The Flint Lord

by Richard Herley

  Half an hour later they were locked into the compound. To Klay, watching through the bars of the holding cage, the night-shift looked more like walking cadavers than men: they were slow, haggard, whitened by smears and dust of chalk. Some were bleeding from cuts and grazes.

  The sight of them gave form to Klay’s dread of the coming day. The holding cage was crammed with men. Suddenly he could no longer bear to be trapped; but already the chief overseer had removed the bar at the gate and the day-shift were leaving the cage.

  “What’s it like?” Klay said to Wouter. “What’s it like in the mines?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  5

  At the start of his second day underground, Klay and fifteen others, who yesterday had been working as a team, were kept waiting in the cold while the Trundleman, Blean, discussed something with the chief overseer.

  The men stood in a line on the white ground, shivering and stamping their feet. Klay embraced himself and buried his chin in his shoulder. The wind was blowing at his back, flinging sleet across the face of the hill from the north-east. Far away to the south the hill ended in a belt of aspens heaped with drifted snow, beyond which, spreading three miles to the sea, were white, yellow and dun marshes, reed-beds, tidal flats. The sea was the colour of flint itself; sluggish waves pushed at the snow on the beach.

  Gabot, the foreigner, was standing next to Wouter. The previous day he had made a point of eating his mid-shift meal in the same place as Klay. It was as if he had been told to make a report on the new man. During the night, Klay had awoken to the sound of faint whispering. Through his lashes he had watched Gabot conversing with an overseer through the bars of the cage.

  At last Blean concluded his talk with the chief overseer and the slaves were told to collect their tools. Yesterday they had been set to deepening the shaft. Klay, Wouter, Gabot, and the rest of the unskilled men had taken turns to dig out the chalk and haul it to the surface, while three pairs of carpenters and joiners had cut and fixed new ladders and shuttering to support the walls. Today they would be doing the same.

  Gabot went first, carrying an oil lamp. His partner was to have gone next, but Klay jostled him aside and grabbed his load, a bundle of antler picks. The partner said nothing and took a second bundle. It made little difference who went down first or last, as all the unskilled jobs were rotated throughout the day. The worst job was perhaps digging at the very bottom of the pit, where a persistent foot or so of water seemed to collect and form a creamy slurry with the chalk despite all their efforts at baling.

  Klay ducked through the shaft-head shelter to see Gabot starting down the first ladder. Gabot’s lamp dimly illuminated the shuttering, lit his face and chest; but below was unfathomable darkness overlaid by the darkness of his own shadow. The bottom of the shaft was at least forty feet down, and presumably the night-shift would have taken it even deeper.

  Holding the lamp in his left hand, Gabot began to descend. Klay climbed on the ladder, the bundle slung across his shoulder.

  “Not so quick,” Gabot said. “You nearly trod on my hand.”

  Klay’s face was level with the top of the ladder; he checked that Gabot’s partner had not yet entered the shelter.

  “I can’t go so quick, fool!”

  Klay rapidly moved down two rungs more and felt his foot crushing Gabot’s fingers. He pushed with all his strength downwards. Gabot cried out and dropped his lamp. It fell, still burning for a moment before going out. There was an appreciable interval before it splashed into the slurry below.

  Gabot clawed at Klay’s ankles with his free hand. Keeping his right foot firmly in place, Klay descended another rung and lashed downward with his left heel. It struck Gabot in the mouth. At that instant he released Gabot’s fingers.

  Gabot fell. He scrabbled for the rungs as he lost balance and tumbled backwards, striking his head on the shuttering. Limply and clumsily he dropped into the shaft. There was a splintering noise near the bottom and Klay heard him hit the slurry.

  “What’s happening down there?”

  Klay looked up to see Gabot’s partner, a hand on either rail of the ladder, outlined in the twilight of the shelter. He was moving his head from side to side, trying to see.

  “Gabot’s fallen!” Klay answered.

  Weak groans were coming from below: he was still alive. Without waiting for the overseer’s interference, Klay hurriedly continued down the ladder. Gabot’s partner was shouting something. Klay ignored him.

  Near the bottom of the shaft, Klay reached the place where Gabot had smashed the ladder in his fall. His foot failed to find a rung, and in the blackness he crouched down and fingered the jagged edges of the broken rails.

  “You down there! What’s going on?”

  The overseer, leaning over the ladder, looked very small. “He’s hurt!” Klay called up the shaft. “I must help him!”

  Gabot’s groans had become quieter. It was hard to tell how far away he was. Klay looked up again to see someone climbing on the ladder. There was no time to lose: Klay jumped.

  He was surprised to find that the bottom of the shaft was only two or three feet below. He landed on Gabot’s legs and stumbled against the chalk wall.

  Gabot gasped with pain and feebly snatched at Klay’s clothing. Klay kicked his arm aside and got one leg across his chest; his hands found Gabot’s forehead and forced it down. The injured man resisted for a few seconds. With a supreme effort he arched his back, gurgling as his face came clear of the slurry. Klay pushed harder. He felt the slime closing over his wrists, rising towards his elbows. Gabot relaxed.

  Presently the overseer, bringing a lamp, reached the bottom of the ladder. “He made a strange noise,” Klay told him. “He made a strange noise and then he just let go. I think he had a fit. When I got to him he was already dead.”

  The overseer gave Klay his lamp to hold and pulled Gabot’s head and shoulders towards the light. Gabot looked like an effigy of himself in wet, white stone, but his tongue was partly pink and his teeth were brown and black. The overseer scrutinized Klay.

  “It’s just an accident, boy. Don’t worry about it.” He glanced up the shaft. “Wouter! Wouter!”

  “Yes, master!”

  “Send down a rope!”

  Klay fastened it to the dead man’s ankles. Using the fixed pulley at the top of the shaft, the other slaves drew Gabot to the surface and laid him in the snow outside the shaft-head shelter.

  They gathered round the body.

  “His little girl is in the Trundle,” one of the carpenters said. “I’ll pass the message on somehow.”

  “All right,” the overseer said. “We’ve wasted enough time here. Let’s get to work.”

  * * *

  Valdoe Village, where Klay had been captured, was sprawling and prosperous, with many wood and stone houses, two granaries, several barns, and a large variety of sheds and workshops. The Meeting House was the finest in the Flint Lord’s domain. The aesthetic pitch of its roof, the sweep of its eaves, proclaimed from a distance the extravagance of materials and virtuosity of craftsmanship that had been expended on its construction. The proximity of the Trundle did away with the need for a palisade round the village, and it was as if all the cost and labour saved thereby had been lavished on the Meeting House: its architect had been the chief builder in the service of Gehan Third, a man who, like many of the Trundle officers and craftsmen, had kept a household in the village for his family, away from the military atmosphere of the fort.

  This custom was still maintained, and of the seventy or so houses in the village fewer than fifty were inhabited by those who held no direct post under Lord Brennis. These were freemen following every conceivable trade, all of whom paid a tenth of their earnings to the fort, with an additional annual tax reckoned proportionately to the harvest impost. The village fields belonged to Valdoe and were worked by slaves who lived in a small settlement on the outskirts.

  The village lay in the valley between Valdoe an
d Levin Down, a hill whose summit was two miles from the Trundle and a hundred feet short of it in height. The southern slopes were partly under cultivation, but the rest of the hill, especially on its north side, was covered in thick woodland or scrub. Where the soil was poor there were patches of gorse; farther up were stretches of dogwood and buckthorn. These gave way near the summit to mixed woodland and coppice of ash, oak, beech, rowan, whitebeam, with occasional stands of pure oak and here and there a yew tree.

  Some of these yews were ancient: the largest had a girth of ten yards and had been standing for as many centuries, during which it had become hollow. Over the years the hunters, farmers and soldiers too had cut wood from it for bows and spears and tools; at one time or another all the hill had been visited for timber. Many of the trees had been felled a hundred years before, during construction of the Trundle, but the old hollow yew had escaped.

  A raven, perching on the topmost spray, craned its neck in alarm and then took wing; in silence it slid over the treetops and across the hill, away from danger and the approaching sound of men.

  * * *

  From his time as a slave, Tagart had learned that the Gehans had placed their forts on the most strategic, and usually the highest, points on the downs. The forts communicated by smoke signals, were connected by roads that remained passable throughout the year, and were each occupied by a unit of twenty-five men. He had also learned that the Flint Lord lived inside the Trundle and rarely ventured beyond Valdoe.

  Due west of Valdoe, three miles away and within signalling range, was the fort at Bow Hill. There was another fort, Eartham, south-east of the Trundle, also within range; but the road between Valdoe and Eartham ran through open farmland and provided little cover. The road to Bow Hill, however, passed for much of its length through deep forest.

  Tagart knew the landscape of the downs, and his plan depended on this knowledge almost as much as on the three separate forces of nomads, each more than a hundred strong, that had converged on the Shode Valley from the other winter camps. Some had never been so far south before; others Tagart knew personally. Almost every tribe was represented, every totem: the camp was overcrowded and overstretched. Old animosities were laid aside, feuds tacitly forgotten, and under Tagart’s leadership the strategy for killing the Flint Lord was explained.

  They had left for the coast in two forces. The first, sixty experts in trap-building led by Tagart himself, had left two days after Klay’s departure. A day after that the main force, four hundred and eighty-three people, had started, led by Bubeck. He was to take them as far as the Rother, a river in the south of the Weald. Here, well away from the villages and the Flint Lord’s roads, he was to await further orders.

  The march from the winter camp had taken Tagart and his men six days. Bubeck’s force, travelling more slowly, would take seven to reach the Rother, which gave Tagart two days in which to make the necessary preparations in the countryside near Valdoe.

  Most of Tagart’s men had already gone on to the woods near Bow Hill. Tagart himself, Fodich, and six others, taking cord, axes, and hatchets, had hidden their packs in the undergrowth at the base of Levin Down and clambered up through the snow-covered scrub, cutting bundles of gorse which they had dragged to the top of the hill.

  With his hatchet Tagart moved aside a branch of the old yew tree for a better view of the Trundle.

  Sleet was falling across the hills and into the valley. The men could make out the black timbers of the fort, the pennons flapping on their staffs above each guard-tower. Fodich pointed out the slaves’ quarters, just visible at the right-hand shoulder of the hill. Winding past them, issuing from the south-west gatehouse and coming down the vast white flanks of the hill, a line of posts marked the descent of a trackway, four hundred and fifty feet to the village below.

  “That’s Valdoe Village,” Fodich said.

  “Let’s start,” said Tagart.

  They arranged their bundles of gorse around the trunk of the yew. On the bundles they heaped twigs, bark, sticks, larger branches, and a layer of wet leaves that reached well above the lowest boughs of the yew. From his pouch Tagart brought out a pocket of tallowed leather and checked its contents – a fire-making kit, which he hid under a piece of bark.

  They were three-quarters of a mile from the village and hundreds of feet above it, and the wind was blowing hard: there was little risk of their hatchets being heard below. They lopped a few branches from neighbouring trees and trimmed the undergrowth near the yew to improve the flow of air.

  “No more,” Tagart said. “We don’t want anything to be seen from the village.” He turned to the man whose duty it would be to light the beacon. “Can you remember this spot?”

  “I think so.”

  “You must be sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Tagart was satisfied. With a last look round, he led the others back the way they had come. They collected their packs and started south-westwards, towards Bow Hill and the rest of Tagart’s men.

  * * *

  “Why did you kill him?” Wouter said to Klay.

  Klay poked a piece of bread into his mouth and chewed it. There were no galleries yet in the shaft: the overseer had ordered the sixteen men to the surface to eat their mid-shift meal. Klay and Wouter were sitting a little apart from the rest.

  “Why did you kill Gabot?”

  “He fell and drowned in the slurry.” Klay pulled his tunic closer to his neck. “It’s cold out here.”

  “His partner says you kicked him down the ladder.”

  “He fell. He had a fit. Who cares?”

  Wouter mopped up the rest of his stew. “They might put me back on the night-shift,” he said, hopefully. “You could team with Gabot’s partner.”

  They sat for a while in silence. Klay squinted at the sea. Keeping his profile to Wouter, he said at last, “Have you heard these rumours about a rebellion?”

  “What’s that you say?”

  “Someone in the cage told me. They said the fort was going to be attacked and we can be set free, if we play our part.”

  Wouter looked round for the overseer; he was out of earshot.

  “There will be smoke on Levin Down,” Klay said. “That’s the signal. When we see it we’re to open the gates from the inside and let these people in.”

  “How can we open the gates from here?”

  “Word has to be sent to the slaves in the Trundle.” Klay looked Wouter in the eye. “Do you think that could be done, Wouter?”

  Breaking from the fear and disbelief in Wouter’s mind came a sudden gleam of hope. “This man in the cage,” he said. “Your friend. When did he say these people were coming?”

  “Soon. In a few days.”

  “Do they know about the army? Do they know about the foreign soldiers?”

  “That’s what it’s all about.”

  Wouter’s insides were churning. He had been a slave since the age of eight. As a boy he had often dreamed of escape – they all had. During the passing years he had thought of it less and less often. Now he was not sure if he wanted it any more.

  But then he remembered that the meal break was nearly over. Soon they would be going back to work. There could be no question of a choice.

  Wouter saw again Gabot’s white corpse lying in the snow. He thought of what the carpenter had said, that Gabot’s daughter was in the Trundle. It explained why Gabot had spied on his fellows; it explained what had happened to him in the shaft. Wouter felt thankful and relieved that he had chanced to mention Gabot to Klay. If he had kept silent he might have jeopardized the only hope of freedom he would ever have.

  “We must keep these rumours from the guards,” Klay said. “Can everyone be trusted?”

  “Yes,” Wouter said. “They can be trusted.” He looked over his shoulder at the overseer. “I think even he could be trusted. He’d take his freedom if he thought they wouldn’t chase him and bring him back.”

  “But you won’t tell him.”

  “No. O
f course not. Of course I won’t tell him.”

  “This man in the cage told me we should all pass the message on.”

  Wouter looked levelly at Klay. After his first excitement he was beginning to have doubts. “Where did you come from?” he said. “What are you?”

  “A pedlar.”

  “We have them here sometimes. You’re not what you say.”

  “It doesn’t matter who I am.”

  “Then who are these friends of yours mad enough to challenge the Flint Lord?”

  “Just remember the signal. Smoke on Levin Down.”

  Wouter was growing suspicious. He wanted to ask more questions. But he had no time: the overseer decided that the break had ended, and for the rest of the day there was no safe opportunity to talk.

  Gongs sounded: the shift was over. The slaves, about a hundred in all, were brought above ground and formed into ranks.

  After the first count the chief overseer, accompanied by another overseer carrying a torch whose flame was blown about by the wind, came and stood next to Klay’s rank.

  “Which man here was on the ladder when Gabot fell?”

  “I was, master.”

  The torch was put near Klay’s face. “What is your name?”

  “Klay, master.”

  The chief overseer studied him with experienced, sceptical eyes. Wouter watched. Throughout the afternoon his thoughts had been consumed by wild and changing moods. He had tried to keep calm, but it had been impossible. Talk of escape on its own would have produced no effect on him – he was too wise, too much a slave. No, it had been the circumstances of Klay’s arrival that had given some credence to the talk; and then, and then, the blinding realization of what Klay had done to Gabot and why!

  Of course, it was probably all nonsense! For some reason Klay had been trying to impress him. Or perhaps they had found out that Gabot was known as a spy. What more convincing way for a replacement to establish himself than to kill his predecessor?

  But still …

  The chief overseer plainly suspected Klay of something. This was no act. Wouter’s heart soared.