane to his back fifty times.

  When I arrived tonight, Cassius had him spread out belly down on his own bed like some sort of sick exhibition. Winnie had given me a small pot of healing salve (she’s not allowed to distribute magical items, so it’s secret), and while I brushed it over his back, we all heard him describe what it was like. He whimpered the whole time, as if his they’d broken his mind as certainly as they’d broken his body. They all looked at me as if I was some sort of angel, and that was nice, even if entirely inaccurate.

  I don’t ever want to be whipped.

  Cassius has a way of using words that makes what he’s saying more powerful. There’s a rhythm, a variation in force, changes in volume, drawing out certain words, shortening others that make listening to him almost hypnotic. I recognise it in him, because I’ve seen Father practice it for hours and hours on end. I don’t think Cassius practices any of it. And when he speaks, the others listen.

  “They’re trying to rob us of who we are,” he said. “They’re taking away from us everything we used to be and they’re leaving us without a place in this world. They punished Jeffery with fifty lashes, for chocolate. What punishment would they inflict, I wonder, if we demanded our basic right to magic? Only one thing sets us apart from Helikan sheep, and that is that we seek Communion with, not subservience to our gods.”

  And then he invited us to explain if we felt diminished… and then he came to me. I’ve tried not to be dragged into their complaint circles, but tonight, for some reason, he insisted that we all speak.

  So I did.

  I think ole Cassius was a bit taken aback to find that someone else could also be eloquent, but I served his purpose so he did not complain. I laid it out – the conspiracy I thought was afoot, orchestrated by a mad Empire.

  It was only when I finished speaking that I realised something – things sound a lot less alarming on paper than when you’re speaking to someone. They heard it all – the confiscations and the segregation; the fact that the camp resembles a prison more than it resembles a camp; that we’re cut off from the outside world and have no idea if our letters are getting through to anybody at all; and that the stories about bandits are likely just that – stories.

  When I finished, they all looked as if I’d contracted Baba Yaga to hunt them down in their nightmares. Except Cassius, who looked as if he’d fallen in love with me.

  Also, I’m a little surprised about how angry I am at the scene at the camp. It may have been the sight of Jeffery’s back, or the fact that my nose is a little crooked now, but there’s this fire somewhere between the centre of my brain and my eyes… and it wants to start burning things down.

  Cassius says he has an idea he’ll discuss with me tomorrow.