Rubin paused for a breath, feeling he was at a turning-point. He could still go back and, perhaps with this old man’s help, find the way out to daylight, to the comforts of home. But by now the emperor’s men would have arrived at the Salient, seeking him for the army. And if they could not find him they would certainly return.
So he gritted his teeth and, saying a silent farewell to the life he’d known, he followed his new friend down into the hell of the Halls, walking beyond light and hope to a world where despair squats like a toad, eating brave boys for breakfast.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE INJURED MAN writhed in agony, fighting against his captors, bellowing his pain and fury. He was a strong man, though drained by his wounds, and it was all they could do to hold him. One soldier, a heavy-muscled veteran, sat on the man’s good leg while two others bore down on his shoulders. The surgeon kept hacking relentlessly through the meat of the man’s thigh. His arms and apron were covered with gore, and the stench of blood and anguish in the summer heat was sickening.
It was Valla’s job to catch and hold on to the big blood vessel which snaked down the inside of the injured man’s thigh, to hold it and pinch it and stop it spurting his lifeblood over them all. The thing was slippery as an eel and, like an eel, seemed to have a will of its own, but Valla held on to it conscientiously. It was not her first amputation.
The surgeon, an old man called Pindar, dropped the straight knife he was wielding and grabbed the serrated bone-saw off the ground. He started scraping it across the exposed thighbone. The patient gave an agonized screech and was suddenly still.
‘Is he dead?’ asked Pindar, still sawing. Sometimes the heart of the strongest man would stop at this point.
One of the helpers felt the casualty’s neck. ‘Swooned,’ he said.
Pindar grunted. Then, with a loud curse, he threw down the saw and snatched another from the ground. Blunt, Valla thought despairingly, they’re all too blunt.
Mercifully the man stayed unconscious until his leg had been hacked off and thrown on to the pile of limbs, disturbing a cloud of flies. The raw stump was slathered with hot tar. Then the other helpers picked the patient up and hauled him off to the tent where recent amputees and other soldiers whose lives hung in the balance shared a grim comradeship.
Pindar nodded his thanks to Valla, dismissing her, and she wandered out into the sunshine. She raised her face to the light. Then she crossed in front of the three tents full of wounded and set off up towards the woodland stream which had dictated where the surgeons pitch their camp. Eager to get the stench of blood and fear out of her body, she breathed in the clean air, but even this small movement of her chest sparked agony in her injured arm, on top of the deep and abiding throb of pain that always lived there. As ever, she tried to put it aside and relish the fresh scents of the mountains. Down in the City, she thought, so far to the south, summer was a wretched time. The sick and elderly and the very young died in their homes from the heat and lack of water, the whole place stank of rot and decay, and the soldiers dreaded it, garbed in their armour and leather. She hated the City in the dog-days of summer, but nevertheless she wished she were there, with the Warhounds, if that was where they were, and away from this cool, pine-clad mountain. The trees were dark green and stately, pungent with sap, and the ground beneath them thick and mattressy with millions of needles accumulated over hundreds of years. She loathed being there.
She stepped across the steep, babbling stream to the other bank then knelt and let the water wash the worst of the blood off her good arm. Then she sat back on the low bank and looked up towards Needlewoman’s Notch. Today’s battle had started soon after dawn, as most of them did. The breeze was from the south, so the sounds were muffled: the clash of metal, the cries of the wounded. Valla had stopped counting how many battles there had been since she first arrived there with Leona and the rest of the Warhounds half a year before, when the ground was covered with clean snow and she had been a respected member of the Thousand. Now she was just a dogsbody, dressing wounds, fetching and carrying for the injured, cleaning them up, listening to the groans and screams all day and night. Her prized black and silver armour had disappeared slowly, piece by piece, stolen or cannibalized by and for other warriors. The last to go was the helm, smaller than the common size, too small for most soldiers. But it had gone anyway one day when her back was turned.
She tried to accept her lot. She tried to be useful. But she could not do much, she thought, looking down at her useless arm.
Marcellus had left the winter war in the hands of General Dragonard and marched away, perhaps back to the City. He had left the Warhounds to buttress the general’s campaign to take the Notch, which was expected to last only days. But the Blues were more resilient than Marcellus had expected. Half a year on, and high summer, and they still held the Notch, despite appalling attrition on both sides.
Valla had been injured forty or so days before in an engagement between the Hounds and the Mulanese beetles, the most feared of the Blues’ heavy infantry. They were dark-skinned men encased in armour from knee to helm, all of them big as trees and twice as slow. But difficult to kill.
Valla had been caught by surprise and by arrogance. She had speared two beetles, one in the knee, one between the chest plates, and had bounded back, thrilling with triumph, unaware of a third warrior looming at her rear. He had hit her below the shoulder with the full weight of his mace, a crushing blow weighted with iron and driven by dense muscle, which had shattered her arm and felled her, helpless with shock and agony, at his boots. The beetle had raised his mace for the killing blow.
Leona had saved her. Though fighting another beetle twenty paces away, the Warhounds’ commander had dodged a thrust from the warrior’s broadsword, turned on her heel and flung her dagger at the mace-wielder, catching him in the neck. The blow had no depth but the beetle was distracted for a heartbeat. Leona had abandoned her own opponent and run to Valla’s side. She stood over her friend and defended her, not giving a pace, until she had managed to disable the beetle then kill him.
The bones in Valla’s lower arm had broken cleanly, but the upper bone was shattered. The surgeon told her he had to cut it off at the shoulder but Valla had refused, arguing feebly as she fought the drift into unconsciousness, defending her arm as Leona had defended her. As she refused to lose the arm, so she refused to pass out, hanging on grimly, for she knew the sawbones would hack it off as soon as she could no longer say no. Leona had come to her aid again, telling the surgeon to wait a few days to see if the limb started to heal. Regretfully Pindar had complied. He had reset the shattered bones as best he could, then bandaged the arm in splints, strapping it across Valla’s chest. And there it stayed. It had not healed, and it pained her constantly, but Valla lived with hope and she prayed daily to Aduara to make her whole again. And each day she peered at the white waxy fingertips, peeping out from the grimy bandages like those of a corpse, willing them not to turn black.
Just days after her injury the Warhounds had received new orders and Leona and her century had marched away, leaving her behind, a crippled Hound with no home and no future.
‘I can have that arm off in a heartbeat,’ Pindar would tell her from time to time once she was back on her feet. ‘I can call a bugler in here. In the time it takes to blow ten blasts on the bugle it will be off and you’ll start healing.’
Valla knew he wished the best for her but she would not agree. There were plenty of one-armed fighters in the rear ranks of all armies, but they had usually lost the limb at the wrist or just below the elbow and could strap on a shield. She would not be able to and would be a hindrance to others. No one would trust her to fight alongside them. And if she could not fight, what would she do?
Tears welled behind her eyes. She wished now she’d had the courage to have the arm taken off. She wished it had been severed cleanly on the battlefield. Sometimes she thought of taking her sword and heading up there, to the battle at the Notch where men and
women died honourably each day, to die a useful death, a valorous death with her comrades.
Sitting by the stream she heard the scuff of sandals and looked round. A soldier came climbing up towards her. He sat down on the other bank and they nodded to each other. She recognized him. He had had a mangled hand chopped off and was very nearly battle-ready again. But he could not fight in the struggle above them at the Notch, for the steep and rocky terrain made two hands essential. The man, whose name she could not remember, was to return to the City to be redeployed.
She lowered her eyes, avoiding looking at his healing stump. She felt sick with jealousy, sick that this warrior would fight again, perhaps with a hook for a hand, a leather sheath for the stub. He could use a shield and was thus considered a worthy fighter. He grinned at her across the stream and she forced her face into a grimace approximating a smile.
‘How’s your friend?’ the soldier asked her.
‘My friend?’
‘The one the death gods threw back. Red.’
She nodded. ‘Still alive.’
Red was a marvel to them all, a soldier who should have died back in the winter when he was gutted by an enemy spear. When he was found barely alive, his guts were stuffed back into his body and he was carried to the tent for the dying. But he did not die. A thin man already, he had become skin and bones, with no more muscle on him than a butterfly. When Valla started looking after him he had been a frail, pale thing, covered with sores, his eyes sunken, his face that of an old man. She had conscientiously fed him each day, making sure he had life-giving gravy or soup. It sometimes stopped his breathing so she would roll him over easily, light as he was, and let the food trickle out of him before trying again. His will to live became legendary.
And a few days ago he had started moving a little, his muscles twitching, his swallow reflex strengthening, eyelids moving as if he dreamed. Valla washed his thin body and talked to him, telling him of her life with the Warhounds, the battles they had fought, the valour of the City’s warriors. She willed him to wake up. She did not know his name – no one did – but they called him Red because of his bright hair. Valla wondered what colour his eyes were.
She looked up. The one-handed soldier was watching her assessingly. She sighed to herself. She knew what was coming – he was about to say something flattering. They always did once they felt new vigour rising in them.
The soldier cleared his throat and said, ‘They say you used to be a fine warrior.’
Valla snorted, caught between amusement and despair. She stood up, nodded amiably enough to him and made her way back to the encampment. The day’s battle was still raging above; she could hear its sounds in the clear air. There would be more casualties. She decided to check on Red before they were overwhelmed.
The medical tents were no more than flimsy tunnels, open-ended, each housing more than fifty patients. They were made of thin canvas, offering shade from the heat of the sun in summer and a poor protection from the icy northerlies in winter. The farthest tent was separate from the others and it housed those who needed the least care. It was light and airy, and well away from the sounds and smells of recent casualties and the doomed. Valla’s straw mattress was at the far end, the prime position, at the lip of shelving cliffside that looked down and south towards the far-distant City. In the quiet summer evenings she would lie there and watch the eagles soar on the warm winds.
She picked her way between the beds, exchanging words with the soldiers – men and women – who lay or sat or stood around. They would, most of them, fight another day, though some had head injuries which would condemn them in the last, however well their wounds healed: some had poor balance or coordination, and a few had little idea what was going on around them. Looking at those warriors, she was reminded that Aduara had been merciful to her, though her mercy was harsh.
She had moved Red’s pallet opposite hers so she could keep an eye on him. He was lying on his side, where she had placed him after feeding him at first light. She paused to watch for the small movement of his back and shoulders, the weak inhalation, barely discernible, that showed he was still alive. His red hair, grown long, had flopped over his face and she pushed it back. Her breath caught in her throat.
His eyes were open.
Valla leaned close, touching him gently on the shoulder. ‘Hello,’ she whispered. She wished she knew his name. ‘Red,’ she tried.
But his eyes closed and within moments his eyelids started flickering and she guessed he was falling deep into dreams again.
Rubin and the old Dweller who, he learned, was a former sea dog called Captain Starky, journeyed down through the sewers together for a very long time, until Rubin thought he must reach the centre of the earth, then slowly back up again. Rubin later learned that the Captain was avoiding the more dangerous parts of the Halls, where reivers walked intent on theft and murder and worse.
The path along which they climbed and scrambled was at times wet and muddy, the ringing of falling water constant in their ears, and at other times dry as dust, as though it had not seen water for a hundred years. Mostly they were travelling through tunnels carved in rock or formed by natural splits in the earth. But then Rubin would suddenly realize they were crossing an abandoned chamber, complete with cobwebbed furniture. He hurried quickly through those, feeling ghosts watching him from the blind windows.
Throughout its history the City had been sinking. As it descended, ground-floor rooms were transformed into basements, first floors into ground floors. Within a generation or two a whole house could completely disappear, descending into the Halls like a very slow cage down a mine-shaft.
While Rubin had struggled to keep up, the Captain was also watching the ground, searching for pickings. Occasionally he would dart to the side, beckoning Rubin to bring the torch, then swoop triumphantly on some piece of flotsam, bringing it close to his face, inspecting it, sniffing it. If it was valuable to him he would pop it in his sack, and Rubin saw many unidentifiable morsels go in there. If the old man rejected something he would politely offer it to Rubin before throwing it back. Rubin wondered if this was a courtesy throughout the Halls. He had refused everything he was offered, craving only fresh water and rest, and a relief from the awful smell.
Once the Captain pounced on a lump of mud and, whistling to himself, cleaned it off, revealing a dead tortoise. Miserable though he was, Rubin was intrigued to know how a tortoise, of all things, had come this far into the lower depths. The Captain ripped out the decaying flesh, sniffed it, then, wrapping the shell in a rag, turned to Rubin and shouted out the first word he’d volunteered in hours.
‘Treasure!’ Delight lit up his wrinkled face and Rubin couldn’t help but smile.
They had been crossing one large, low Hall when Rubin realized he was being rained on. He held up the torch to illumine the ceiling of the cavern, where he could see wobbling drops forming then falling in fat explosions. Is this fresh water, he wondered, his throat parched and thick with disgust.
‘Can I drink this?’ he asked the Captain, who shrugged unhelpfully. Rubin threw his head back and opened his mouth until a fat drop of moisture fell into it, then he gagged and spat, his mouth twisting in a spasm of revulsion.
‘Rain,’ Captain Starky volunteered.
Rubin was to learn that there was weather in the Halls. There was rain, from condensation on walls and ceilings when the tunnels sweated as if with fear, and from the spray from weirs and waterfalls. Mist lay on the stream of life and sometimes crept up out of the water channels and through the tunnels. This was considered an ill omen, information which made Rubin laugh bitterly when he first heard it, for talk of bad luck in such a terrible place seemed ironic – though further experience showed there were many degrees of luck in the Halls and few of them were good.
Some areas were much cooler than others. Generally, the deeper you went the warmer it was, but it was also warmer in the centres of population, where men, rats and insects gathered. And there were air currents
– both gentle breezes which cooled the skin and shifted the heavy miasma of fetid air that clotted the mind and dulled the spirit, and brisk winds that rattled down tunnels, chilling the bones in winter.
It was a place of fear and terror, but also a place of safety. Like a mother, the lower depth had a warm embrace; it was a haven from the outside world, a refuge from attack. In the darkness you cannot be seen, so the frightened and fugitive were drawn towards it. It housed men and women and rats, stray dogs and myriad scurrying insects, and the odd gulon. Cows were stabled there and spent their lives in darkness; pigs too and some mules, although horses, the most sensitive of beasts, would not enter its portals; if forced there, they would quickly sicken and die.
Among the pale creatures which never saw the light of day were white crabs which lived on human excrement, and fat ginger slugs which thrived on damp walls and which would crawl into bedding in the night as if for company. These could be eaten, if absolutely necessary. Silver eels, the only creatures to be farmed there, were kept in great cauldrons fed by fresh water in the High Halls. Giant mushrooms, as big as your head, burgeoned in the ceilings. These were edible, although they were rubbery and tasted atrocious; they would keep you alive if all other sources of food failed.
Rubin’s first lessons were on the places to avoid: the haunts of evil men, the regular routes of the emperor’s patrols, and the most perilous of tunnels and air-shafts, called high funnels. He learned that old graves exude essences of the dead and to unwittingly walk under a graveyard was to call on oneself a sentence of death. And the blood sewers, which lay under slaughterhouses, were best avoided, for the stench was particularly vile and, it was said, could kill you stone dead with just one breath.
The Immortal Throne Page 7