It was the most solitary of solitary confinements that could exist. Men went mad from isolation; I knew that. Despite the suffocating lack of otherness that surrounded me, I held grimly to my sanity. He could not, I told myself, suppress me forever. He needed me. I was part of him, as surely as he was part of me. And a time would come when I could slip free of him and dream-walk to warn Epiny. Unless the time for such a warning had passed all usefulness. I veered away from that thought. I would not think what I would do if I emerged from this only to find Gettys destroyed and everyone I cared for slaughtered.
I found other ways to anchor myself in time. I recited poetry I’d memorized for various tutors. I worked math problems in my head. I designed, in excruciating detail, the inn I would have built at Dead Town if I’d stayed there with Amzil. I walked through every step of it, sparing myself nothing. I forced myself to raze old buildings. Mentally, I moved the old lumber out of the way, one load at a time. With a shovel and a pick, using string and sticks, I leveled a building site. I built myself a crude wheelbarrow and with it hauled gravel for a sturdy foundation. I mentally computed the number of cubic feet of gravel my foundation would require, estimated the size of a barrow I could push, and relentlessly forced myself to imagine each trip, down to the shoveling in of each load, the pushing of the barrow, the dumping of it, and even how I would spread it with my shovel. Such was my obsession, and my effort to stay anchored in the world.
And when my inn was built, I thought of how I would bring Amzil and the children there and surprise them with a snug, clean home of their own. I’m afraid I imagined an entire life there with her, gaining her trust, building our love, watching her children grow, adding our own to the brood. It was mawkish, a schoolboy fancy that I embroidered over and over, yet when all other diversions failed, I could taunt myself with thinking of her and pretending a life of shared love.
Not all the time, of course. No one could have lingered in that endless emptiness and stayed completely rational. There were times when I railed and threatened, times when I prayed, times when I cursed every god I could name. I would have wept if I’d had eyes to weep, I would have taken my own life if it had been within my power to do so. I tried every way that there was for a man to escape himself, but in the end, I was all that there was, and so I had to come back to myself.
I plotted a hundred revenges. I shouted to his unlistening ears that I would surrender myself if only he would allow me to stop existing in this vacuum. I found a deep faith in the good god and lost it again. I sang inane songs and made up new verses for them.
I did all those things not for a hundred years, but for a hundred centuries. I became certain that Soldier’s Boy had died long ago, but that somehow I continued to exist among his slowly decaying bones. I lived in a place beyond despair. I became stillness.