So he just watched. The enchanter was afraid of the wraiths. Leof had assumed that the wraiths were his servants. But judging by the looks he cast over his shoulder as he worked, he didn’t trust them anymore than Leof did. They were circling and calling to each other in a language he had never heard; half wind noise and half speech. Occasionally, they darted at the enchanter and laughed when he flinched. But they seemed to respect his right to work, and they were interested in what he was doing.
He worked without pause, following a strict routine. He dug a new section, taking the turf off in squares with a sharp spade and laying it aside, then digging deeper until he found bones. Then he put the spade aside and took up a spoon, loosening each bone carefully and laying out skeletons. From each skeleton, he took a bone — a fingerbone, usually. He bent his head over this bone for a moment. Sometimes it was a long moment, sometimes short. After this, he either put the bone and its skeleton carefully back in the earth and buried it, or he put the bone even more carefully into a sack, and then buried the rest of the bones. The work was painstaking, and for a while he seemed to become unaware of the wind wraiths.
After a couple of hours, Leof realized that he urgently needed to piss. He eased back from his vantage point, losing sight of the enchanter, and retraced his path step by careful step until he was hidden in a dense coppice of willow trees and it was safe to relieve himself. He stood in the green shadow for a while, trying to decide what to do. The enchanter was so caught up in his work and, from the size of the hill, had a lot more digging to do. Leof decided he was better off going to meet Thegan and guide him to the spot.
So he left the willows and made for Bonhill, not sure whether he was deserting his post. The wind had risen as the sun began to lower; every gust or wuther made him look behind him, in case the wind wraiths were following.
Bramble
THERE WERE FAR too many questions and too much exclaiming and explaining by the miners, particularly explanations to the mine boss, a middle-aged man named Sami whose brown eyes trusted no one. Sami insisted on knowing who she was and how she had got into the mine.
Bramble was sick of talking, and disconcerted by the appearance of a group of young boys who poked their way in to the center of the circle and listened, their eyes wide. She bit back a curse as she met the eyes of a pale child surely not more than nine or ten.
“Enchantment, all right?” she snarled at Sami.
He took a step back and then recovered his authority. “You’ve got no right here.”
“You’ve heard about the ghosts?”
“One of our buyers told us,” Sami confirmed. “The news is all over the Domains.”
Bramble wondered how long it had been in this time since the attack on Carlion; since Maryrose’s death. “How long ago did it happen?” she asked.
Sami shrugged. “Three, four days. We haven’t heard anything else yet.” His eyes narrowed. “What’s it to you?”
She didn’t have time for this. She didn’t have the time or patience. “My sister was killed there.”
There was silence. Bramble used the moment of shock to take charge. “I need to find the animal cave,” she said, gesturing to the mine. “There’s something in there that we need to defeat the enchanter who set the ghosts on Carlion.”
“Are you an enchanter, too?” The miner who had killed the hunter stepped forward, his pickaxe still in his hand. She could see that he wanted to feel justified; to not be guilty of murder. He didn’t look like a murderer: he was strong enough, but his face was gentle and his voice quiet. She felt sorry for him. If she had heard the stories about Carlion and then had seen two figures appear out of nowhere, what would she have done?
She shook her head. “No, it was the hunter who had the power, not me. I’m just ordinary.”
They looked skeptical, and she supposed she didn’t blame them. But she was wound up with tension and grief and purpose, and she couldn’t baby them.
“I need the animal cave,” she said again. “Then we might be able to stop the bastard who raised the ghosts.”
“Why should we trust you?” Sami asked.
“Oh, shag it, I haven’t got time for this.” Bramble drew her belt knife, grabbed Sami by the collar and put the knife to his throat. She was faster than she had been, she thought. Hunting every day had made her more dangerous. She grinned at his frantic eyes, pretending to enjoy his fear. Her stomach roiled in disgust.
“Because I could kill you right now. But I won’t.” She let him go, and only then thought of the right thing to say. “Because the Well of Secrets sent me.”
These were truly powerful words. Each man there relaxed, as though everything had been explained.
“What animal cave?” the miner asked.
“The cave with the animal drawings on the wall, from the very old times,” Bramble explained. “The aurochs, and the elk and deer.”
The miners exchanged glances and shook their heads.
“Never seen ought like that,” one said. “What about you, Medric?”
The miner pushed out his lip and shook his head, too. “No,” he said. “I don’t know it.”
Bramble felt her guts cramp. The cave had to be there. She had been sure the miners would have found it.
“There’s another cave,” she said. “I could find my way from there . . .” She looked up at the mountainside, trying fruitlessly to spot any familiar landmarks. She had seen this mountainside only a few moments ago, as Acton rode up. Surely she could remember? That big peak, yes, but that was miles away… a thousand years of mining had altered the side of the mountain beyond recognition. The area where Dotta’s cave had been — that was where the entrance to the mine was. Inside were not caves but tunnels, wide enough for carts to be pushed up and down.
Despair began to creep over her, but she pushed it down. “Who knows the caves best?” she asked.
There was silence, but everyone looked at Medric. He rested his pickaxe on the ground and stared at it, as if unwilling to meet their gaze.
Sami cleared his throat. “Think you’ll be able to find him, Medric?”
Medric took a breath, and let it out again as if unsure what to say. He shrugged. “If I call him, he might come,” he said eventually, in a voice that gave nothing away.
“Who?” Bramble asked.
“A friend. Fursey. He, uh… he lives in there.” Medric indicated the mountain with a jerk of his head.
“Human?” Bramble asked.
A couple of the men looked at the ground as though unsure of the answer. One shorter man grinned and said, “Well, we’ve had our doubts,” and then shut up as Medric glared at him.
“Human,” Medric confirmed.
She was glad of that confirmation as she followed Medric and his lantern down the tunnel and felt the weight of the earth above her, encountered the absolute darkness of underground for the first time with her own body. The dark hadn’t seemed as bad when she was looking through Gris’s eyes.
He led her down a long way, through tunnels that sometimes required her to crawl, and sometimes took them through caverns where the roof echoed high above her head. They stopped, finally, in a small cave — no, a tunnel. She saw the marks of pickaxes and chisels on the rock walls. This was the bottom of the mine, but there were fissures in the rock, passages like the ones Dotta had shown her, leading further down. Medric put down the lantern and stood for a moment, as if gathering courage.
“Fursey,” he called softly. “Fursey! I’ve come back!”
He waited a few moments, and then called again, and then again.
There was silence. The earth seemed to grow heavier above them. Medric checked the candle in the lantern — it was more than half gone. He tightened his lips and sighed. “Fursey,” he called again, but this time reluctantly. “I need your help.”
Nothing.
He raised his voice in frustration. “There are people dying, Furse, and I need your help!” Echoes rang along the tunnel walls, so that the whole min
e seemed to be whispering, “help, help, help . . .”
Medric turned to Bramble and shrugged. “If he doesn’t want to help . . .”
Behind him, from the thinnest of the fissures, a slight figure appeared. A man. Yes, human, Bramble was sure, although there was something about the way he moved that reminded her of the hunter. He stood staring at Medric for a moment as someone might stare at a picture of devastation. Then Medric realized where Bramble’s eyes were staring and whirled around.
“Fursey!” He took a step forward and clasped the man to him, but the slight figure slipped out of his grasp and stood looking at him, head to one side.
“I thought,” he said in a soft voice, “that if you came back, you would come alone. Is this your wife?” There was venom in his voice.
Medric flinched. “Of course not. I only just met her. She needs help, and you’re the only one . . .”
“So you came back for her, not for me? How was your family?”
The question threw Medric. “They were fine. Da’s dead. Mam’s remarried. My sisters’re fine. So I came back to find you.”
Somehow, the words took the tension out of the cave. “But you hate the mine,” Fursey said.
“Yes,” Medric confirmed. “I hate the mine.”
“Then you should not have come back.”
Medric bent his head, as he had after he had killed the hunter, and stared at the floor of the tunnel.
Bramble had had enough of all this melodrama. “I need to find the animal cave, the one with the paintings on the wall,” she said directly to Fursey. “Will you help?”
“That’s a sacred place,” Fursey said.
“I know.” This man might have been human, but he was strange. Well, she had dealt with stranger things than him. “I need to find some bones,” she said.
“Are they calling you?” he asked.
Very strange. But in a way, they were.
“Yes,” she said. “They have called me for a thousand years.”
He nodded. “Then I will take you.”
Medric’s Story
THIS IS HOW it was.
It’s cold and windy. Da’s hand is the only warm thing in the world, and there won’t be that much longer.
The man from the mine is not too impressed; this one’s too skinny, his look says, too bloody hungry. My boys’ll eat him for breakfast. But he clinks some coins in his pocket.
“Five silver pieces.”
Da’s hand tightens. Too much, or too little? It’s hard to tell. What’s five silver pieces worth, anyway?
“He’s worth more than that,” Da says. “He’s a good boy, obedient. He’s a hard worker, aren’t you, Medric?”
Oh, yes. Da’s strong enough to make sure of that. He’s got a hard hand, has Da.
“Say something, why don’t you?”
The man interrupts before Da does more than raise his voice. “Five and a half. That’s it.”
“It’s robbery.” But he takes it.
The man from the mine is called Sami. He’s from the north, with fair hair but brown eyes. Traveler blood in there, somewhere. A middling-size man, running a little to fat. But a man with a hard hand. It’s not difficult to pick them, once you’ve known one.
“Come on,” he says. “I’ll put you in with the pushers. They’ll start you off right.”
He leads the way to a long stone building with a slate roof. It’d be impressive in a town, but stone’s cheap here, after all. All it costs is the labor of getting it out of the ground.
A chill strikes off the stone as he leads the way through the doorway. Inside, the floor is packed dirt. The little windows are so high up that at this time, late evening, there’s almost no light at all. There are wide wooden bunks in rows on both sides of the room. In the closest bunks are boys, two or three to a bed: every age from ten up, and all of them asleep with the sleep of exhaustion. They sprawl uncaring, arms hanging out, legs uncovered by the one blanket. The mine whistle blew an hour ago, as Da hurried up the steep path to the mine, saying, “By all that’s holy, hurry up.”
An hour from leaving the mine to this oblivion.
Da said, “Forget your bloody big words and your bloody airs and graces, boy. You’re here to work, and don’t you forget it.” Good advice. The only good advice Da ever spoke. Maybe not such a good farewell, though.
Sami gestures to a bunk in the far corner where there are only two boys. “Nav and Fursey. Bunk in with them tonight and they’ll show you around tomorrow. You’ll be pushing. Get some supper over at the kitchen.”
He points northward, through the stone wall, then considers. “You’d better give me your duffel. This lot’ll steal anything that’s not nailed down. Don’t worry, I’ll look after it. You can get it back when you leave.”
Right. In seven years, at nineteen. Those clothes are going to be really useful then.
Sami grins. A clip over the ear is clearly his normal way of saying goodbye. It could be worse.
The kitchen is bright with firelight but there’s not much food left. The cook grumbles as he fills a bowl with lentils and scrounges around until he finds a crust to go with it. The food’s not too hot, but it’s good. Solid. Sustaining. After all, you have to feed boys if they’re going to hew out a mountain for you the next day.
Nav and Fursey both grumble about having to train a newcomer, but only Nav means it. Nav’s a city boy from Turvite, mean-eyed and suspicious, sold to pay his “uncle’s” gambling debts. His mother let him go without a word, he says, scared that if she objected his “uncle” would leave her.
“She’m a twitty bitch,” he says, “no shagging good on her own. I’s well off without her.”
Fursey’s an orphan, with nowhere to go and no one to complain about. He’s yellow-haired and blue-eyed, so his folks must have come from the south, but that’s all he knows. He’s been here since he was five; he doesn’t remember before that.
“I was somewhere else,” he says. “I don’t care. Now I’m here.” He smiles, sweetly.
Fursey’s the smallest of the pushers, but the others let him alone.
“Go easy with him,” Nav says quietly. “He looks like he’s a soft one, but if he takes against you he’ll kill you. He don’t never forget nothing; and he don’t never forgive.”
Fursey looks people in the eye, even the hewers. He smiles like a much younger boy, but his stare is too strong for even Sami to bear for long. So Sami doesn’t look at him.
“Get moving,” Sami shouts at all of us. “You think it’s a holiday?”
Fursey leads the way. Pushers don’t really push — they pull the ore-laden carts out of the mine, up the steep, stony ramps. The traces go around the chest, and a long strip of leather rests against the forehead and is attached to the sides of the cart. A trained twelve-year-old boy who leans into the leather headband and puts his whole weight into it can haul a fully laden cart up a mile of mine ramps in twenty-two minutes. That’s how fast Fursey is, but Sami doesn’t know it. Fursey stops halfway up, every time, in the darkest part of the ramp, and just looks around.
The leather strap cuts. The ramp is stony and sharp on bare feet. The mine’s not cold, exactly, not like up above, where the wind cuts through clothing like it was paper. But it’s dark. By the gods, it’s darker than anything. A darkness that settles down, heavy, like thick cloth over your mouth. The pale yellow of the candles at the turning points of the ramps can barely be seen. There is only the great bear of the dark. The roof feels like it’s caving in.
“Look for the gold,” Fursey says urgently. His hand is warm. The boy-smell of him is comforting.
“What?”
“Look for the gold. There’s always sparks of it, even here. That’s why I stop, to see the gold.”
There are sparks. Tiny, flickering at the corner of your eyes. Barely there.
“There’s a reef behind there,” Fursey says, pointing at the wall. “But those fools up top don’t know it. They’ve passed it by.”
�
��How do you know?”
“I know,” Fursey says, and settles the leather strap onto his brow. “Back to your cart, Medric. Follow me. I’ll go slow.”
With the strap around your forehead you have to look down and the dark doesn’t seem so heavy. But it’s a long, long way to the top of the ramp. To the sunlight. There are four more trips to make before mid-meal.
Well, you get used to anything, they say. Even to unending work, eat, sleep, work again. Not every day is pushing. The mine closes down at the dark of the moon for two days, and the free hewers go downvalley, to their families, those who have them.
“Dead unlucky to be underground at the dark o’ t’moon,” Nav explains to me. “That’s when the delvers come out.”
“Delvers?”
Nav looks quickly over his shoulder, and makes the sign against hexing. “The dark people, the little people, the eaters of rock, the owners of the blackness,” he says, and it’s clear those aren’t his words, that he’s learned them off by heart. But from whom, he won’t say.
Even with the mine closed, the pushers don’t stop working. There’s always work: scything the grass around the barracks, cutting wood, weeding the kitchen garden. That’s not so bad, with the sun warm on your back and the smell of fresh earth; living earth. Different from the dark, dead smell of underground rock.
These two days, Fursey is twitchy as a cat. Snapping at everyone. His wide-eyed stare has become a glare.
“He just hates being out o’ t’mine,” Nav says. “I told you, he’m crazy.”
It’s true. Back in the mine, Fursey sings as he pushes; and stops to look at the gold twice as long.
In bed that night, he talks about it, whispering. “I know none of the others understand, but you do, don’t you, Medric? It’s so beautiful down there, with the gold shining all around me. The gold calls to me, I can hear it, I know where it is underneath the rock. It wants to be taken out, to be melted down and made into beautiful things. It wants to be admired and treasured. It yearns for the pain of the pick cutting through the reef.”
Deep Water Page 50