The fourth book in the Evan Tanner series

It wasn’t a cell exactly. Not in the usual sense of the word. When one speaks of a prison cell, one implies rather a sort of room in a sort of building, with perhaps a barred door and window. A stone or cement floor. A cot, a dangling light bulb, a pot of some sort in which various bodily functions may be performed.

I had been in such a cell once, in Istanbul. I hadn’t liked it much, but at least it was a genuine and proper prison cell.

Not like my current home. Not like this idiot contrivance in which I was presently trapped, a rude box eight feet square and four feet high, constructed entirely of bamboo, and suspended from the limb of a tall tree, with its bottom about five feet from the ground.

You couldn’t call it a cell, then. What you could call it, if you were inclined to call it anything, was a large birdcage. And it was the only sort of birdcage to be found for miles around. Birds are not caged in dense teak forests far in the north of Thailand. There are plenty of birds to be found, bright of plumage and swift of flight and shrill of voice, screeching hellishly in the tops of tall trees. Such birds are not overly fond of captivity.

But, then, neither was I.

I had been in the cage ever since the guerrilla patrol captured me four days previously. It was almost impossible to believe that only four days had passed, but one must rely on the evidence of one’s senses; the sun had risen and set four times, and that had to have some significance.

But I had never lived through longer days. The endless quality of those hours was in part a function of the particular design of my bamboo cage, which seemed to have been devised as a special form of Oriental torture.