The Gathering Storm (102 page)

All criminals were doomed to the Pit, surely, so what difference does it make if we trade their corpses for silver?

So they said, but their uneasiness wafted like the stink of the dead man’s voided bowels through the levels until the mines reeked with guilt.

The wheels turned. He walked, because it was the only thing he remembered how to do. The dreams wicked away, swiftly come and swiftly gone, and if there had ever been any existence beyond the wheel, he had long since forgotten what it was. Whispers tickled him as smoke and steam did when a miner set fire to heat the rock and then poured water on it so it would crack. In these closed spaces he could smell and hear and taste every least tremor of life.

“They say he’s protected by a twisted spell that looks like a bronze armband.”

“I think he’s a demon.”

“An angel.”

“How else could he have survived so long? No man turns the wheels for as long as he has. Have you ever seen one last beyond two months?”

“Has he been down there two months?”

“Nay, three seasons or more.”

“I don’t believe you!”

“I was here when they brought him in the spring. Mute and blind, if you please.”

“Hsst! It’s almost winter! The levels make no difference to him! If he’s touched in the head, he’s like to an ox pulling in its traces. That would explain it. A mute beast.”

He walked, and he slept, and he ate, and walked and slept and ate, and again. And again.

Until the guards clattered down one turning and surrounded him, thrust a hapless, moaning prisoner into his place on the wheel, and hauled him up the ladders, up and farther up although it was no trouble to climb because he trudged so far every day, until a strange touch hissed against his skin and he swayed, dizzily, as air opened around him and they emerged from the workings.

So many smells! The perfume of earth made him reel. The
scent of fallen leaves and the stink of forges dug into his lungs until he coughed. Sounds expanded, fading away into the heavens, which were unbound by stone walls.

There were too many noises to sort through: the hammer of picks breaking up rock; a man’s shout; a goat’s bleat; the susurrus of wind; feet grinding on loose rock and squeaking on damped down earth as a man halted before him.

Sour breath chased across his nostrils. The breeze carried the rich tang of horse manure.

“Here’s the one, Foucher.”

“Ai, Lord! What a stink! Best clean him up.”

“Do you think so? If we clean him up, no one will believe he’s survived below for so long. The duke won’t be impressed.”

“Umm. True enough. But the highborn won’t like the stench.”

“Nor will any man, low or high. I can scarce endure it.”

“True words. This creature is something rarely seen. We’ve got us a real prize here. He looks strong enough still.” The point of a stick prodded him in the chest, but no hands touched his body. “He might last months more on the wheel.”

“Years more!”

“Do you think so, Captain? Think you so? That would be a miracle!” Foucher snickered, enjoying this thought as another man might enjoy the sport of laughing, innocent children.

“You feed on our misery,” he said to Foucher.

Silence from his captors, fed by drawn-in breaths. “I thought he couldn’t talk!” exclaimed the Captain.

A switch whistled, snapped against his ear.

Pain exploded in his head, that had for so long now been a half-forgotten dull ache.

“So he shan’t!” said Foucher. “We’ll take him over quickly. Parade him before the duke and whip him if he speaks, then haul him back down below.” Foucher hissed hard between his teeth and the stick prodded him again, this time in the stomach, but its thrust barely penetrated the pain raging in his skull. “You’ll keep quiet, Silent, if you know what’s good for you!”

“Maybe this isn’t wise—” protested the Captain.

“Nay, I already told the duke we’d a fine strange sight for him, so he’s waiting. I hate to disappoint him.”

“Ai, indeed. He might do anything if we displease him. He’s that angry already that there isn’t more ore, nor did he like the sleeping conditions for the prisoners.”

“As if they deserve better!” The switch slapped against his buttocks. “Get on! Get on!”

He stumbled forward. As the pain throbbed with each jarring step, vision flashed on and out as a man might catch glimpses in a dark room when a candle was covered and uncovered.

He saw feet so grimy and mottled with a scaly growth that they didn’t seem human feet at all; then nothing, blinding darkness; then a swaying distant ocean of yellow and orange; then darkness; then the ocean again, but these were trees seen a long way away only it had been so long since he had seen trees painted with the colors of autumn that it had taken him this long to recognize them; then night as the clamor of the workings muted as they walked out beyond it; then mushrooms growing in sparse grass, only these weren’t mushrooms but pale tents and graceful awnings sagging and rising in the wind with brightly colored creatures laughing and chattering and walking out under the sun. A magnificent, broad-shouldered lord stood among them whose skin was dirty yet after all not dirty but burned a deep brown complexion like that of Liath. Beside him clung a frail, pallid woman with hair the color of wheat. Her belly was swollen with pregnancy. She and her noble husband turned to see the curiosity that the foreman of the mines had brought for their amusement.

He saw her face. She was repulsed by the grime but otherwise disinterested. Yet he recognized her.

“Tallia,” he said, the word like the throttling gasp of a man as a noose tightens around his neck. A nail burned in his empty hand.

His voice woke memory in her. Her expression shifted and altered.

“She’s pregnant,” he said. “Tallia is pregnant.”

But it was a lie.

Her shriek cut through the pain. Darkness swallowed the brief stab of vision. He drowned.

“Conrad! Take him away! Make them take him away!”

“I pray you, Your Highness, we meant no offense,” gabbled Foucher. “An amusement only, meant for your—”

“Lord have mercy!” swore the duke as the woman shrieked on and on and on, a grating wail that dissolved into hiccoughs and a whining sob. “Take the creature away, Foucher. I know you meant no harm. It’s a miracle, indeed, and he looks more like a goblin than a man with so much filth caked on him, although I wonder if you wouldn’t get higher yields if your criminals lived under better conditions.”

“But my lord duke—”

“If I starved my soldiers and let them sleep out in the rain, they’d be too weak to fight. Why do you mistreat these poor souls?”

“The miners are hardworking free men, my lord duke. As for these others, they are only criminals. Half of them had a death sentence imposed on them for their sins but were shown mercy by being sent here instead.”

“A strange sort of mercy. It wasn’t so bad last year, as I recall it. I never saw so many sickly creatures in my life. Look at the sores on that man!”

“He’s no more than a mute beast, my lord duke. It’s a miracle that he turns the wheel as well as he does. Think of it as his penance for the crime he committed.”

“Maybe so. No matter. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I have need of different miracles today such as more iron for my army and silver for minting coin. To add grief to all else we have word that the Eika have come back and are harrying the Salian coast! Take him away. Away! As for you, Foucher, my clerics will look over your records of the summer’s yields.”

“Throw him into the pit! He should be dead! He’s dead!”

“For God’s sake, Tallia! Control yourself!”

A choked silence followed the crack of his words, and after it a sniveling whine that blended with the whisper of the breeze through distant leaves and the faraway noise of the workings and the sting of smoke from the charcoal fires set through the forest for leagues around.

“Should we throw him in the pit, my lord duke?” asked Foucher, voice trembling. “He’s a valuable, worker. We’ve none so strong for the wheels as this one.”

“God Above! I hate wasting good labor. Nay, put him back to his task, as he was before. He’s serving his sentence, just as we all are. Nay! Enough, Tallia! We’ll speak no more on it!”

The switch stung his thigh. “Get on! Get on!” said the Captain. “This is all your fault!”

He stumbled, blind again, and tripped, and fell, but a hand grasped his arm, pinching his skin, and dragged him upright and hauled him away as he wept because she had betrayed him and he had betrayed Lavastine only he could not remember how. The past was closed to him. The blindness swallowed him up.

They came back to the workings, yet at the lip of the shaft a man’s silky voice drew the Captain aside, saying, “Here’s two gold nomias for you, friend, if you’ll cast that creature into the pit I hear tell you have beneath the levels, out of which no man ever emerges. You’ll gain as well the favor of Her Highness Lady Tallia who, I should tell you just between you and me, will be Queen of Varre soon enough. Duke Conrad’s war along the border against the Salians is going well. There’s no word from Henry in Aosta. Varre will break free of the Wendish yoke soon. There’s no one to stop Duke Conrad for he’s born out of the same royal lineage as Henry, just as his lady wife is, and she with the right of primogeniture on her mother’s side as well. Do what Lady Tallia wishes and you’ll be glad of her favor in the days to come. Trust me.”

“Two gold nomias,” murmured the Captain, greed melting his voice until it wasn’t a man’s voice at all but that of the Enemy. “I’ll throw him in myself. Here, let me have them.”

“One now, one later when the deed is done. I’ll go down with you and see you’re given a second when you and I have come safely to the surface.”

“Fair enough! Fair enough!”

When they had pushed him and prodded him down the ladders past the turning wheels and their rumbling tumbling roar, they drove him to the edge of the Abyss where a cold wind blasted up from the depths and a smell of decay and
sulfur swirled around his body. He did not fight them. He was too stunned because it had been a lie that she was pregnant; she had renounced the married state for all time and chosen to wed herself to God’s service, hadn’t she? God did not make bellies swell with pregnancy. Only men did that. What she withheld from him she had given to another man, and she had betrayed him to his death twice over, though he had loved her honestly and well.

With a thrust from the butt of a pick hard into his back, they shoved him over the edge, and he fell.

SILENCE did not come easily to Zacharias. Words screamed in his head every waking moment, but he had only vowels left him, a babble of ooo ah ee eh, all those strong glorious sounds shaped twixt tongue and lip cut clean off. He was a mute beast who could only moan and groan. It would have been better to be dead.

It would have been better to be dead than to have betrayed his sister.

Yet he did not die. Like a whipped dog he staggered at his master’s heels cringing and slavering, communicating with gestures and a grotesque vocal mush that Lord Hugh sometimes deigned to interpret, for after all whatever Lord Hugh wished him to be saying surely was what he meant to say, wasn’t it? He was a shadow, kept close by the iron chain that was Hugh’s will and by fear. What if Hugh choked him again with the daimone?

At the end of a miserable summer they left Darre and journeyed north to the town of Novomo, where Novomo’s mistress, Lady Lavinia, entertained Presbyter Hugh and his entourage lavishly and showered Hugh with attention and praise for his role in saving her daughter from an unnamed but obviously gruesome fate. Here they lingered only one day, however, because the heavens remained clear, and in the afternoon
of the second day his retinue loaded pack mules and a pair of wagons with a king’s ransom in provisions and traveling gear. With their escort of forty of Adelheid’s crack Aostan cavalry they rode to a hillside outside Novomo where an old stone crown stood above slopes turned to white-gold after summer’s searing heat.

The dozen servants, forty soldiers, and half a dozen clerics who made up Hugh’s retinue waited in marching order as the sun sank toward the rugged western hills. Hugh led Zacharias forward to a patch of sandy ground—the only part of the hill not covered with brittle grass—and placed Zacharias directly in front of him, back to chest, placing into Zacharias’ hand the arm’s-length wooden staff used to weave threads of starlight into stone.

This mathematical weaving Hugh had been teaching him for months now, and tonight his learning, and his memory, would be put to the test. His knees trembled, his palms were damp, and his lips were cracked. Was it worth the price of his tongue to have the secrets he had so long wished to uncover revealed at last?

His tongue, perhaps. But not Hathui.

“There,” said Hugh. “Do you see it? The first star. We must seek east and north to weave our path. We will hook the Guivre’s Eye, rising to the northeast, and weave a net around the Eagle rising to the east.”

They would snare the Eagle, who had already been betrayed by her own brother. The staff quivered in his hand as rage shivered through him, but Hugh guided his arm. The staff rose as Hugh chanted words Zacharias would never be able to speak, although he now knew them by heart.