That one cannon discharge stopped the advance in its tracks. The savages stood there in the clearing, utterly dazed, those unhurt looking down at their own gray- and black-striped bodies, which were now spattered with their comrades’ blood.
The second cannon blast, coming from Farhan’s right, from a gun captained by Lieutenant Muda, smashed into the stunned survivors, wiping them across the clearing, hundreds of heavy lead balls smashing into faces painted like skulls, dismembering painted bodies, ripping open naked flesh, soaking the earth of the clearing in a rich dark gore.
Farhan lifted his rifle once more. Men were on both sides of him at the parapet now, firing their muskets. But the painted savages were beaten. Those that still lived, and who could still move, were running, hobbling or crawling back toward the tree line.
A ragged cheering broke out on the firing platform as it became clear that the painted men were in full retreat. One of the Buginese began to sing a victory song, a wild ululating sound that made the short hairs on Farhan’s neck stand up.
“Silence on deck,” shouted Captain Lodi, forgetting for a moment where he was. “Reload your weapons. We haven’t seen the last of these devils yet. Reload and make ready, I say.”
Farhan looked down at the rifle in his shaking hands and realized that, in all the carnage about him, he had not fired it once.
CHAPTER 23
It was all very well to boast to his friends that he planned to escape, but Jun had no idea how to go about it. For a start, they were moved out of the wire-fenced compound the next morning after a comparatively luxurious night in which they had enough to eat for the first time in days and were able to wash, tend their wounds and sleep unyoked.
During the night, two more coffles came into the compound, were cut free from their yokes, fed, washed and curled up gratefully to sleep in the dust. But while Jun was dimly aware of the new arrivals, he did not let it disturb his slumber. In the morning, a middle-aged Han gentlemen in a fine blue silk robe and a square hat with a golden-glass button on the top came into the compound, accompanied by a dozen giant soldiers—they were a full head taller than Jun—in long green coats and baggy black trousers, one of whom was carrying a long black vertical banner. Manchus, Jun guessed. Bannermen. War-Master Hardan, he recalled, had been particularly impressed with them. These soldiers were armed with muskets, and at the top of each musket, fixed on a ring around the muzzle was a vicious, foot-long, iron spike. At their belts hung the fat brown coils of buffalo-hide whips.
The slaves were all lined up in the compound, shoved into their positions by the Manchu guards, who yelled at them, spittle freely flying, in their own ugly and incomprehensible language mixed with a few simple words of the Common Tongue. For those who did not immediately understand, whips cracked and the slaves cried out. The line was swiftly formed. Pain is a universal language. Jun noted with relief that the Mbaru hunters and their monstrous beasts, who had watched them silently through the wire the evening before, were now gone. But then the tall, scarred warrior—her name was Tenga, Jun discovered—whispered that their absence meant they were on the trail of a Runner, and Jun’s sense of relief turned sour in his belly.
The Han gentleman with the golden-glass-button hat was a senior engineer, Tenga whispered, one of the Gold Masters. He walked down the line of slaves, stopping occasionally and squeezing a limb, or peering at a whip laceration or a rash. About halfway down the line of forty or so men and women standing mostly naked in the cool of the dawn, the engineer stopped in front of an elderly woman, who was four along from where Jun was standing between Tenga and Ketut. The crone was a skeletal creature, with a badly bowed back, spindly limbs and swollen joints at the knees and elbows. Her wild gray hair spilled down over her flaccid breasts. The Han barked a single word and pointed a finger at the woman, and the Manchu who was accompanying him stepped forward and without the slightest hesitation punched the bayonet-spike on the end of his musket into her belly. The woman collapsed around the blade, letting out a sighing grunt, and fell to the ground. The Han gave another order, flicking his finger at the bleeding wretch, and the Manchu stepped in and crushed her skull with one blow of his musket butt.
Jun was not sure if he was more shocked by the sudden cold-blooded murder of a frail human being or by the reaction from the rest of the slaves and the Manchu guards. There was no reaction; nobody moved from the line, nobody protested. And neither did Jun. It was perfectly clear the value that these terrifying people placed on human life. The Han engineer barely gave the old woman another glance but moved on down the line. For a heart-stopping moment, the gold-buttoned murderer stopped in front of Ketut. Jun saw him assessing her skinny limbs and small stature—there had never been very much of her, Jun thought, but the hardships of the past few days had stripped whatever spare flesh she had from her lean body. But Ketut glared directly into the face of the Han engineer, seemingly daring him to kill her, and after a few long moments he merely smiled coldly and moved along the line.
After the inspection, the slaves were marched off to their labors. They came out of the holding compound in single file, following the Han engineer and with the Manchu guards, muskets at the ready, keeping a watchful eye on them at all times. They were led up the slope to the nearest mine head set into the hillside and, as Jun filed in with the others through the double doors of the square black building, he had a strange fancy that he was, in fact, entering a secret earthly portal into one of the foulest of the Seven Hells.
He was not far wrong.
They walked through wide steel corridors, past several open doors leading to cavernous rooms—some with obvious functions such as the dining hall, where they glimpsed dozens of long tables and rows of benches where a handful of exhausted-looking wretches were determinedly, almost manically eating from small wooden bowls, or the dormitories, where men and women from the night shift could be seen curled up and sleeping like the dead on wooden two-foot-wide shelves stacked up the walls of wide, dingy rooms. One room was a morgue and crematorium, and Jun saw a dozen dirty linen sacks clearly containing bodies piled on top of each other beside a wall. Some of the sacks were only half-closed and slack, emaciated limbs poked out. A small, white-coated man in a doctor’s mask was standing beside a gurney looking at the mouth of a roaring furnace.
Some rooms were empty or had the doors shut. Two Manchu sentries were posted beside every open door—whether the room was empty or not. And at one point they passed a Manchu squad of twenty bannermen marching out toward the exit, and were forced to give way and hug the walls to allow the soldiers to move past without breaking their step. The air in the mine building smelled of cold steel, machine oil and stale sweat, with an undernote of urine. To Jun’s mind it smelled of fear and self-pity, sorrow and an indifference to suffering. It smelled of death.
Another hundred paces, after which Jun realized that he must now be underground, inside the Gray Mountain. He was aware of a noise, a deep metallic clanking sound that came up through the soles of his feet. The farther they penetrated into the mine, the louder the noise grew, and Jun was conscious that the temperature had noticeably increased, too. Now, as they were herded onward, they all gleamed with sweat—even the icy Han engineer was seen to mop his face with a black silk kerchief. They were ushered down a series of steep iron stairs, farther and farther down until they came out into a large gallery with a high ceiling. They were ordered to sit by a warm steel wall and wait, with the Manchus looming over them.
Squatting there, Jun got his first proper sight of the heavy machinery of the mine. At first it was too noisy and confusing to make any sense of it: belts on great wheels flapped and clanked; giant metal hoppers ground gears and squealed; great wooden wagons the size of a modest house in Taman were wheeled past, piled impossibly high with chunks of black stone, some showing tiny visible flecks of light. These wagons were pushed along by gangs of sweating, emaciated men and women, twenty folk to each wagon, the raw whip mark
s on their bare backs making their servile status clear. Eventually Jun began to make sense of it. The ore wagons were wheeled into position by the slaves. The wagons were then seized by gigantic metal claws, lifted and their contents poured into the vast hoppers. These hoppers gave off a hideous grinding noise, audible even over the roar as the black rock was emptied into them, and clouds of fine gray dust billowed out of the tops as the ore was ground into smaller chunks. A trickle of broken rock came from the bottom of the hoppers and onto a long moving belt-track driven by rollers. The broken-down ore traveled away along the belt-track to the far side of the gallery and out of sight.
To Jun’s left there was a bank of four vast elevators, giant cages made of thick, greasy, steel bars and big enough to hold one of the ore wagons and the exhausted people who pushed them. When the wagons were emptied, the slaves dragged the vehicles back over to the elevators, loaded them inside and with a slamming of the steel grills and a sucking, groaning, whooshing sound, the full cage disappeared down into the hot earth below.
A long, piercing whistle split the air and made Jun flinch. Tenga leaned toward him, and whispered, “Shift change. Now we go below. Into the Hole.”
The elevators clanged, fell and rose and a great wave of humanity—several hundred men and women in varying stages of malnutrition—surged out of the squat steel cages and swarmed up the stairs to the upper floors. They seemed to be racing each other to get to the top, some shoving others out of the way, some even being trampled.
“Rice time,” said Tenga. “They feed us after the shift so they don’t waste food on the day’s crop of dead. There’s never enough rice for all and latecomers go hungry. After the shift, don’t stay here in the machine level, go straight upstairs to the dining hall. Run, if you can. Don’t wait for anything. Not me. Not Tut. Go straight up there.”
When the rushing tide of slaves had passed, Jun saw that the Manchu were pushing a smaller wagon out of the steel doors, which had come up with a separate elevator. The big, green-coated men pushed the wagon across Jun’s line of sight toward a smaller elevator on the far side of the hall. As it passed, he saw that the wagon was piled with fresh corpses, half a dozen limp bodies wrapped in big, dirty white sacks. The little masked man in the white coat whom Jun had seen in the crematorium waited by the smaller elevator, leaning against the steel bars of the cage casually, ready to escort the piled bodies to their destination in his fiery lair on the floor above.
There was something familiar about the shape of his head, and the way he held his short, fat body, even in the voluminous white gown. Then he pushed off the steel bars and said something to the Manchu guard, who laughed. The little man ignored the wagon full of bodies by the open doors of the elevator and came sauntering over to the newcomer slaves, sitting by the steel wall. He strolled along the front of the seated prisoners, looking them up and down, as if he were inspecting livestock at market and, as he passed Jun for a brief second their gazes met. And Jun found himself looking into the wise, jet-black eyes of his old servant Semar. He opened his mouth, about to exclaim his surprise and joy—and stopped. Semar’s soft, familiar voice was speaking—but speaking inside his head. It was answering questions that he had barely formed, let alone spoken aloud.
“Yes, my prince, it is truly me. And no, I cannot explain things just now. But I am here to help you. Have courage. I will see you again soon. In the meantime, do not tell Ketut. Do not tell anyone who I am. Trust me. Have courage, stay strong. In the end, all will be well.”
Jun noticed that the old man was already a dozen paces away, heading back toward his wagonload of corpses even as the echoes of his voice died in his head.
They were ordered to stand up, march to the elevators, and were bundled into the giant cages—all forty of the newcomers and their guards squashing roughly inside. With the groaning and whooshing came a curious hollow feeling in his stomach. Jun felt the elevator drop. Down, down, down it went. The steel wheels screeching as they ran on ungreased rails. Down into the black entrails of the Konda Pali mine.
Jun felt a strange insistent pressure on his rear from the man behind him and by turning his head he saw that he was squeezed up against Kromo, the half-mad fellow he had been yoked to during the march. He had forgotten neither the man nor his disgusting ways but there had been so many new experiences that he had pushed the creature from his mind.
“Good morning, pretty one,” whispered Kromo. And Jun caught a blast of his rotting-meat breath. Worse, he could still feel something hard rubbing against his buttocks. He hoped with all his heart that it was just the brute’s groping right hand.
Crushed in together in the elevator, Jun could not move away, nor could he move his arms. He looked at the nearest of the two Manchu guards accompanying them down into the Hole but there did not seem to be much point in protesting, and he was not sure how he would communicate his distress to the guard anyway. He looked across at Tenga and briefly caught her hard black eyes but by then they were at the bottom of the fall and the steel-bar gates were clanging open and the pressure was relaxed as they streamed out into a surprisingly large area, as wide as the Watergarden, with a low, rock ceiling and the whole place lit with a sallow glow.
As he came out of the cage, Jun reached behind and felt the material of his raggedy sarong at the back and his hand came away wet and sticky. He felt sick and shaky but he knew he must put his disgust and—yes—increasing anger from his mind: Semar is here. That is what he must focus on. They would find a way to escape. He wished he could tell Ketut. But Semar had been clear. Tell no one. All would be well. Semar is here. He repeated that luminous fact to himself. Jun hoped it would give him the courage to face whatever horror came next.
He looked around the wide cavern he found himself in. A dozen empty wooden wagons of varying sizes were lined up against the far wall. It was very hot and dim—the only light was a few flickering oil lamps set in sconces hollowed out of the rock walls. By their yellow light, Jun could make out four or five tunnels, twice the height of a man and wider than one of the big wagons, leading off into the blackness.
Jun moved as far away from Kromo as he could, but stayed close to Ketut and the warrior woman. Tenga told them both in a low whisper that this was the assembly area, and that if they ever got lost or separated from the rest of the workers, they were required to come back here and wait for their guards. If they did not, they would be treated as Runners. Jun thought of the Mbaru, and the bear-dogs, and felt his ball sack contract. Semar is here, he told himself again. The two Manchu guards, with gestures and grunted commands, separated the forty-strong group of newcomers into two gangs of twenty. The first was herded off to the far side of the cavern where they congregated around an empty ore wagon.
Jun’s group of twenty, too, was shown the ore wagon they were to use. His work gang contained Tenga and Ketut, but his heart sank when he saw that Kromo was also a part of it. The big man was ten feet away and whispering to another slave, a dark-skinned dwarfish fellow, very strong-looking with a large, misshapen head. He had the flattened nose and tightly curled black hair that marked him as one in whom the blood of the Ebu people, the original inhabitants of the Laut Besar, still ran strong. Both men were shooting glances at Jun, then the dwarf gave a horribly dirty snigger.
“You like that one?” Tenga said to him, nodding over at Kromo who was now leering openly at him from the far side of the wagon. “You like to fuck with him tonight? Or suck him? Yes? Maybe, if you suck him good, he’ll give you some of his rice and beans?”
“No! By all the Gods, no. I’d rather starve. How can you ask that?”
“This is the Hole,” said Tenga with a shrug. “People do what they have to.”
Jun thought, I am Wukarta. I will never be made into that creature’s whore. Whatever it takes, whatever is necessary, I will do it.
“What are we waiting here for?” he asked, mainly to change the subject.
“The
y’ve got to blow their drill-holes,” said Tenga. For an instant, Jun thought she was naming some disgusting sex act that took place in this dark and humid hell.
He opened his mouth to say something rude but the Manchu guard shouted out a single word, and Tenga said urgently, “Quick, cover your ears and open your mouth.”
“What?” said Jun.
“Do it now, both of you,” said Tenga, “or you’ll lose your hearing.”
Both Ketut and Jun covered their ears just in time. A vast explosion pummeled the air, vibrating the rock under their feet. A huge cloud of dust bloomed out of the tunnel directly ahead of them. All the newcomers were stunned by the force of the blast, rocking on their feet. The dwarfish fellow, Kromo’s friend, was knocked off balance, tumbled to the rocky floor, but he bobbed up a moment later grinning, jabbering something funny to Kromo.
When the dust had nearly cleared, the group was herded round the ore wagon, and induced to put their shoulders to the huge vehicle and push it into the tunnel. It was a brute to get moving. The wagon was heavy, even unladen, and the thick wooden wheels were uneven and clumsy. The twenty slaves struggled to keep it trundling along at any speed. To pause, however, even for a moment, was to invite the lash, as one poor wretch soon discovered. A short, fattish woman with her hair tied into two braids stopped pushing for a moment to stretch her back and the nearest Manchu immediately began cutting at her with short hard blows of his whip. The guard only relented when the poor creature, now dizzy with pain and one of her braids dripping with blood, resumed her position at the side of the wagon and once again began straining to heave it forward. Jun wondered what it would be like to push when it was filled with the heavy black chunks of gold ore.
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