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The soldiers get tired of playing with Erik about the time his feet give out on him for the second time, and they’d have to drag or carry him to get him back to camp. Too much effort, although they have plenty of energy to devise his end. They strip of him whatever tatters their games have left him with, and dress him in the uniform of their enemy.
Not Erik’s enemies. He has no time for enemies, or at least for distinguishing groups of them from each other. Everyone’s his enemy; they have been for longer than he’s been wearing the suppression collar welded round his neck. He can barely remember what form his mutation took, it’s been on him so long.
They force him to kneel, and bind his arms behind him to a T-shaped post set into rock. Erik curses them, only half beneath his breath. He gets his feet tied together for that. They don’t bother with a gag or a blindfold, but then, they aren’t going to waste a bullet or a knife’s edge on him, either. Not when the sun can do their work all by itself.
They laugh at him, piss on him, and leave. For a moment, Erik lets his head hang forward, slumping down til his shoulders scream, enjoying the almost-peace of slightly-damp solitude. It’s a relief, in a way. At least now they’re done, and he can get on with the business of dying.
The natural world seems to ally itself with Erik’s human enemies easily enough. The sun is the world’s hammer; crashing down on him relentlessly. The bare rocks shimmer around him like a fever. The thirst rises. He can feel his skin scorching.
The flies and mosquitoes stop by, taking from Erik what they can; it’s strange how much of a torment it is, not being able to slap them out of his face, his hair. He blinks, and blinks again, trying to keep them from his eyes.
He hisses at the first crow he sees, and it flees; let the vermin wait til he’s dead before Erik’s body gives them the feast they want. Let them wait.
Day turns to night, and a chill hammer replaces the heated one; but that’s the only difference Erik can see. The cold makes it a little easier to feel hunger as well as thirst, but that is all. There are more hungry things now, scuttling at the edges of sight. He’s reasonably sure some of them are real.
By mid-morning of the next day, (He thinks. Perhaps it has been more than one day, maybe two, or three. Perhaps he’s been here forever, or a lifetime. Time has no meaning now.) Erik’s almost sure he’s mad with it: with heat and thirst and flies, waiting for the rats and crows.
He starts hallucinating, then passes out for a change of scenery; he wakes up to find nothing much has changed. Erik continues to endure. His tongue is swollen in the dry pit of his mouth, and he can no longer see, between the sunburn and the mosquito bites.
Not long now, he tells himself. Soon be over. The thought is a relief. He’d weep, if he had the moisture for tears.
He’s drifting, half conscious, when he hears the wagon party approach.
If that's what he's actually hearing. His ears might have joined the general betrayal, after all. Feet pace towards Erik over the dusty rock. He tenses, or tries to, bracing himself. He remembers the uniform he’s wearing (it is not his) and can no longer be very sure if he can hope for someone generous enough to slit his throat, or if he should fear the cruel mercy of water more.
A quick refreshing drink just means a longer death, here. He doesn’t bother moving as they come closer. A hand alights on his neck, feels for a pulse. Hands lift Erik’s face towards the sun and he can’t resist a faint, protesting grunt.
“He’s alive. Get me Bobby’s box, quickly,” say someone close to him, and Erik tilts his head, wearily trying to prise one eye open enough to see the man that goes with this educated, arrogantly assured voice, and what he’s planning to do to Erik next.
Someone else hurries up, there’s conversation Erik doesn’t bother to follow, something about re-routing and then… then.
“Please open your mouth.”
Ah. Water then; making him live through more of this, giving Erik more time to suffer before—wait. Perhaps he’s lucky, and it’s poison.
He opens his mouth anyway, too weak to refuse, hating himself and his tormentor and is utterly shocked when what’s slipped into his mouth to lie on his tongue is not water, or kindly poison but something miraculous, impossible. Ice.
Erik thinks he moans as the first chill melted drops trickle down his throat. The experience is so blissful he forgets to close his jaw, and is very sad when the ice falls to the floor. He wants to weep, again.
“Oh—no, here, there’s more. I’m sorry.”
This time the stranger holds Erik’s mouth closed for him. Gently—at least Erik thinks the other man is not trying to hurt him, even if it is painful. The ice melts all too quickly, but before Erik can grieve over that, there’s another piece. And another. Erik abandons thoughts of the future, and lives for the moment.
The cold, delicious melting ice irrigates his parched mouth and throat. Bizarrely, Erik finds himself thinking of summer rain, drops darkening, softening the hardened ground. He blinks up at the dark figure bending over him, pressing ice on him, and wonders if he might already be dead, and for some reason transported into Paradise.
“Wh—whuh?” His voice is a harsh rattle; he’s not entirely sure if he’s understandable.
“Friends.” The other smoothes Erik’s tangled hair away from his eyes and mouth. He’s a black cut-out against the hurtful blue of the sky, standing between Erik and the sun like a shield. Internally, Erik snorts. He will be grateful to this man for the rest of his life, however short a time that might be. But a friend?
“People who want to help, then.” The ice is replaced with the brass-ringed nozzle of a leather water bag. “Slowly.”
Erik tries, oh, how he tries to follow that advice, but it’s so hard. He is salt and sand and dust, not human flesh now. Maybe he is alive.
The ice pieces have only whetted his awareness of his thirst; not quenched it in the slightest. He’s dimly away that someone is sawing at the wire-twisted ropes binding his arms, his legs, but he doesn’t care. Water, water and the man holding it for him are standing at the center of Erik’s universe right now.
He tries to suck down too large a mouthful and chokes. Water spatters across Erik’s face and chest. He jerks, automatically. One of his arms takes that moment as the time to fall free and he slumps, weak and despairing. The other man catches him, holds Erik’s weight so he neither kisses the rocky dust nor wrenches his other limbs, and patiently continues to feed him small sips of water.
Erik decides to reconsider this whole friends thing.
With much chatter, Erik is slowly untangled from the T-pole, and shifted to lie almost flat on a coarse-woven tarp. It’s the finest bed he’s ever known, and he’d still think that even if the pillow wasn’t his water-man’s lap. He’s fed thin cold broth as well as water (he doesn’t like it as much: salty) and the day wheels towards its hottest part.
There is more ice.
Erik’s eyes open a little better now, and he can see the face of his ice-giver. Young, palely freckled—how is he not burning, in this weather? And with eyes as blue but far kinder than the skies over them both.
Erik has absolutely no idea who he is.
He decides he doesn’t care. Soft hands keep feeding Erik water and ice and broth, and stop the others from hurting him in their eagerness to strip him. That’s enough for Erik.
“I’m not sure the trousers are salvageable,” says someone else, not that Erik cares. The uniform’s not his; just camouflage the soldiers used to display their false cunning, their pretend fearsomeness in dealing with one of their enemy. Pathetic liars.
“Take everything, and burn it,” the ice man says, tone chill. “Drape it over that Gods-damned post and burn the lot. Or—wait, no. Get Alex to deal with it.” Murmurs of assent. Erik adds that mite to his knowledge of his water man: he is in a position to give orders and have them obeyed.
More tugging and Erik is moved this way and that, before the tarp is wrapped over his battered dry body.
“Gods, he stinks,” says a youthful voice says Erik’s head. “The wagon’s going to reek for days.”
“They urinated on him,” Erik’s stranger friend says, flat. “Among other things.”
Erik wonders what his current odour—which is pretty profound, he’s sure—has to do with the wagon. It’s not anywhere near him, he thinks, hurt.
“Because you’re going in it.” His water-man says to him, very earnest. “It has a roof.”
What? Erik thinks. He makes a croaking, querying noise.
“You don’t think we’d cut you down and just leave you, do you?” Erik’s eyes close, briefly. To be strictly honest, he hadn’t thought further than the next mouthful of ice. “You’re coming home with us, and then we can get that—” A fingernail flicks against his collar “—off.”
“Yuh—c’n’t mean—” he croaks, tense with disbelief.
“Of course he does,” says someone else—a woman, or a boy, Erik can’t see very well right now, and he’s not going to turn his head for a kid. He croaks again, instead. Are these people real? Are they out of their minds?
“i-I mean, as long as you want it off, and-and—”
“Do. W’nt ‘ff” Erik says, and he’s back to wondering if he’s dead, now. “Do. p—Pls.”
There is shuffling and tugging and far too many people are touching Erik as he is lifted and carried. He grunts, and tries to see where his strange water man has gone off to.
A hand takes his searching one, wraps its fingers around his, tight.
See. The stranger’s voice is a breath of laughter. I said we were friendly.
So it seems. Erik has his doubts, even as he’s slid gently into somewhere dark, soft, covered. People aren’t friendly to those who are alone, or helpless. Not in his experience. There’s always a catch.
You’ll see, Erik’s water man promises him, and slides the last of the ice into Erik’s mouth. Aloud, he says, “You’re not alone. Erik, you’re not alone anymore.”
Erik barely has time to be startled afresh as he realizes his water man—Charles, Erik. My name is Charles.—is one of the fabled, a telepath, before his eyes slip shut.
He’s asleep before the wagon starts moving.