2 Life on the rock

  On that far yellow rock, uncelebrated, the glorious sun rose far to the East, bathing the ungrateful sand in life giving warmth and light. Mile upon mile of golden dunes, ever shifting, ever dry. Stands of dessert grasses were sparse and spaced out across the island as if the land was attempting to be productive but had too little to work with. Not enough water, not enough substance in the sand to make soil. Were you to try to live here, you would fail, spectacularly.

  With the sun’s rays came the wind. At first a gentle susurration, hissing as it passed, but apt to accelerate into blinding storms without warning. Today, however, was a calm day. Cool, light, gentle sounds. Harshly beautiful, but none to see. Most of the inhabitants of the Fort could not look out onto the shifting sands without drawing attention from the guards, and that wasn’t to be advised. For this was not just an abandoned fort, as it seemed, it has been adapted to be used as a prison.

  The poor, the disabled, the disfigured, the differently intelligent, the curious, the clever – all abandoned by the ruling classes of the mainland country of Dresic. They had been shipped across the hazardous channel to the desert isle, unnamed and unwanted by anyone else.

  Once aquifers had been discovered, forts had been built, presumably to guard the mainland from invaders. Long abandoned, the prison owners had discovered them and created not only a place to dump those they did not value, but also to build a factory of sorts to make them money.

  Every day for the captives began the same way. Reveille; a coarse horn blast. Drink water, splash wash, don robe and commence walking; firstly, up the stone spiral stairs, and then to work.

  Every day the walking. Sometimes on the wooden steps: endless wooden slats on stiff ropes, appearing in front of you and disappearing beneath you as you stepped onto the next one, always there was a next one; sometimes in the huge wooden wheel: lifting the endless buckets of water from far, far below; and always for too long.

  Most of AyJay’s injuries were to her knees and hips as she tumbled into an exhausted heap, only to be prodded or whipped back onto the tortuous wooden steps. AyJay had named the men the shouty men. The men with whips and pointy sticks who prodded and pushed them every day to work beyond their ability. Shouty men who never let you stop for a breather or take a drink of water without shouting for you to get back to work.

  Water ration, heel of hard bread and despair.

  That took care of lunch, late in the afternoon of another hot, dry day on the parapet. Legs trembling and useless from the walking, AyJay and her fellow walkers were put to the looms for the rest of the long, harsh day. Sitting, or rather collapsing, to the floor of rough wooden panels, AyJay was tasked with moving threads, counting threads and shuttle passes, and hopefully producing cloth. Fine silk cloth with bright and colourful patterns, plain homespun cloth in grey and browns, whatever was loaded onto the loom nearest to her.

  AyJay has mousey blonde hair, hacked short by blunt knives and sharper scissors, to keep it manageable and easy to wash and dry. Her features would have been attractive, maybe, with enough flesh on to cover the sharpness of bone. Emaciated to the point of starvation, she was still young enough to stay alive on the meagre rations doled out each day.

  Cabbage soup today, tasteless and tepid slop. She ate every scrap.

  Finally, at the sound of the tuneless horn used for all movement of the prisoners, she dragged herself back to her sleeping mat. Drinking ladles of warm water from the communal barrel, she looked around at the sad mass of humanity as each one filed away to their designated place.

  Robes off, sand bath, scrubbing away the sweat and dust, and fall into blankets on the stone floor for another night’s rest. Cold hard stone softened only slightly by a sleeping rug, handmade from rags by women long ago. All colour and most of the softness worn away by long use. Each rug placed by a pair of hooks on which rested wooden tiles. Each tile had a letter on it. AyJay’s were A and J. They were always there and had always been there. Every day.

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  There were others, many of them, each with their own pair of letters naming them impersonally. It took a surprisingly short time to forget your actual name, especially for the very young, shipped here and abandoned to the mindless life of walking and the looms. There were other jobs, AyJay didn’t know them all, just those she had experienced personally. No-one really talked. There wasn’t enough energy left in them after a day of labour to waste any on speaking.

  Eating was enough of an effort and there were those who gave up even that. They just shut down and then disappeared. No one had the energy to wonder where they went, they just became a vague memory. Maybe their initials were reused, maybe not. Life here was hard, mindless and only profitable for some remote master. They produced cloth. They also must be growing food, as the cabbages never ran out, but AyJay knew nothing about that. All she knew was the walking, and the looms.

  In the fort, AyJay briefly tried to remember ‘before’ but could not. The endless drudgery had eaten into her brain, and the only memories left her were of walking and using the looms. She could not even remember arriving here, like others she had seen, just being sent up the spiral staircase to hours of mindless walking. Seasons came and went, cold dry, hot dry, cold dry again. In the cold weather, they slept on the floor below. Descending the spiral staircase in the corner of the roof area, they stumbled down stone stairs and into stone cells on the next floor. The stairs went on down, but she never did. She thought she used to share her blankets with a thin old woman who didn’t tell her much, just to eat up, sleep and walk when you are told to. The memory was dim and did not inspire regret or even an interest is where the woman had gone.

  There were washrooms and a clothes store and even a laundry room down there that were manned on a rotation. Ah, washing in the cold weather, that was the job to get, she’d been told. Hot soapy water, hot clean water, drying racks warmed by the fire pots. Sorting and allocating clothes were the next best jobs, but mostly it was the wheel and the looms. Some muttered about other levels, about animals and crops, but AyJay never saw them. Sometimes she could smell them though, when the stink of humanity wasn’t overpowering.

  In the cold dry weather when they slept in the cells, then the smell of the animals rose up through the open arches and mingled with the smell of man. She had tried to count people once but knowing her numbers and applying them to a moving mass of humanity weren’t quite the same thing. Counting the stitches on the loom was easier. They stayed put. She had tried to work out where people went when they were injured or too old to work, but they always disappeared in the night, and she was too exhausted to stay up. They went, though, and never returned. New people came from time to time. Not many, and usually very young. AyJay had no idea where they came from, and nobody asked. Even when they ate together at the wooden benches, no-one talked. There was just no point in communicating when nothing ever changed.

  Reveille. Drink water, splash wash, don robe and commence walking.

  Today there were screams. AyJay stopped, looking up like a meerkat, waiting to see whether a response was required. The screams did not continue for long. They stopped, cut off, silence returned. Someone had slipped up, on the wheel or on the looms, or on the stairs sometimes from sheer exhaustion. Break an arm or leg and you were finished. Gone. As silence continued, and the shouty men approached with their whips and prods, AyJay resumed her walking, concentrating on staying alive until she could fall into her blankets once again. Thoughts ran wild, who had fallen, where were they now, can I stay upright? Step, step, step. The day dragged on.

  After the wheel, the looms had been worse today. Instead of the fine cloth they more usually made, they had been making the rough homespun which hurt the hands even more than the fine threads did. AyJay thought that the homespun was what their robes were made of, and that stocks of clothing must have been running low currently. That was why they were making it, she was sure. The fine stuff they never saw again, it went down in large bolts of fabric and away somehow from the fort. It was their ‘produce’ over and above self-sufficiency. AyJay had no idea where it went, or who would get to wear such lovely clothes that might be made from it, but she dreamed about it sometimes. They were given the threads and left to put them together how they wished, to a large extent. Some of the older women had scribbled plans and layouts for patterns they liked to make, and if they sold well, they were encouraged to make them again. Then, every now and then, some large guy would come up to the loom floor and lash out some beatings to discourage pride in their work! As if it was possible to have enough energy left for pride.

  Before this rough work started, AyJay had been working with one of the oldest women on the looms, learning her skills and patterns so that work would continue when the old woman left, dead or unable to work, whichever. Thoughts were all she had. No talking, no sharing dreams or concerns, just her own mind constantly ticking over, even wondering why she was still fighting to be alive. Lying in her blankets that night, like any other, she wondered what life was all about. Just this? Surely not. Please don’t let this be all, she begged silently in her head.