Buried Heart

by Kate Elliott

  The head cook cleans out the wound and spreads a salve on it as our priest wrings his hands.

  “Give her an extra ration of water and food until she recovers her strength.”

  “Yes, Your Holiness.”

  They leave. I have to see Polodos before he goes, but I’m too weak to stand, and when I push up with my right hand, a hot pain flashes up my wrist. I cry out, but there’s no one to help me.

  Only at dusk does Djesa appear with a tray of soup, bread, and juice. It hurts even to close my fingers around a cup.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  “I hope it’s not broken. Can you get some cloth? I have to wrap it and keep weight off it. That’s what Anise and Tana and Darios would say.”

  “Who are they?”

  “My Fives trainers. I’m so hungry.”

  “You’ve been giving away your ration, haven’t you? I see you hide it inside your vest. You can’t feed everyone from your portion.”

  “But they’re dying. It’s so cruel.”

  “Efea will rise,” she says, but she has fresh bruises on her arms because she had to go on water rounds in my place. She doesn’t sound as if she believes it.

  That night I become delirious and slip in and out, waking in sweats, shivering until I’m exhausted, then sweating again as my thoughts spin and spin. We’ll wait until shift’s end to pull down all the guards and pound them over and over with rocks until they’re dead. We’ll wait until a new supply train comes, and raid the kitchen for supplies as we flee across the Stone Desert where nothing lives. We’ll die there, and crows will peck out our eyes.

  It doesn’t matter. Once I regain my strength we will fight. We have to, even if they kill us, even if the desert kills us. We’re dying anyway. I won’t let Gargaron win.

  19

  After some days my fever subsides and I resume my duties as water carrier. Even those days were too many for Djesa, although she does not complain. What point is there?

  I’m shaky on my feet, persistently light-headed, and my wrist hurts if I put any pressure on it, but I am strangely hopeful. Maraya will come through. I’m so sure of it that I plot out a daring plan of attack, which I share with those I trust most: Djesa in the kitchen, Menesis and his cohort of laborers, Beswe and a few other trusted women, Anu among the boys, and Selukon and the other Tonor men.

  “Whether we win or lose, my suffering will soon be over,” Selukon confides with philosophical cheerfulness. “I just wish that I could smash a rock into Lord Gargaron’s face in payment before I go. We had a decent life in Clan Tonor.”

  I’m no longer feverish but my brow is puffy, and I can’t decide if that means the inflammation is getting better or worse, although the head cook—the closest thing the mine has to a healer—covers it with a salve every evening. I keep moving. Our hidden caches of discarded stone tools grow. I’m no longer worried about supplies for the journey; I’ve worked out how to deal with that.

  If Maraya comes through.

  She will because she’s the cleverest of us girls. Because she’s also one of Father’s daughters, the firebird’s heirs, who subsist on air and courage.

  When the supply train arrives for its next scheduled visit I hang about in the shade, and I’m not surprised to see Polodos. This time I’m smarter. I go straight to the lavatory courtyard and wait in a shadowed corner amid the stink until he appears, alone, looking cautiously around.

  “Jessamy?”

  It’s so sweet to hear my name. “Here.”

  He pulls a leather pouch from his sleeve. It’s small enough I can hide it in my vest. “She said to tell you that under no circumstances should you touch the powder with bare skin or else you too will be poisoned. It acts quickly and will incapacitate most. Many will die. The rest you must kill. Can you kill people, Jessamy? Have you really thought about what this means?”

  “If we are merciful and let them live, they’ll raise the alarm and come after us and kill us before we can hope to escape. I see no other way.”

  “So I fear. Add extra spice to cover the taste. Make sure you burn or bury the pouch. Let all the dead look as if they have been killed by violence so no one suspects poison was involved.” With a disquieting frown, he touches my forehead, just above my inflamed eye, and slips a tiny sealed pot into my hand. “She says you must use this salve on your eye.”

  “How is she?”

  “Her position in Lord Menos’s household protects her. For now we are safe, as you are not.”

  I wait one day.

  One long day.

  In the first few days after the supply wagons come, the guards and the servants in the priest’s compound eat particularly well. They are served fish from the coast, fruit that doesn’t grow here because there is too little water, and imported delicacies.

  Timing is everything. Workers are fed a ration of gruel at dusk but the priest, his servants, and the guards enjoy a midday meal as well. Djesa distracts the head cook as a fish soup simmers, and I pour in the powder as well as an extra dollop of spices. If anyone is caught, let it be me.

  The midday meal is carried into the compound and barracks by the priest’s servants. I want to carry the soup to the mine guards myself but that would break the routine. A pair of kitchen servants lug a full pot and ladle up the road with a basket of freshly cooked bread on their backs. In the back of the kitchen, the cook’s assistant complains that his stomach is upset and runs to the latrine. Djesa beckons to me, and we peek into the head cook’s private courtyard to see him vomiting onto the stones, hands clenched at his belly.

  “You know what to do,” I say to her.

  To my surprise, she kisses me on the cheek like a sister. Her gaze is fierce and wild. “Efea will rise,” she whispers.

  It’s here. It’s now.

  I grab my bundle of filled water bottles. This time of day it is too hot to run and twice I have to pause in the shade because the heat makes me dizzy. But the weakness burns away as I climb the last slope, passing Beswe staggering under a heavy load of rocks. I nod at her, and she halts with a look of stunned fear that shifts to grim resolve.

  “Back again, Mule Bountiful?” The first guard leers as I walk up. “You look so hungry these days. I’ll trade you my ladle of soup for a kiss.”

  “It’s too cursed spicy,” says the other guard with a grimace. “I feel sick.”

  “You gulped it down too fast,” replies the other guard, and I realize he’s not had any.

  This is our only chance. So I do it because I don’t know what else to do. I shove one guard into the other and as they stumble, confused by my aggression, I push with all my might. The one who complained of feeling sick falls into the shaft, screaming. But the other guard catches himself, one leg dangling over the rim. I kick at his shoulders, trying to tip him over, but he grabs at me so I have to jump back. I stumble, off balance, and he leaps to his feet, his face red and expression murderous.

  The two Efeans who work the pulley gape like comical actors.

  “Efea will rise. Efea will rise!” My shouts echo down into the shaft. “Act now, while they’re weak from poison!”

  The men at the pulley let go of the rope. As the platform plunges, one of them grapples with the guard. But the guard is bigger, stronger, healthier, and shoves him away. As he slides his short sword free of its sheath, Beswe runs up. She lobs two rocks at him at such close range that they both hit. I tackle him and hold on to his legs as Beswe drops a big milling stone on his abdomen. The other man grabs a rock and bashes it into the guard’s face over and over until he stops screaming and fighting. Somehow there is blood all over my hands.

  A clamor has broken out below.

  “Go to the compound and the barracks,” I say to Beswe. “Take everyone, every rock, and kill them while they’re down.”

  I climb down the rope safety ladder. The platform has crashed all the way down the shaft. The guard I pushed lies sprawled amid the debris, and two slaves have been crushed beneath the heavy baskets. C
hildren cower as slaves and criminals struggle with the guards. The only reason the guards don’t slaughter the laborers is that they are heaving and vomiting even as they fight for their lives. A group of men led by Menesis come running out of the darkness and lay into the guards with the mallets and chisels with which they work the rock.

  I can barely hold myself up by clinging to the rope ladder as the last guard is slaughtered with a chisel in the eye. A haze darkens my vision, and I don’t know if it is the sight of blood and violence, or my still-inflamed eye, that makes me woozy and disoriented.

  Silence spills out from the miners until all I hear is their ragged breathing and the hiss of a burning lamp. There is something grotesque about the way the dead lie there with no spark. Where does a spark go when it departs the flesh, when there is no net to catch it?

  Suddenly in my spinning memory I’m sealed in the oracle’s tomb with my family, clutching a stillborn infant in my arms. I remember how the coffin jolted sideways, how the corpse of Lord Ottonor rolled out toward me, how his cold fingers touched my ankle. How in a panic I dropped the baby’s tiny body onto that of the dead lord. Yet there was still a spark alive in the lord, a life stolen from an innocent girl to help him walk to his own tomb.…

  “What do we do now, Spider?” Menesis asks.

  I have to focus or we won’t succeed.

  “Sweep the mine. Look for stragglers, for guards in hiding. Leave no one behind. We’ll strip the compound of supplies and set out at once. Most important of all, don’t anyone drink or touch the soup.”

  “Whoever goes up that ladder first is going to get a sword in his face,” says one of the convicts.

  “I’ll go up first.” I start but I’m trembling too hard and have to come back down.

  The pulley has broken. Men set to work fixing it as Menesis moves up the ladder with a guard’s whip and a sword slung over his back.

  A voice shouts down the shaft. It’s Djesa.

  “Efea will rise! Can you hear me?”

  “Yes! Yes!” my compatriots shout.

  “It’s safe. They’re all dead!”

  I shout, “Get wagons, supplies, everything! We have to go right away.”

  As the others clamber up, I sit in a daze, almost confounded that it worked. And yet we’re not safe yet. We still have so far to go, a searing journey across the unforgiving Stone Desert knowing that pursuit will be on our heels all too soon.

  The shadows of the dead men flicker at the edges of the lamplight. What if their shadows swim over the ground and crawl into my body? Will I be strong enough to resist? I want to move away from all this death but I’m so tired. I didn’t feel the pain in my wrist when I climbed down but it throbs so badly now that it takes all my energy just to breathe. My eye hurts every time I blink.

  “Spider?” Selukon looms out of the darkness, carrying the last lit lamp.

  How long have I been sitting here?

  He goes on. “The mine is cleared. All the tools and weapons have been taken up.”

  A creak causes us both to startle, but it’s Menesis, descending on the repaired pulley.

  “Spider! It’s time to go. Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” One word is all I have breath for.

  We are the last ones out, leaving the bodies behind.

  The women have done their work. Wagons are hitched, supplies loaded, the weakest clinging to tailgates or crammed together on the front benches beside the drivers. There’s only one road out of the ravine, one path to freedom. For some reason they are waiting for me to take the lead, so even though I’m so exhausted I want only to lie down and sleep, I trudge forward.

  Behind me, the wagons roll. We are on our way.

  The sun is merciless, and I’m grateful when Djesa runs up and dumps an entire bucket of precious water over my head. The people around me laugh, the sound rising into the air as joy and strength. Some begin singing a song I’ve never heard before; its eerie melody winds a prayerful cadence around my bones.

  You are the breath that sparks life in us, the earth that fashions us, the sun whose rays illuminate us, the water that nourishes us. You are the heart.

  Hope burns so hard my five souls swell and strengthen. Even in our ragtag ranks we can survive the Stone Desert. We can. We will.

  Then I hear a faint rumbling sound. At first I think I’m hallucinating. The sky is cloudless, as always, so it can’t be thunder. It rolls on and on. Vibrations tremble through the soles of my feet.

  I hold up a hand to halt the line, then walk forward past a sentinel tower, where a guard sprawls dead in the open door, an overturned soup bowl at his side. As I come around a bend in the gully I see a horrible sight ahead of me. So stunning. So unfair after everything we risked and achieved.

  Wagons fly the Inkos temple banner. In long lines chained between them stride new prisoners for the mines, mostly Efeans but with a few Saroese and foreign people scattered among them. The Saroese guardsmen haven’t spotted me yet. They’re not expecting to meet armed and desperate people. If we rush them, take them unawares, free the captives who are with them to fight beside us… and yet that’s what’s odd. The prisoners don’t walk like beaten, cowed people. They walk like proud soldiers.

  That’s when I see Ro-emnu.

  He’s seated beside the driver of the first wagon. He’s wearing no vest, leaving his torso bare in the manner of Commoners and slaves, but he looks sturdy and well fed, glossy with health and strength. He scans the hills with a piercing gaze, as if he’s already composing a poem about this sun-blasted day. At first I can’t believe it’s him. Surely I am dreaming. My lips form his name but I don’t have enough breath to speak. Footsteps hurry up from behind as Menesis, Selukon, and Djesa join me.

  “A curse on fortune,” says Selukon with a cynical laugh.

  “We fight,” says Djesa.

  “What do you say, Spider?” asks Menesis.

  “Wait,” I say.

  Ro’s gaze skims over us. He doesn’t recognize me. He must think we’re random workers wandering the road.

  I take a step forward and with a last burst of strength open my arms wide in Spider’s gesture of triumph, throwing her webs to the wind.

  His eyes widen. He grabs a whip off the seat next to him, leaps from the moving wagon, and runs to me.

  “Jessamy!”

  “Who are you?” Menesis steps in front of me, brandishing a sword he’s taken from a dead guard.

  Ro slashes the whip through the air for emphasis. “This is the Lion Guard of the Efean army, come to liberate this mine.”

  “Too late, Honored Poet.” I can’t help but sound cocky even though I’m beyond exhausted and barely able to keep to my feet. “We liberated ourselves.”

  The Efean woman who is captain of the Lion Guard takes charge. I sink down in the closest patch of shade, grateful for a chance to rest. Ro kneels beside me and offers a flask of glorious water.

  “Not all at once. You look very ill, Jessamy. You’d better travel in one of the wagons.” He speaks so gently, not like the sarcastic Ro I know, and I hate his gentleness because it makes me feel vulnerable. “That cut by your eye is a fearful scar, and inflamed.”

  “I have salve for it.…” I pat around my vest with my right hand, wince at the lance of pain in my wrist. “It must have gotten lost in the fight. No matter. We’re free.”

  He catches my elbow. “Let me see your arm.”

  “Are you a healer too?”

  “No, just a poet.” His frown worries me. “Your wrist is swollen.”

  “Ouch!”

  “Is it broken?”

  “It can’t be broken! What if it doesn’t heal properly and I can’t run the Fives?”

  “Oh, indeed, what if? I’m relieved to hear you say so. As long as you’re thinking about the Fives, I know you aren’t dying. Although probably even then…”

  A crowd of children led by Anu swarm over to surround us. In daylight they look so skinny and abused that a towering swell of rage ro
ars in my head. But they are smiling and giggling, damp with water they’ve poured over themselves, fingers gripping dates and figs and other rich food taken from the priest’s supply that will probably make them sick.

  “Are you a poet? That’s what everyone is saying.” Anu wriggles with excitement, the others jostling at his back to get a better look.

  “I am a poet, sworn to speak truth.”

  “Why do you carry a whip? Only guards and captains carry whips.”

  “The whip is the goad and guard of truth. It reminds me that truth is a weapon.”

  “Does that mean you’re a soldier too? Can we join the army? Can we fight?”

  A tear runs down Ro’s face as he takes in their emaciated bodies and scarred faces, but his charming smile and gracious tone don’t change at all. “Yes. Those who wish can join the army. You’re too young yet to carry weapons but there are many ways to serve Efea.”

  “The guards said she was the king’s lover,” adds Anu. “That’s why she was sent here. Did you come for her? Are you her husband?”

  For once Ro has no response. He doesn’t say anything. He can’t even look at me.

  Anu frowns, looking scared by the poet’s silence. “Are we really free?”

  “Yes,” I say, irritated by Ro’s refusal to comfort them. “We are free, Anu. All of us.”

  Ro stands. “We are not free to rest. There is a long fight ahead. May I help you up, Honored Lady?”

  I consider trying to get to my feet under my own power but I’m quivering with weakness, so I nod. He helps me to a wagon. In the bed, sacks are being emptied of hidden weapons as the pretend slaves arm themselves. After he props me up amid the sacks he fishes a round of bread out of a covered basket. I’m grateful he makes no comment as I struggle not to cram the whole thing into my mouth at once.

  After I finish I finally ask my most pressing question.