He followed the stream, bending, sliding past narrow places, the flame sometimes going low in the lantern. Did that mean bad air? He pushed on through a crack where the rock changed and became crumbly. Suddenly he came out in a larger space that smelled of metal and earth and strongly of fox, a place that already had firelight in it, on a ledge. His own lantern flame got stronger and he looked up and around in a great space like a cathedral. He saw lines and stipples in orange, black, and white on the walls and blinked and suddenly saw the animals on the walls, thousands of them. There were deer and creatures like bulls and what looked like a ridiculous made-up elephant with fur on him, all galloping for one place where there was a bald man in a miner’s tunic working, moving rocks quickly out of the way with a spade.
Above him, looking down on him from a flat piece of wall, was something that made the hair stand up on Carey’s neck. It was a huge beast-man, part-painted in red and black, part carved, with animal legs and human hands and penis, and above his strangely calm face, tall stag antlers that swept up from his head. Joachim was exposing his pawlike feet and from the piles of rock all around him, it appeared he had been doing it for a long time; perhaps he had spent years at it.
Carey’s mouth dropped. For a moment he wondered if he was dreaming this because the image of the Devil seemed to move as the lanternlight flickered. Was it the Devil? The expression on its face seemed mournful, rather than evil.
“There he is at last, all of him,” came Joachim’s voice, deep and soft, “The Devil. When I first found him as a lad, there was only his face and horns visible behind piles of rock and I looked at him and knew him. The Devil. Whoever you think you serve, really you serve him.”
Carey drew his sword.
“I dug him out whenever I could, at night, on Sundays, so I could see more of him, to thank him for the gold he gave me. He’s magnificent.” Joachim laughed. “Now…well, whenever you kill or fornicate or take what isn’t yours with some excuse about how you should have it, you worship him, the Devil. Whenever you lie and claim you follow the crucified fool, and burn Jews or Protestants or Catholics or heretic Anabaptists, he’s there laughing at you. Do you think you fool anybody with your piety and wailing after Jesus? No. It’s the Devil there in the Mass and he’s in your dreary Church of England too, it’s always him in blood and semen and shit and piss, he owns the world and we all worship him whether we realise it or not.”
Carey was trying to advance across the rocks and pillars of the floor, picking his way. Joachim was backing carefully, seeming to aim for one of the shadowed curves in the wall, where the animals rioted above.
“But recently I’ve begun to think that he’s just another thing we’ve made up, like God and Jesus. I think that he is just another shadow cast by men,” said Joachim smiling, “which is why I’m still here. I have an experimentum to conduct, Sir Robert, and you’re going to help me.”
Joachim raised a pistol and Carey flung himself sideways, deafened by the explosion. But Joachim hadn’t been aiming for him, but for the nearby brazier which spilled coals onto a network of slowmatches curling across the rocks. They started to hiss and travel and Joachim put the dag down, picked up a ready-loaded caliver.
He aimed it at Carey, but Carey was already charging him, jumping like a goat from one rock to the other and after the explosion was still moving, no holes in him, and he laughed because this was fine, this was not God-damned darkness but light and the animals on the walls seemed to move by themselves in the multiple flames of the slow matches. He felt like one of them, like the great grey wolf in the lead, shaped in a buttress of rock and he snarled and showed his teeth and attacked, a whirling thing halfway between animal and man himself. Joachim gave up trying to reload his caliver, flung it up to parry Carey’s first onslaught with the sword, dropped it, met him with a mattock. They rattled up and down over the rocks, slippery with escaping water, while the slowmatches hissed. Carey fell, rolled, was up on one knee, gasping.
“I’ve laid charges to destroy you. Don’t you want to put the matches out?” panted Joachim, behind a pillar of rock.
“No point,” said Carey, “too many of ’em.” He charged again laughing madly, sword against mattock. Joachim was tiring but he was not, he pressed to the attack again and pushed Joachim up against the rocks where the Devil stood, felt his boot go into a space and lurched backwards.
Joachim looked down once, smiled at Carey and jumped down, feet first, through the hole, seemed to land heavily and his feet pelted off. Carey didn’t pause, didn’t think, just followed him, jumped down the hole to land six feet down on something soft and stinking…
Fluttering flying things were all about him, ah, the soft stuff was clearly bat shit, and he waved his arms, cleared a space, saw moonlight and ran out of the cave as the rock shuddered and the bellowing explosion above him took out the whole outer wall of the cave. He ran the fastest he ever had in his life as rocks rained down around him, leaping and bouncing, as that whole side of the mountain slumped and turned to scree and ruin, and he ran and ran and into blackness as a rock under his feet went sliding out from under him…
He came to again and he was outside, half buried in rubble. All around him the bats swooped and flapped in distress at the loss of their home. The waxing moonlight shone down on him, the air was sharp and cold and sweet and he was profoundly grateful to be in the open, out of the tunnels, away from the mine and the water…And still alive. He stayed where he was, gasping for breath and saying thank you, even while he wondered if he was broken and the pain just hadn’t set in yet.
“Herr Ritter!” came the faint cry from above, and he could see Schlegel and young Josef standing on a ledge.
He lifted up his hand with an effort, shouted something back, started struggling out from the rocks. The eastern edge of the sky was lightening with dawn.
They climbed down to him. Astonishingly, although he was bruised and battered and would hurt tomorrow, nothing seemed to be broken. The strength that had come to him in the cave with the animals painted on it seemed to have left him completely, and he was weak and wobbly. Had there actually been a cave painted with animals and a huge rough painting of the Devil? Or had it been some kind of dream? He felt the whole of the night had been a nightmare in that terrible place of tunnels and rock and water, so why balk at the further dream of the Devil on the rockface?
He accepted a flask of aquavitae and strong arms helped him to his feet. He poked around and found his sword, also miraculously unbroken, sheathed it, stumbled and slipped in soaked boots the short distance down to the silver beck tumbling over the rocks. The miners helped him the whole way, along the side of the hill to the roasting ovens and stamping houses, a little up the valley from the mine and the well-built wooden houses where the miners slept.
He was so grateful he didn’t have to climb up the ladders in the dark, or walk bent over along the endless tunnels, he felt almost like laughing, then thought better not, in case the miners thought him crazy.
Herr Mine Captain Schlegel shook his hand, all the miners gathered round him in wonder. Josef smiled and chatted in Deutsch which sounded muffled to him, until finally Carey said, “Gentlemen, I have to confess that I didn’t kill Joachim. He ran away before the gunpowder exploded.”
They tutted and Schlegel shrugged and said something in Deutsch that sounded rude.
Josef said something else Carey couldn’t hear. “What?”
“At least you are alive, Herr Ritter!” Josef shouted.
“Well, yes, but are you not disappointed that he’s slipped away again?”
“No, well, yes,” yelled Josef, “but it’s that we are talking about the idea of using gunpowder in a mine. Nobody has thought of using it to break rock before and everyone is excited at it.”
Well, if he was crazy, he wasn’t as crazy as that. “What?”
“Gunpowder can blast out rock. This is a great discover
y!”
“Er…Joachim is loose? We still have to find him?”
“Yes, yes, but this will transform mining, you will see. We just have to learn how to do it.” And the conversation began again in Deutsch, going hammer and tongs.
Carey left them to it.
He walked to the entrance of the mine, stumbling occasionally and limping as his bruises took their toll, found Tovey and Red Sandy drinking beer but no longer stepping on the bellows to blow air into the mine. Frau Schlegel was there and gave him some, which was very kind of her and probably stopped him from falling over. His ears were hurting and he couldn’t hear very well, had no idea what she was saying, and he was feeling utterly exhausted at the idea of running Joachim to earth again and finding a way to kill him. In fact he thought that he would have about as much chance at killing Joachim now as a puppy would have against a hound and didn’t think he would even have the energy to get on a pony and go back to the inn and sleep.
In fact it was Tovey who saved him because he started to climb on his pony but was also tired from stepping on the bellows for hours and Carey gave him a leg up. Red Sandy mounted and Leamus emerged from a cubbyhole where he’d been asleep but had woken to the sound of gunpowder. A pony was missing, the one called Ox who had been tethered outside, not harnessed to his wheel yet. Carey retrieved his tall beaver hat. And so they went back to Keswick, across the Derwent Bridge, heading for Crossthwaite and the row of houses near the Greta Bridge just as the sun came up fully.
Joachim was shocked at what had happened to the cave where the Devil danced. He hadn’t been sure what would happen when he lit the charges to see if the Devil could protect himself from the gunpowder. It hadn’t occurred to him that the gunpowder would actually destroy the whole cave—which he had to admit was amusingly stupid of him since he had become quite expert with fireworks at Court. But rock was hard, rock was eternal, earth was soft, masonry was brittle, the living rock endured. If he had thought about it at all, while he brought in the gunpowder barrels and slowmatch, he had assumed that rocks would always need to be painstakingly chipped out by miners with hammers and chisels. That was why he had gone along with the encouragement of the persistent voice in his head which had called for the dramatic explosive trap against the courtier. If the voice was the Devil, why hadn’t it known his cave would be destroyed?
At least he had the rolls of gold dust chipped from the seam tied round his waist. They would help him go to New Spain where they urgently needed mining engineers, a final gift from…what?
The voice was gone for the moment. Surely the bloody man was dead? Joachim had jumped down the hole as he had practised before, into the cave with the bats, and sprinted as fast as he could out of the cave, down beside the beck. The blast was supposed to kill Carey, not ruin the place. But then he heard the muffled sequence of booms and then a roar. He risked a look over his shoulder to see the side of the hill suddenly crumble and fall into chaos. He stopped and stared, but then smiled. Nobody could live through that if they were inside, surely? He sped up, past the roasting and stamping houses, past the mine entrance where he grabbed the first pony he found, climbed on and kicked it to a gallop along Newlands valley. There were people there but they were staring at the side of the hill where there were rocks still falling. Nobody noticed him, and he found himself still smiling as he rode away. Was the Devil still helping him? Maybe, maybe so. Or maybe he was just lucky as he always had been.
He had a place he was going to, the last place, the only place, despite it having been violated…except no, that was a bad idea because an island could be difficult to leave without a boat and he did not want to swim through the icy lake again. Once had been enough. Also the heavy gold around his waist would sink him. No, there was a better place he could go. He stopped and worked on his dag, finding the powder flask on his belt, the bullets in a little bag, the wads in his pocket. It took him a while because he was an engineer, not a man-at-arms, not a soldier, but eventually he was satisfied that the gun was loaded properly.
The pony was pawing the grass and cropping it, so he mounted again, changing course slightly, aiming for the houses near Crossthwaite church where many of the second generation Deutschers like himself lived. Women were moving around in the street, a line of cows being led into town by a plump fair-haired girl, knitting as she went, one-handed with a needlecase on her belt, and singing in a high true soprano.
He walked past her and banged on the door of his sister’s house. He knew there would be only women there because his brother-in-law would already have left before sun up to go to the smelthouses—or perhaps to see what had happened at Goldscope. A woman whose name he couldn’t remember opened it, and he shoved her indoors, shutting the door behind him and slapping her hard across the cheek when she screamed. She fell over, crawled away. There was a sturdy-looking woman sitting on a low chair with a baby to her breast, Annamaria was coming in from the kitchen, somebody was following her but stopped and ran away before he could see her.
“Joachim!” Annamaria shouted. “Mother of God, what are you doing?”
They were always wailing after the lying little trollop who had borne Jesus Christ.
“Good morning, Annamaria,” he said politely. “Still as fat as a pig, I see. I want clean clothes and a good horse…”
“No,” said Annamaria, “I am not Mutti. We don’t have anything for you. Go away.”
“I’ll settle for Mark’s clothes,” said Joachim with a grin. “Or anybody’s, really, I’m now ready to leave town and I’m sure my brothers will be oh so happy to hear that.”
“No,” said Annamaria again. “My husband told me about you, how you were soaking wet when he tried to talk to you in Mutti’s house, how that was the day you killed Rosa Carleton, my friend, and put her in the lake. And you killed her husband as well. Get out of my house and don’t come back.”
Joachim pulled the dag out of the front of his mining tunic and pointed it at Annamaria. It had a snaphaunce lock and no need for a slowmatch that would eventually burn down.
She went satisfyingly pale and started to gobble, and then she had to sit down. There was a minute’s complete silence, in the back of which was a woman’s voice shouting in the street. The wet nurse still had the baby to her breast, although it was starting to fret and fuss. Joachim looked down at it and frowned.
“Whose is the child? Not one of yours, is it, Annamaria?”
“If you want to know whose baby it is,” said the wet-nurse in English, loudly and clearly as if to an idiot, “it’s Mrs Burn’s babby, the poor fatherless wee mite.”
The baby stopped nursing, looked around and started to roar. Joachim pointed his gun at the wet-nurse. “Make it stop that noise!” he ordered in English, and the wet-nurse looked scornful.
He advanced on Annamaria, starting to feel fear, starting to feel the world sliding out from under his feet. People did what you ordered when you pointed a gun at them. His head was suddenly aching from the earsplitting noises the baby was producing.
“Make it stop!”
“I can’t feed him while you’re waving a gun around,” sniffed the nurse contemptuously. She was a Liddle from Liddelsdale and had seen guns before.
Someone opened the door behind him and came through from the street, strangely with a pile of clothes in her arms, and stood to one side of the door which had closed again. He looked and saw Little Rady or Poppy, who had gone with him when he left, who had kept house for him and then run off with a minister of the church; his favourite sister, who had so foolishly written the letter in code that had somehow ruined all his carefully laid plans.
“Here are some clothes for you, Joachim,” she said calmly. “And I’ll help you get a horse.”
He looked at her, saw betrayal in her face, in her voice. She had betrayed him once, hadn’t she, when she went off with the minister? And again with that idiotic letter.
He mov
ed sideways, bent and grabbed and had a handhold on the baby’s swaddling clothes. There was a smell of cinnamon from it and for a moment it stopped screaming and stared at him curiously, swinging from its bands like the worms hanging in the trees that turned to butterflies.
“Is this yours?” he asked and pointed his gun at it. It was such a pity he only had one shot. There must be a way to make guns fire more than one bullet, it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of bullets…Damn it, what was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he focus?
Poppy watched him, she had gone very still. “Please,” she said softly, “I would rather you killed me than my baby.”
Joachim shrugged. “That’s because you’re weak and foolish,” he said, and turned the gun on her. “But all right, just as you wish.”
Strangely she relaxed and smiled at him. “Oh, Joachim,” she said, “I feel so sorry for you.”
He started to laugh, “Why? You’re the one who’s going to die.” Then he wondered why his back was feeling cold. The baby started making that awful noise again.
English suddenly intruded. He was so tired he actually had to make an effort to switch mental horses to the different language.
“Joachim,” shouted Carey hoarsely from the street, “put your gun on the table and then your hands on your head…” The courtier was aiming one of his wheellock dags at him from a distance of about three yards while his man with the plait down his back was crouched by the door he had eased open, moving away.
Joachim spun to shoot the courtier and in that moment, Poppy grabbed something from between the clothes and launched herself forward onto Joachim, stabbing hard up at an angle in his side with the kitchen knife in her hand. Both guns barked and Joachim looked down on his sister with the knife sticking out of his side and his shoulder destroyed by Carey’s bullet. He had been right not to trust her, but his bullet had gone into the wall when she stabbed him and when he tried to raise the gun to hit the caterwauling baby with it, the weapon simply dribbled out of his numb fingers.
A Suspicion of Silver Page 29