The Ask and the Answer (Page 71)

I stroke Angharrad’s nose again. The groomsmen bring out Morpeth, freshly brushed and shiny with oil. Submit, he says.

“If you’re worried,” the Mayor says, taking Morpeth’s reins. “Ask yourselves this.” He hoists himself up in the saddle in one smooth movement, like he’s made of liquid. He looks down at us.

“Why would any innocent woman object to being identified?”

“You won’t get away with this,” the woman says, her voice almost steady.

Mr. Hammar cocks his rifle behind us and aims it at her head.

“You blind?” Davy says to the woman, voice a little too squeaky. “I’m getting away with it right now.”

Mr. Hammar laughs.

Davy twists the bolting tool with a hard turn. The band snaps into the woman’s skin halfway up her forearm. She calls out, grabbing the band and falling forward, catching herself on the floor with her unbanded arm. She stops there a minute, panting.

Her hair is pulled back into a severe knot, blondy and brown mixed together, like the wire filaments in the back of a vid player. There’s a small patch on the back where the hair is grey, all growing together, a river across a dusty land.

I stare at the grey patch, letting my eyes blur a little.

I am the Circle and the Circle is me.

“Get up,” Davy says to the woman. “So the healers can treat you.” He looks back at the line of women staring at us down the hall to the front of the dormitory, waiting their turn.

“The boy said get up,” Mr. Hammar says, waving his rifle.

“We don’t need you here,” Davy snaps, his voice tight. “We’re doing just fine without no babysitter.”

“I ain’t babysitting,” Mr. Hammar smiles. “I’m protecting.”

The woman stands, her eyes on me.

My own expresshun is dead, removed, not here if it don’t have to be.

I am the Circle and the Circle is me.

“Where’s your heart?” she asks. “Where is your heart if you can do these things?” And then she turns to where the healers, who we’ve already banded, wait to give her treatment.

I watch her go.

I don’t know her name.

Her number, tho, is 1484.

“1485!” Davy calls out.

The next woman in line steps forward.

We spend the day riding from one women’s dormitory to another, getting thru almost three hundred bands, much faster than we ever did the Spackle. We start for home when the sun begins to set, as New Prentisstown turns its thoughts to curfew.

We ain’t saying much.

“What a day, eh, pigpiss?” Davy says, after a while.

I don’t say nothing but he don’t want an answer.

“They’ll be all right,” he says. “They got the healers to take away the pain and stuff.”

Clop, clop, along we go.

I hear what he’s thinking.

Dusk is falling. I can’t see his face.

Maybe that’s why he ain’t covering it up.

“When they cry, tho,” he says.

I keep quiet.

“Ain’t you got nothing to say?” Davy’s voice gets a little harder. “All silent now, like you don’t wanna talk no more, like I ain’t worth talking to.”

His Noise starts to crackle.

“Not like I got anyone else to talk to, pigpiss. Not like I got any choice in the situashun. Not like no matter what I effing do can I get moved up for it, given the good work, the fighting work. All that stupid Spackle babysitting crap. Then we turn right around and do the same thing to the women. And for what? For what?”

His voice gets low.

“So they can cry at us,” he says. “So they can look at us like we ain’t even human.”

“We ain’t,” I say, surprised to find I said it out loud.

“Yeah, that’s the new you, ain’t it?” he says, sneering. “All Mister No-Feeling I-Am-The-Circle Tough Guy. You’d put a bullet thru yer own ma’s head if Pa told you to.”

I don’t say nothing but I grind my teeth together.

Davy’s quiet for a minute, too. Then he says, “Sorry.”

Then he says, “Sorry, Todd,” using my name.

Then he says, “What the hell am I saying sorry for? Yer the stupid can’t-read pigpiss all getting on my pa’s good side. Who cares about you?”

I still don’t say nothing and clop, clop, along we go.

“Forward,” Angharrad neighs to Deadfall, who nickers back, “Forward.”

Forward, I hear in her Noise and then Boy colt, Todd.

“Angharrad,” I whisper twixt her ears.

“Todd?” Davy says.

“Yeah?” I say.

I hear him breathe out thru his nose. “Nothing.” Then he changes his mind. “How d’you do it?”

“Do what?”

I see him shrug in the dusk. “Be so calm bout it all. Be so, I don’t know, unfeeling. I mean . . .” He drifts off and says, almost too quietly to hear, one more time, “when they cry.”

I don’t say nothing cuz how can I help him? How can he not know about The Circle unless his pa don’t want him to?

“I do know,” he says, “but I tried that crap and it don’t work for me and he won’t–”

He stops abruptly, like he’s said too much.

“Ah, screw it,” he says.

We keep riding, letting the ROAR of New Prentisstown enfold us as we enter the main part of town, the horses calling their orders to each other, reminding theirselves of who they are.

“Yer the only friend I got, pigpiss,” Davy finally says. “Ain’t that the biggest tragedy you ever heard?”

“Tiring day?” Mayor Ledger says to me when I come into our cell. His voice is oddly light and he keeps his eyes on me.

“What do you care?” I sling my bag on the floor and flop down on the bed without taking my uniform off.

“I suppose it must be exhausting torturing women all day.”

I blink in surprise. “I don’t torture ’em,” I growl. “You shut yer mouth about that.”

“No, of course you don’t torture them. What was I thinking? You just strap a corrosive metal band into their skin that can never be removed without them bleeding to death. How could that possibly be construed as torture?”

“Hey!” I sit up. “We do it fast and without fuss. There are lots of ways to make it worse and we don’t do that. If it’s gotta be done, then it’s best that it’s done by us.”