December 4th, 1950
Somewhere in Nagano prefecture, Japan
Dawn
"Get up."
The guards were, as always, brusque and efficient, limiting their interactions with their prisoner to the fewest possible words, and glares of contempt and hatred. Harald hadn't expected to care, but to his surprise he found that he did. It was oddly difficult, even for an Yngling, to completely disregard the only human contact you had, and live purely on your internal resources. Superman or not, an Yngling was still a primate, and a thousand generations of instinct shouted that banishment from the tribe was death. The urge was to grovel and submit, to work one's way back into the good graces of the alphas, and be fed and mated once again. Harald had resisted his hindbrain's urgings sternly; and, it appeared, for long enough.
The guards led him down the corridor; the other prisoners - Japanese all - glared at him through the bars, and some spat. Harald had seen other men do this walk and not return, but then the prisoners had cheered ironically, or called out support. Even from this wretched society of murderers and rapists, he was outcast. He raised his chin, ignoring the catcalls. An Yngling and an officer need take no notice of such.
Ordinary executions of mere criminals were done in the small prison courtyard; but for the notorious "Hiroshima Harald", it was necessary not only that justice be done, but that a large audience should see it done. Thus a special gallows had been built, for him alone, on a small artificial hill outside the prison gates. He could not help but check his stride slightly when he saw it, and cursed himself for the mis-step. The Japanese should see how an Yngling died; but the body had its own agenda, and statements of cultural superiority were not on it. It was one thing to resolve to die with dignity, and another to see the actual machinery that would choke the breath from your own personal throat. He raised his chin again and walked forward, up the thirteen steps. The crowd watched in complete silence. It was eerie, to see so many - thousands? - gathered, and hear no noise.
The executioner was not wearing a hood; there was, presumably, no need for anonymity for this execution. In fact - Harald blinked in some surprise - the executioner was the Deputy Minister of the Army. He smiled wryly; in a sense it was an honour, to have made himself so notorious that high-ranking men would compete for the privilege of killing him. Although, admittedly, it was only a Deputy Minister. He wondered idly what combination of favour-calling, closeness of relatives killed, and prestige had led to that.
The guards shoved him forward, and he waited for his hands to be tied; but the Deputy Minister - Chudi, that was his name - just picked up the noose and began lifting it over his head. Well, really now... He cleared his throat, then asked in a tone of idle curiosity, "Aren't you going to tie my hands?"
Chudi paused for a moment, smiling malevolently. "Oh, no. We all want to see how a brave Yngling comports himself while choking, when his hands are free."
Harald's mouth fell open at this revelation. Were they really that stupid? Of course, they could no doubt force him to flail undignifiedly about, and grasp at the rope in desperation; that was unavoidable. But to leave free the hands of an Yngling in his last moments? Stupid, stupid! But a great gift to him.
"Ah yes, I see," he smiled. "Well then, in that case..." and on the 'Well then' he began moving. His feet were still in chains; there was no hope of escaping, nor of killing very many. But Chudi was right next to him, his hands were busy with the rope, and the good old technique of beginning a fast movement in the middle of a pacific-sounding sentence worked its magic. Harald's flat hand smashed into the Minister's throat, crushing the larynx - not necessarily a fatal blow with the prison hospital so close, but a good setup for grabbing the man by the ears and twisting the neck. The pain and panic of being unable to breathe rendered him unable to resist, and he was a head shorter than Harald. A powerful twist of the upper body, a crack of breaking vertebrae. Ironic, in a sense: Chudi would have given Harald a short drop, to make him choke rather than breaking the neck; Harald had given him a more merciful death. But for final revenges, you took what you could get.
He dropped Chudi and whirled to face the guards, not expecting to do any more damage against men alert to their danger, but unwilling to stop fighting before he was forced to. He took the first blow of a nightstick on his upraised forearm, but was unable to parry the next, which thumped into his ribs. Unthinking, he tried to step into the attack, to close with one opponent and choke the life out of him while using him as a shield against the other; but here trained reflex betrayed him, for the chain between his feet checked his stride, and he stumbled. A nightstick hit him in the head, and he saw stars. Then there was a weight on top of him, and his hands were being tied behind his back.
Bruises or none, though, he was grinning when they raised him to his feet again. They would be hanging him with hands tied, after all; he had won that much dignity. They could not force him to grab desperately for the rope in an attempt to buy a few more seconds of life. Besides, a Deputy Minister was a nice addition to his bodyguard in Valhall, although admittedly he already had a fairly large one - possibly the largest in history, in fact.
He held on to that as they fitted him again with the noose, and unceremoniously dropped him. The rope choked him immediately, but he could just barely breathe if he forced his chest to work, and of course he did. There was no giving up, whatever his brain might think best. The burning grew in his chest, and the panic. Disjointedly, he thought that hanging was a good choice for the Japanese revenge; there was no holding on to one's cause or triumphs in the face of being unable to breathe. He would have sobbed in terror if he could have drawn the air for it; and he would gladly have traded all his dignity for that one last wonderful breath. Then he could force his labouring lungs no more, and the darkness came out of the corners of his eyes and seized him.
And the light came back. He gasped, conscious only of the sheer delight of breathing unhindered, and of his pounding, crushing headache; then he turned over and vomited. He became aware that he had soiled himself while he was unconscious, and that he stank. He was lying on the rough wooden floor of the gallows, and the Japanese were still watching him in that eerie, total silence.
They left him alone for a few moments, while he got his wits back; then the guards raised him up and marched him back towards his cell. Bewildered, he did not struggle. He had to clear his bruised throat a few times to make it work. "What is going on? Why am I not dead?" He cursed himself for it, but he was unable to keep a slightly plaintive note out of his voice. What the devil were the Japanese up to? But he was afraid that he knew, and that they would win this game of punishment and defiance after all.
Once he was back in his cell, they sent an officer to explain it to him.
"It is a problem of balance. You killed something on the order of six million people."
"And one Deputy Minister," Harald interrupted, grinning. What were they going to do about it, after all? Hang him?
"Quite so. Alas, we can only kill you once. But we can hang you... many times."
"Most amusing for you, I'm sure. A bit of entertainment in the mornings."
"Ah. Defiance. So easy to maintain for one morning; you will show us how an Yngling dies, yes? Well, we would rather see how you hang. Especially on the fifth day we do it to you. Do you think you will be quite so insouciantly defiant on Friday? I think perhaps you'll begin pissing your britches before we string you up. Five days is when men begin to crack, you know, in heavy combat. We can only take so much. Of course, you are an Yngling and an officer. Perhaps it'll be ten days before you beg for this to be the day we do it for real. Who knows, perhaps twenty? We have time. For you, we have as much time as we need. If we could, we'd hang you once for each victim at Hiroshima. Twice for the children. Unfortunately, you would die of old age first; and we will kill you eventually. You'll never know, when the noose chokes the breath out of you, if this is the one you won't wake up from."
The officer rose, baring his teeth. "Are you looking forward to tomorrow, Yngling? I know I am."
Harald looked after him, bereft of words. So they would win after all. Sooner or later he would break, under that regime. Oh, perhaps the brain damage would get to him first, and it wouldn't really be him that blubbered for mercy in the shadow of the gallows; but that didn't matter. The world would see Hiroshima's killer reduced to a weeping wreck. At the door, the officer turned for a parting shot.
"By the way - the war you tried to keep alive, is ended. We are making peace."
"WHAT?"
"Peace. The absence of war; a condition of no hostilities; a period of preparing for the next one. You're familiar with the concept, I'm sure."
"And you call yourselves samurai?"
"Some do. My own family were peasants. But you have misunderstood Bushido. The samurai is not afraid of death; it is lighter than a feather. But he does not kill for sake of killing, and it is his task to protect the innocent and the weak. The dead at Hiroshima cry out for justice. Not for vengeance. And their brothers in Tokyo, in Yokohama, in Kanazawa - how shall we protect them? So we offer up Hiroshima's lives to the gods of peace and mercy, and we hope they will hold their hands over Japan. The cherry blossom has great beauty, and never greater than when it is falling; a brief flutter of colour in the air, and it is gone. The beauty lies in the transience. We hope Hiroshima's dead will come to be seen the same way. A brief flash, six million lives... a sacrifice for peace. A thing of beauty, whose beauty lies in the fact that it will never happen again. Only thus can the dead achieve peace. Only thus can we make your brutal, stupid crime have meaning."
He shrugged. "And besides, we're annexing the Norse Law. Perhaps some of your women will get to see how Japanese men are hung, eh? Practically a tradition when you lot lose a war, so I understand."
Harald managed to turn his face to the wall. But he couldn't keep back the tears.
