Armistice - Part 1

     “Dinner for His Squireliness!” The Darigan Skeith bangs open the cell door, a practised spectacle and slides a tray over stone.

     Meekel doesn’t rise from his straw pallet. “I’m not hungry.”

     “Eat up, eat up,” Haskol sings, “so you can get nice and plump for supper—[i]my[/i] supper, that is!”

     His voice rings out, the only sound in the Darigan Citadel dungeons other than the slow drip of water from somewhere unseen and the occasional dragging of chains. He’ll make somebody cry soon—provoking reactions has always been his way—but it won’t be Meekel, and he should know that by now.

     So Meekel doesn’t even lift his head as he says, “Haven’t you tired of this routine, Haskol? It’s been twenty years.”

     He doesn’t entirely know why he says it, only that the twentieth anniversary of his imprisonment has struck him in a way that the fifth, the tenth, and the fifteenth have not. Only the first can compare—the dismay of realizing that an entire year of his life had been snatched away, coupled with a boy’s terror that each day within this dark prison would be his last, fomented an existential dread that never truly left him.

     Haskol bares his teeth. “I miss the boy squire who trembled in fear at the mere sight of me! Oh, how fun you were to torment back then when you thought I would eat you because I was kind enough to bring you extra rations!”

     In twenty years, Meekel has come to learn that Haskol is more bark than bite. The loud and vulgar prison guard who once terrorised him with threats of fattening him up for supper can no longer rule him by fear. But Meekel doesn’t hate him—there are too few comforts within these imprisoning walls to hate for something as trivial as past wrongs. He and Haskol have something of a rapport these days—performatively adversarial yet built on a mutual, unstated loneliness. General Galgarroth retired seven years ago, and Haskol has seemed to be missing a part of himself ever since. Even Meekel has found himself missing the company of the noble general.

     As soon as Haskol departs his cell to taunt a fresher-faced inmate, Meekel rises. His ball and chain have grown with him, and he manoeuvres them expertly now to the point where he wonders what purpose they even serve anymore, if any they ever did; he has never been exceptionally strong or clever, and never did he have the courage or wits to attempt escape like the Yellow Knight. As he shambles toward the tray—dry mashed potatoes, out-of-season peas, and an unidentifiable meat tonight—he pauses upon hearing the sobbing shriek of his neighbour, followed by Haskol’s bellowing laugh. The boy is new, freshly convinced of some unknown malfeasance, but his sentence is only a year. What Meekel wouldn’t do to have even a far-off date to look forward to.

     The war has ended. The dust between nations has long since settled. Meridell and Darigan Citadel are allied—ostensibly. Word from the outside tells of the alliance’s tenuousness, but in the almost twenty years since the treaty was signed, the fighting has never resumed.

     So say the guards, who are free to leave this place. Meekel is not. Meekel has been a prisoner for longer than he has been free.

     The torches in the dungeon’s sconces never burn brighter. He has adapted to a life in the darkness, navigating it by eye and ear in his cell—five paces by seven—and in the corridors outside it whenever he’s taken for exercise or a shower. These days, he might even give Barallus’s echolocation a run for its money. But Barallus isn’t here anymore to test the theory. Barallus was taken away years ago—Meekel doesn’t know to where. Neither guards nor prisoners speak of him; perhaps it’s easier that way.

     He leans back against the cool stone wall of his cell as he eats. He eats for survival and for something to do, not because he’s hungry or because there’s any joy in it. It’s mere habit; back home, he was the eldest of six, a farm boy with no prospects, and food was something never to be turned up when it was presented to him.

     When he finishes, he curls up on his pallet, recently refreshed of straw—one of those few comforts he’s afforded here—and closes his eyes. Tomorrow will begin as today ends, and the cycle will repeat itself. Ad Infinitum. [i]Forever[/i]. That is the only truth he has here.

     *

     Meekel dreams of home, as he often does these days. Ma is old and grey, the yellow of her fur faded to a pale cream. She’s sitting on a rocker on their front porch—or what’s left of it. The tiny farmhouse has fallen into disrepair in his absence, the roofs crumbling inward and the fences all broken down. The Whinnies they once kept are nowhere to be seen, their corral collapsed into the mud, and the Wibreths no longer strut about the yard with their beaks to the ground, scavenging for seed.

     Neither his father nor his siblings are around, and he doesn’t dare to ask after them. When he speaks, his mother does not turn to him.

     “I’m home,” he says from the gate he’s too frightened to push open. “Ma?”

     She turns her head at last with the deliberate gingerness of a woman aged. Her eyes are clouded as she squints at him. “Who are you?” she asks him.

     Her voice is as he remembers it, soft and kind and full of a vigour that belies her advanced age. But her question strikes him as an arrow to the heart as he says, desperately, “Your son, Meekel.”

     She does not blink as she says, “I have no son named Meekel. All of my children have moved away. I am alone here.”

     Meekel wakes shivering even though he has long grown used to the dungeon’s chill.

     *

     “Move your piece,” says Master Vex, fingers drumming against his cheek.

     The next morning, they’re set up in Meekel’s cell, the game board balanced on a rickety table brought in for that purpose. Meekel blinks, dispelling his thoughts, and moves his piece—the ironically cruel Meridellian castle he fights to protect.

     “You lose.” Vex completes his diagonal chain of five that Meekel had failed to notice. Then he swipes his hand over the board, clearing it. “You haven’t put up much of a fight at all lately,” he quips.

     Meekel bows his head in acknowledgement. In truth, he’s simply realised the futility of fighting for anything. Not even Cellblock, which he had once taken to, inspires much enthusiasm in him anymore.

     “I would ask you to play another game,” Vex continues, “but I doubt it would amount to much of a challenge.”

     Vex has aged, too, of course, but not so notably as the rest. His fur is a dusty mauve, his beard grey, but aside from the deepened wrinkles around his eyes, he looks much the same as he did the day Meekel was brought in a sobbing, quivering mess. Though he’s maintained his expression of boredom all these years, he hasn’t retired; Meekel suspects he simply wouldn’t know what to do with himself on the outside without a captive audience to entertain him.

     Vex taps the board. “Are you awake in there? Answer me.”

     “I’m awake,” Meekel says.

     “Hmph. Could have fooled me. What are you thinking about?”

     Meekel glances at Vex before turning down his eyes to stare at his hands. “The past,” is all he says with a shrug.

     “Again?” Vex sighs. He leans back in his chair, the creak of wood echoing into the dark.

     “It’s been twenty years,” Meekel says for the second time in two days.

     He almost regrets it until Vex pinches the bridge of his nose and nods slowly. “I know. I know it has.”

     Silence stretches between them, and then Meekel says to his lap, “The war is over, isn’t it?” [i]So what’s the point of this?[/i] he holds back.

     Vex is quiet for a long while. Then he lets out a low, staggered breath. “Yes.”

     Meekel nods, a mechanical motion.

     Vex opens his mouth, then closes it, then says, falteringly, “Look, I—I’ll bring your case up to Lord Darigan once more.”

     Meekel nods again, but it’s the same old platitude he’s heard for years.

     “There’s a lot of legal red tape, you know. That oaf Skarl can’t get his records straight to confirm your identity. A lot of you poor farm kids didn’t go through the proper channels and so slipped through the cracks—it’s a bureaucratic nightmare!”

     Vex is rambling, and perhaps he knows it because though his mouth moves, his eyes are fixed on Meekel.

     *

     Meekel dreams of the war.

     He walks down the middle of an endless procession of soldiers. They incline their heads and call him “Sir Squire” in Haskol’s voice. He hates it, but his mouth won’t open to tell them so.

     As he walks, he remembers how it all started—it was before his squiring but not by much. At fifteen, he had been a coward but optimistic. As the eldest son of a poor family, serving in the war was all but required of him—by his family, by society, by King Skarl, by his own childish conceptions of manhood. The money would support the family, his parents said. It was a man’s duty to fight, his village instilled. Fame and glory and all the riches in the kingdom can be yours, Skarl promised. I’ll be a hero, he lied to himself.

     “Don’t do it,” Edie, his oldest sister, begged.

     So he had enlisted. Training was quick but brutal—time was of the essence, after all—but he survived it. He was squired to a knight, a Silver Draik called Galdion. Meekel never heard of him before or since.

     He didn’t last his first battle. Though he shook and whimpered, he accompanied his master onto the field of battle like a man. Swords clashed, and soldiers fell, but he kept to his master’s side and tried to find some way to support him with his flimsy blade (the steel rationing had just been codified, but squires were at the bottom of the list).

     Inevitably, the two were separated. That was when the Darigan Skeiths had taken him.

     His detainment was unlawful under all observed Neopian rules of engagement. Though he has never dared to say so aloud, he understands now that it was a war crime, one which Skarl never cared enough to pursue and Darigan never remembered to rectify.

     In his dream, when he reaches the end of the procession, his mother is there in her rocker, her eyes milky and unseeing.

     “It’s me,” he tells her, his mouth moving again. “Your son. Meekel.”

     This time, though, she doesn’t say anything at all.

     There was never any record of his capture—he was abducted, after all, not formally taken as a prisoner of war. If even his family has forgotten him, then isn’t it as if he never even existed at all?

     *

     The Yellow Knight was the first of the original inmates to go. He had been so noble, so kind, and Meekel had sought him out for comfort in his early days. But the Yellow Knight had escaped. He was a hero, the guards later said—it was he and Vex who had discovered the truth behind Lord Darigan’s possession. The Yellow Knight was welcomed home to Meridell with accolades and fanfare—or so Meekel presumes. He’s never seen or heard from him again.

     Number Five left next. A few years into Meekel’s imprisonment, the old Lupe’s ravings peaked, and his banging of his stick against the wall and bars kept them all up at night to the point where none of them cared what happened to him anymore so long as he would go quiet.

     And then one day, he did. The banging stopped, then the muttering. And Number Five would only stare blankly ahead, responding to neither light nor shadow, question nor curse. Shortly after that, the guards took him away. They didn’t say where, but all the prisoners knew that for a long time, Number Five had not been well.

     Barallus was taken out in chains. Wherever he went, it wasn’t to freedom. Clop left the dungeons the same year. At that point, Meekel hadn’t even bothered to ask after them.

     Sometimes, in the dank loneliness of his cell, he wonders how much better off he might be if he simply closed his eyes one night and faded away with the rest of them.

     *

     Meekel stopped counting the days in his first year, but he’s gotten good at keeping track of them nonetheless. Several breakfast-dinner cycles later, he wakes to a conversation beyond his cell door. He sits up on his pallet, having no desire for Haskol to startle him awake as the Skeith is wont to do when he catches him sleeping at this hour. But something is amiss. It feels earlier than usual, and Meekel’s neighbour is still snoring away. Haskol would never allow that while delivering breakfast.

     A few moments later, Meekel’s cell door groans open. It isn’t just Haskol standing beyond the threshold; Vex is there, too. Meekel furrows his brow. He can’t recall a time when Vex was here so early in the morning. Stranger still, there’s no tray of food between them.

     “What’s going on?” Meekel asks, his anxiety rising.

     “Get out,” Haskol demands, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “You’ve got a guest waiting to see you.”

     To be continued…