Buried Heart

by Kate Elliott

  “I know my place, Your Holiness,” I say, although the priest doesn’t look soothed by my hard tone and blunt stare. “I belong in the mines with the rest of the criminals and slaves.”

  I still love Kal, despite everything. But I choose Ro’s words and Ro’s path. My place is here, in this trial, because I will find a way to defeat Gargaron and bring my people to the victory tower with me.

  18

  Despite my demand to work in the mines, the priest assigns me to work in the big kitchen, where all food is stored, cooked, and measured out in strict rations. The head cook is a Saroese man but his toadying Efean assistant is the one who enforces the rules with slaps and whippings.

  I begin a slow sabotage as I observe the routine. I grind grain so slowly that I’m whipped. I slop soup so it spills. I burn bread on the griddle even though Mother made sure we girls all know how to cook.

  Just before the other kitchen workers are ready to dislike me, I volunteer to take over for the girl who makes the water rounds in the mine. She’s grateful because the guards assault her every day. The head cook does not care; working in the kitchen is a coveted job and if the girl complains, he will simply replace her. The priest is concerned only about meeting the temple’s quota for gold every month.

  “What’s your name again?” I ask as I sling full pouches of water across my back. I’m working hard to learn names and stories, as Kal would.

  “Djesa.” She never once offers a welcoming grin like those I am used to from Efean girls in Saryenia. It’s as if she’s afraid to smile lest any scrap of happiness be torn up and stomped into bits.

  “You’re from Ibua, you said. How did you get here?”

  “I’m one of six girls. My mother sent me north to live with her sister, who has no daughter. The boat I was traveling in was stopped and everyone on board arrested and marched here.”

  “For no reason.”

  “Why do they need a reason? They needed people, so they took us. That was a year ago.”

  She’s too thin, like everyone here, coated with a second skin of dust, and suffering from a persistent cough. Her once-pretty sheath dress has been torn off at the knees and the extra fabric twisted around her shaved head. There are bruises on her arms. With a shy glance, she goes on.

  “Is it true what they’re saying, that you were the king’s lover and he callously cast you out?”

  Ro would tell me to give my tale the sharpest turn, but I can’t name Kal as the villain. “His wicked uncle kidnapped me.”

  With a pitying look, she rests a hand on my arm. “The Saroese take what they want. Beware of the guards.”

  My wry smile surprises her. “What the king claims belongs to the king, even here. The gods will know of their impiety if they try anything with me. But the truth is much greater than Saroese gods and rulers. I am come here on the wings of the Mother of All. Stone by stone and heart by heart, we will fight them. Be patient. Spread the word. Efea will rise.”

  Days turn to weeks as my life falls into a numbing routine of delivering water to the guards and slaves. Today is no different. When the guards see me coming they smile in a peculiar way I still cannot interpret after over a month at the mines.

  “Here is Lady Bountiful, the king’s beautiful mistress, come to pour water into the pit of the dying.”

  “Someday you will be the one begging for water as you lie dying. You will receive what you have earned as the gods measure the lightness of your souls against the heaviness of your misdeeds.”

  I always expect to be slapped for my insolence, but as usual they instead call me a vile name, then give way to let me enter the mine.

  One spits at my feet while the other sneers, “Make way for the grand procession of the King’s Mule.”

  Two women trudge out past me into the staggering heat. Each is bent under a basket full of rock. By the lines on their faces, they might be my age or twenty years older, and that is a question I’ve never asked.

  “Honored Ladies, will you have water?”

  One mutters, “Mule.” She keeps going.

  The other halts. The basket slides down her back, and I catch it, stagger, and barely get it back up on her shoulders. It’s heavier than I expected.

  I open the seal of one of the pouches slung over my back and she opens her mouth to let me squirt liquid in. With my body hiding the action from the guards, I secretly pass a hunk of flatbread into her hands. She slips it into the band of dirty cloth wrapped around her chest, which together with her ragged keldi are the last remnants of the sheath dress she must have come here in.

  “Blessings on you, Honored Lady,” she murmurs.

  “Efea will rise,” I answer, for we speak in the language the guards do not know.

  I move on. Another guard supervises the main shaft that cuts into the rock. Workers are hauling on a rope-and-pulley mechanism that brings up a platform with laden baskets. By the shaft a woman named Beswe sits cross-legged on the ground, shoulders bowed, head resting in her hands. I kneel beside her and offer from a different pouch. The supervisors think it is all water from the well but in fact it is a salty chicken broth stolen from the priest’s kitchen.

  “My thanks.” She barely has a voice, and judging by her wheezing breaths I fear she will soon be too weak to work. Those who don’t work are given no rations.

  I rest beside her until a basket is swung over and given to her to haul outside. The guard gestures me onto the rope platform and whistles to the men to start pulling.

  As I descend, the heat abates. Twice, the platform passes a side shaft cutting horizontally into the rock. The first is silent and dark, and it reeks of waste and sweat. People on their break sleep here, where night and day don’t matter. A waft of uncomfortably hot air puffs out of the second tunnel. Echoes of hammering float like dissonant music. In the gloom of a single lantern, a man glistening with sweat stands beside a barrow filled with rocks, which he is transferring into baskets to be pulled up.

  I toss him a pouch of broth, which he will transfer back to me, empty, on my way up.

  He calls in soft Efean, “Stone by stone, Spider.”

  “Heart by heart, Menesis.”

  Down I go as drifts of smoky air make my eyes sting. A speck of dust gets in my eye, the one Gargaron whipped, and I forget myself and rub at it. Pain flares and I breathe through the agony like Anise taught me. Finally it fades to its usual throbbing ache.

  The earth closes in around me.

  A hand tugs on the rope beneath my feet. As the platform settles onto the ground, I step aside so men can load their baskets of rock. Efeans work in these depths but also Saroese men marked with a criminal’s brand, most of them common murderers and thieves condemned to end their short and violent lives here. I seek through the crowd for faces that have become familiar to me, and as I pause, one of the criminals crowding around takes advantage of the dimness to grope my thigh.

  I shout, “Off me!”

  An overseer moves in, slashing his whip to scatter the men. “Move back! Move back! You know the rules. What the king claims belongs to the king.”

  Another of the branded men waves to get my attention. With his companions, he opens a path for me out of the press.

  “My thanks, Selukon,” I say as I come up beside him.

  “You’ve promised us vengeance, Jessamy Tonor,” Selukon says in a low voice that doesn’t carry to the guards.

  “We will all have vengeance.” I nod at each one as I give them their ration of water.

  There are seventeen men here who once, like me, belonged to Clan Tonor. They are all of Saroese ancestry, Patron-born, and they worked in the Tonor warehouses as stevedores and clerks. After I convinced them that we are allies, they told me their shocking tale.

  Lord Ottonor didn’t die in debt, as Gargaron claimed. Clan Tonor was growing in influence and power because Ottonor sponsored competent men whatever their birth, like my father, and so effectively managed the lands and harbor and mines he’d inherited that he had dou
bled his clan’s wealth in a mere thirty years. But after he died and Gargaron took over, claiming that Ottonor’s finances were in ruins, these humble servingmen were branded as criminals and transported here because they knew the truth.

  Maybe men like Selukon look down upon Efeans, as many Saroese do, but I have persuaded him and his imprisoned brethren to join us by explaining that if we all work together, we can get out from under this common servitude.

  I turn my attention to the children carrying chunks of rock out of the darkness to drop into the waiting baskets. They are as frail and bent as elders, faces filthy with dried snot and hair matted with grime, not even shaved down as is the custom with children. As each one reaches the staging ground in front of the platform, I give them broth. My heart breaks over and over as I call each by name so they will remember they are people deserving of names. Those of us in the kitchen eat twice a day, and I slip pieces of bread from my own morning meal into their grubby hands.

  A boy named Anu peers at me through eyes clouded with pus. “Is it day outside? Does the sun shine?”

  “It does shine,” I say.

  “I’ve forgotten what it looks like, Honored Lady.”

  “Do not give up hope.” I don’t mean to sound angry but right now anger is what holds me upright. “You will see the sun again.”

  I am not yet done. The final task of my thrice-daily rounds awaits me, down in the depths of a long tunnel supported at intervals by massive pillars of uncut rock. Here and there, oil lamps hang, hissing softly, but there aren’t enough to chase away the wretchedness. Sound scatters around me, not talk—no one has enough air or energy to talk—but rather the sounds of mallets and chisels, of an echoing roar that halts me in my tracks.

  Smoke billows into my face from one of the fires they use to crack the rock face. I cough uncontrollably. When my shudders ease, I move forward to emerge into a long open space tall enough for me to stand upright. To my horror, there’s been a rockfall at the far end of the chamber. Men are desperately hammering posts from floor to ceiling to hold up the rock so the whole ceiling won’t collapse and bury them all. Other workers gather around a body trapped under the fall.

  A slab of rock too heavy to lift has pinned the man’s leg. He is still conscious, his whimpering moans amplified by the enclosed space. As the others argue about what to do, I flash to a memory of Lord Agalar. How he devised a way to amputate a leg and sew up the gash so the victim would not bleed to death and might hope to heal with a stump.

  There is no doctor at this mine.

  Only here in the depths have I come to understand what Bettany saw in Agalar: a man who could save lives, not use them up.

  A flake the size of my hand snaps off and thuds onto the floor next to me. My skin goes clammy cold as I sway, suddenly indecisive.

  The crack of another piece of rock falling from the ceiling jolts me into action. I feel along the back wall until I find the narrow opening of an abandoned vein. The passage angles like a bent elbow, and it stinks of urine and feces. Waves of nausea sweep through me, and my belly cramps, but I push through. The tunnel dead-ends at an air vent into a neighboring mine abandoned years ago. A taste of fresher air kisses my dry lips.

  Under my vest I’ve hidden a knife and two rock pounders, crude implements used by the lowest of the slaves to break the big chunks of quartzite rock into smaller pieces suitable for grinding down to release their hidden flakes of gold. I hide these weapons in the vent together with scraps of leather cord knotted together to make longer lines and my prize of the night: a flask of olive oil Djesa has been filling little by little so none is missed.

  It’s not much. It’s never much. But I have made a few trusted allies, like Menesis and Djesa and the falsely arrested Tonor men. Carefully we are hoarding supplies in abandoned shafts. I have the barest outlines of a plan, but the biggest obstacle is that we have only stone and the guards have steel.

  It’s searing hot as I emerge from the shaft. Panting, I pause to rest, gathering my strength. By the glare of the midday sun I realize I’ve been underground half the day.

  I shade my eyes, searching for discarded rock pounders along the path. The gate to the priest’s compound is open as a line of wagons waits to enter. There’s been one supply train in and out since I arrived; they come once a month. The priest and his clerk, in company with a visiting priest and clerk sent from the temple, inventory each supply shipment together. By eavesdropping I have figured out that our priest sends exactly the mandated amount of gold each month to the Inkos temple; the excess he splits with the lord of Maldine. Once this was Ottonor. Now it is Gargaron.

  An escort of guards lounges in the shade, and I slow down, too exhausted to run the gauntlet of their crude comments. Then I see a familiar face getting down from the second wagon. At first I think I’m seeing wishful visions but instead I have underestimated my sister.

  Polodos wears the uniform of Saroese servants, loose trousers and a calf-length jacket that might be fine for the climate in Old Saro but always seems too cumbersome for Efea’s heat. The visiting priest calls him forward but doesn’t introduce him; clerks are never important enough to be acknowledged.

  The two priests will do their inventory on the portico, in the shade. I hurry to the kitchen and grab the tray being prepared with wine and a platter of food.

  “Hey!” shouts the assistant as I head out. “Women aren’t allowed to serve the priests!”

  He chases me. In another life I would easily outdistance him, but my legs drag like they’re burdened with weights. He catches me just as I reach the far end of the portico and clouts me so hard on the head that I stumble and drop the tray. Ceramic shatters. Wine splashes across the brick pavement. Warm bread slaps onto the ground, while precious dates and almonds scatter.

  My knees hit the bricks, and I barely catch myself on my right hand. Pain jolts through my wrist. Yet even through the pain I can’t stop myself from scooping up the nearest heap of dates and almonds and stuffing them in my mouth. I’m so hungry.

  A blow slams into the back of my head again and I pitch forward. My chin strikes the ground, and then a foot smashes into my side. I lie there in a haze of agony.

  “Stop!” cries our priest.

  “Let me assist, Your Holiness,” says Polodos.

  “No, no, Domon,” says the cook’s assistant, “that is a task for the kitchen servants, not for an honored official like you. This stubborn creature tried to steal the tray.”

  I try to croak out a denial but my voice doesn’t work.

  “Do you feed the workers?” Polodos is standing an arm’s length from me. “Good Goat! Her eye is badly inflamed.”

  “She was whipped by Lord Gargaron,” says our priest, hurrying up to see what the commotion is.

  “That must have been over a month ago, before he left.” Polodos’s tone sounds odd and fluttery. I try to focus on his face but it’s blurred. “Why hasn’t it healed?”

  “I will deal with it later,” insists our priest. “For now, move her out of the way. This is an unpleasant sight, and she smells. We must complete the inventory.”

  “Clerk Polodos, return to me at once,” commands the visiting priest.

  I don’t know who grabs me but I’m dragged into the sun and left lying. My wrist really hurts now, and the sun is a punishment, but I’m too tired to move except to roll onto my back, which is a mistake because now the sun glares on my face like fury. I shove with my feet and scoot backward along the courtyard’s dirt until I reach the edge of the shade and, with a final burst of energy, roll into its blessed shelter. It’s peaceful here with the clerks talking as they record the inventory: goods passed from the temple to the mine and gold dust to be returned to the head priest at the Inkos temple, carefully weighed.

  Everything in this world is carefully weighed, stone by stone and heart by heart.

  Ro’s words bubble up inside me, giving me strength. This will not defeat me. I manage to sit up. By bracing myself against the nearest pil
lar, I’m able to stand. The guards are eating over on the far side of the courtyard. The grooms are busy watering, feeding, and brushing the mules, which are worth more than the workers because they are harder to replace.

  I need to talk to Polodos. Stiff and sore, I hobble to the lavatory courtyard in back, with its limestone benches and sand buckets, hoping he will follow. Footsteps slap on the ground. A hand presses on my shoulder.

  “Doma Jessamy? Maraya worked out a clever scheme for me to be assigned to come here, so I could check on you. But you are ill, and so thin.”

  “I need a way to poison or incapacitate the guards. Maraya will know a plant or mineral. Can she send something?”

  He glances back the way we came, making sure we are alone. “What are you talking about?”

  “Efea will rise. We must break these chains. But I haven’t figured out how to rescue you and Maraya. Is she well, Polodos?”

  “Yes, she is well treated because everyone knows Lord Menos is intended to become High Priest in time and no one wishes to offend him.”

  Hearing this news exhausts me with simple relief because I have had nothing to comfort me in so long. I slide down the wall to the ground as the world reels around me.

  “Clerk Polodos?” asks our priest, hurrying into view. “What is going on?”

  “I needed to use the lavatory, Your Holiness. This slave has collapsed at my feet. Is there no healer or sickroom here? That wound above her eye needs to be lanced and cleaned. I’m surprised she’s not dead of inflammation. Is that your intention, to kill her with neglect?”

  For the first time in a month, our priest is forced to take a close look at me. His mouth drops open in exaggerated alarm, and I am sure he is remembering Gargaron’s threat. After a flurry of orders flies over my head, I’m carried to the stables, where the straw is a more comfortable bed than the dirt I’ve been sleeping on for weeks beside the outdoor hearth.