The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“Nay, three seasons or more.”

“I don’t believe you!”

ia did not like to feel diminished.

But his lips twisted up in an ironic smile, which betrayed his mortality and imperfection. “I have never been sure of God’s intentions,” he said softly. “Much has been hidden from our eyes, and more than that is twisted and confused. Where we have seen a horse, perhaps we have mistakenly called it a cow.”

“Without conviction, there cannot be righteous behavior, Father Hugh. Be warned. Doubt is the tool of the Enemy.” She indicated the map. “I know the shape of the world, and its place in God’s plan. Do you?”

“I know what I want,” he said, and with that he made his farewells and departed.

4

THE madman died soon after, leaving his corpse on the stone where he had slept. It was peace of a kind.

There came a string of screaming prisoners dragged down into the depths to walk the wheel, but none of them lasted more than a score of turnings. He discovered by searching with his hands several who died in their sleep, worn to nothing, so emaciated it was a miracle they had been able to walk. Another lay in agony with the flux for hours or days until at last he voided his soul as well as his guts. The sleeping hollow stank so badly afterward that the next four prisoners refused to sleep there, preferring the noisy ledge beside the wheel. Even the miners complained that the smell made them sick, so eventually a pair of workers dumped chalk in the hollow and after a few turnings swept it up again, but for many turnings afterward he shed chalk dust like skin and traced it into the creases of his body and rubbed it out of his hair, although in truth any substance in his hair was a relief against the crawling lice and the endless scratching.

One man slipped and broke his arm, and he died, too, for there was nothing to set it with and none of the guards cared to take the poor man back up, so the sweet sick smell of poison set in and the prisoner died suffering and babbling of nightmare visions. The next one leaped gibbering into the depths because he could not endure the darkness, and as the wheel rumbled on, strange noises echoed up from the pit where no miner walked—scraping and cracking, like dogs gnawing on bones.

Maybe it was better to be dead than living in this purgatory, which wasn’t life or death but a state of abandonment in which neither the angels nor the demons could get their claws sunk into the flesh. He dreamed of sun and wind and the wide seas; he dreamed of the prows of dragon ships slicing through the swells as salt spray streamed against his face and wind snapped in his hair. But down here neither sun nor wind reached; he was buried, already entombed and awaiting only the final sentence.

The miners dug a transverse gallery and found, unexpectedly, a vein of silver-lead ore so rich that the levels sounded at all hours with the uneven staccato of picks and hammers at work and the rattle of four-wheeled barrows and the squinch of the windlasses hauling up filled buckets and the murmur of miners coming and going. They spoke of new shafts to be sunk and fortunes to be made, and yet always they whispered of the creatures that lurked in the pit where the richest deposits lay ripe for the pickings except for the danger of unstable tunnels and the fear of what waited below. Every day a bucket of purest silver was hauled up from the pit, and every day some dead creature or another pitched down into the darkness. Most of the dead men from the workings met their final resting place in this way although the overseer pretended that any prisoner who died while condemned to labor in the workings received a respectable burial and the blessing of a deacon.

All criminals were doomed to the Pit, surely, so what difference does it make if we trade their corpses for silver?

So they said, but their uneasiness wafted like the stink of the dead man’s voided bowels through the levels until the mines reeked with guilt.

The wheels turned. He walked, because it was the only thing he remembered how to do. The dreams wicked away, swiftly come and swiftly gone, and if there had ever been any existence beyond the wheel, he had long since forgotten what it was. Whispers tickled him as smoke and steam did when a miner set fire to heat the rock and then poured water on it so it would crack. In these closed spaces he could smell and hear and taste every least tremor of life.

“They say he’s protected by a twisted spell that looks like a bronze armband.”

“I think he’s a demon.”

“An angel.”

“How else could he have survived so long? No man turns the wheels for as long as he has. Have you ever seen one last beyond two months?”

“Has he been down there two months?”

“Nay, three seasons or more.”

“I don’t believe you!”

“I was here when they brought him in the spring. Mute and blind, if you please.”

“Hsst! It’s almost winter! The levels make no difference to him! If he’s touched in the head, he’s like to an ox pulling in its traces. That would explain it. A mute beast.”

He walked, and he slept, and he ate, and walked and slept and ate, and again. And again.

Until the guards clattered down one turning and surrounded him, thrust a hapless, moaning prisoner into his place on the wheel, and hauled him up the ladders, up and farther up although it was no trouble to climb because he trudged so far every day, until a strange touch hissed against his skin and he swayed, dizzily, as air opened around him and they emerged from the workings.

So many smells! The perfume of earth made him reel. The scent of fallen leaves and the stink of forges dug into his lungs until he coughed. Sounds expanded, fading away into the heavens, which were unbound by stone walls.

There were too many noises to sort through: the hammer of picks breaking up rock; a man’s shout; a goat’s bleat; the susurrus of wind; feet grinding on loose rock and squeaking on damped down earth as a man halted before him.

Sour breath chased across his nostrils. The breeze carried the rich tang of horse manure.

“Here’s the one, Foucher.”