The Two Confessions
Page 18
That also hit home - as intended. They certainly had worked hard, which made this recompense all the more gruelling. Things had been going really well. The main shaft was now widened, safe, lit and laddered. They'd lost no one: not had so much as an injury (save what the overseers deliberately inflicted). It was a measure of their success that the second, auxiliary, pump had gone below so soon. After that the black waters were really on the run and long drowned levels were being reclaimed all over. True, they were all blocked by sorcery but you couldn't have everything. Come the time for penetration they'd be spoilt for choice of routes.
Samuel uneasily recalled these thoughts and choice of words when the Wizard continued. Maybe his freak-type really could trespass unperceived in normal men's minds. Maybe the mob was right back in Dark Age days when wizards went to the bonfire directly they revealed themselves. The Church had forbidden that but Trevan could well believe she was mistaken.
‘As for the membranes obstructing our desires,’ the fat man informed them, ‘their virginity is intact. I have checked each one. The magic is old and dusty and undisturbed in a manner I cannot adequately explain to you... non-practitioners.’
Those present looked from one to the other as they considered what less flattering description he'd applied to them in the privacy of his head.
‘They remain unpenetrated from either direction, I assure you. Every bit as virgo intacta as the… husband,’ he gestured languidly with a heavily be-ringed hand at Samuel, ‘of this project-cum-bride would wish.’
If he actually did read thoughts the Wizard ought to have then paled or fled. Samuel was constructing shortened futures for him.
However, there was no outward sign of it and Trevan spoke in a reasoned, reasonable tone. Most were not deceived, any more than they still believed this was 'just' a mine. The monkeys had chattered whilst the organ-grinder listened. Now he'd decree how it was going to be.
‘I'm very pleased to hear that,’ said Samuel. ‘Because for as long as possible we should let sleeping dogs - or whatever they are - lie. So: install the new pump when Jimmy returns with it. Have it perpetually watched by two - no, three - armed men: non-nervous types. Get the water down further. Keep the miners occupied: have them tidy the camp or whitewash coal if need be. The rest of you get ready. Because the time is approaching, gentlemen, for us to go further in. But first I want to find an unguarded way. You see, call me over-sensitive if you like, but I get the distinct impression we’re unwelcome here. Accordingly, let us also be unexpected….’
U[U[U[U[U[U[U
cHAPTER 33
‘Gone? Gone where?’
‘To a better place, Master Trevan. One’s already set off, the second's departing shortly. Dunno 'bout the third. You best come quick.’
This oldster's job was to deliver the workers their dinner or 'bait' of pasties, not supply crucial assessments. Therefore, Samuel considered he’d done well - but shouldered him aside all the same.
Samuel also agreed on the need for haste, but not so much of it as to prevent him fetching pistols first. On the way he also gathered some security types. They were still drowsy and thinking breakfast thoughts but his bellow roused them.
‘You and you.’ Two of the soldier 'volunteers' from Llanthony were gestured into the descent tub. ‘Fast as safety allows,’ Samuel instructed the taciturn Welshman who oversaw the shafthead gear, ‘and then send three more. Count off thirty minutes: if you've heard damn all after that then seal the pit.’ Then Trevan jumped into the craft himself and left the upper world behind.
Because he was feared rather than loved, his orders received close attention. They dropped like a stone and knuckles whitened as they clenched on the cold iron of the tub. Swinging wildly on the supporting chain, the caged canary piped its alarm.
They were entirely in the hands of the Welsh 'top-boy' above, but he'd spent a whole lonely lifetime tending winches and cages, seeing people down and awaiting their return. That's how he'd got out of the habit of talking. Samuel paid him well and was now well rewarded in turn. The man knew just the depth they wanted, right to the last ratchet, and delivered them there safe, if shaken.
There was still light at the pump station, which was good news. They could lay aside the giant lucifer-flares brought for emergency and rely on the safer mine lanterns. Samuel studied the scene, read the story, and found no other grounds for cheer.
The requirement for leaps into the dark was past. A plank jetty now extended from the tunnel mouth into the shaft, making getting to and fro far more civilised. Samuel went first, seax and pistol foremost. Behind him he heard the tub bell rung to order its return, and then the wary tread of boots in his support. Out in the chasm the great chain groaned and protested and they felt rather than saw the tub leave, stranding them there. It provoked the pang of regret that Samuel was told never quite left miners, however long in service.
His perceptions were now so skewed that the main thing he noticed was the pump. Yet more trouble and expense. It was just like its predecessor, all leprous and besmirched. Samuel could even see into the guts of the machine through holes oozed deep into the interior. It would never work again. Only then did he look at the people. They were in similar shape.
One was well gone, his face and abdomen and loins erased by the same stuff that afflicted the pump. But for a distinctive neckerchief Trevan would never have recognised him. Then he noticed some kind of mushroom growths flourishing within the ex-man's new cavities and could examine him no more. The pervading aroma - sweat meets sewage meets cloying sweetness - was now reaching them all and they were glad that the alert had cancelled breakfast.
The second of the engine guards was still with them but plainly on his way. You didn't need to be a surgeon to see it. The substance was bubbling away at his legs, still virulent and vital, releasing little gouts of vapour as it triumphed over portions of flesh. The man now concluded in a spreading pool. Samuel had to command his own stomach contents back down.
‘Finish him. Use your knife,’ he told the soldier behind, and then pressed further on, weapons poised. There proved to be not far to go and nothing more to see. The barrier remained in place, detectable in invisible fingers caressing the skin plus a whiff of corrupting spice. Samuel backed off from it. Of the third guard he knew to have been posted there was no trace.
The dying man was still dying; the selected soldier, blade idly in hand, still standing over him.
‘I told you to-…,’ said Trevan.
‘No,’ said the soldier. The refusal was flat and unalterable. ‘He still sees, still speaks. You want cold murder: butcher's work.’
Samuel didn't argue. This was a scene and place that could breed mutiny.
‘Move forward,’ he ordered his companions. ‘Watch the tunnel.’ They were happy to comply.
He forced himself to kneel by the fallen guard. Close to him, or perhaps just more concentrated near the floor, the stench was worse. Samuel felt its active ingredients sizzling in his nostrils. To his surprise he saw the milk-sop soldier's scruples had some grounding in fact: the guard's eyes came in and out of focus; he was mumbling. Trevan remembered him now: a great gangly Surrey-hills hillbilly boy: all 'o-aaa's and 'I be's and rustic innocence: not long in the infantry.
Samuel sought for some appropriate behaviour, dredging back into the days when he was still a Christian.
‘What do you want? Shall I get a priest?’
That woke him up. His eyelids shot open, his voice returned. Samuel marvelled at it: a whole swathe of him was already vaporised.
‘Yes! But... no! NO!’ The man ought not to have been able to muster a shout, let alone grip Samuel's lapel. The stout material tore. ‘No priest!’ said the dying youth.
‘Alright, alright,’ Trevan calmed him. ‘Suits me….’
‘I carn't….’
Samuel gently disengaged the clawed hand and set it back down.
‘Can't what?’
‘I…. No heaven now, not for I. Oh God!’
‘You're going anyway. Tell me what happened.’
Annoyingly, the youth could only think of himself.
‘I couldn't help... so pretty... so ripe. She... he... oh, I be shamed!’
Trevan forced himself closer.
‘Come on, man; you're running out of time: spit it out.’
‘Oh no! It can't be shriven. That one cries-out-to-heaven, don't it? T'ain't my fault. They tempted I.’
Samuel was also now subject to temptation; a desire to hoick the whinger up and wring words out of him. Against that course of action was the realisation that the man had two armed allies nearby, and that down here in this forsaken place they were all decoupled from the normal world. There was no back-up to his authority but himself, no deference but what he could command.
So Samuel chose discretion: analysis rather than action. Weren't there four - or maybe seven - unforgivable so-called sins the Catechism said 'cried out to heaven for vengeance'? Hadn't Father Omar once delicately recounted them? Had that been one of the days he'd paid attention?
Samuel was distracted by the sound of the tub descending. The requested reinforcements would be with them within minutes. His options were further curtailed.
‘Come on, come on!’ he said. With luck the soldiers would think he was urging on the tub.
‘Mum?’ said the youth - and then solved Samuel's dilemma by leaving the world behind.
‘Hell-bloody-fire!’ spat Trevan in exasperation. The uneducated soldiers obliged him by misunderstanding.
‘Aye,’ said one. ‘Too true. That's what were 'ere. That's what he was feared of.’
Then they both crossed themselves. For form's sake, Samuel deceitfully joined in.
************
By the time they got the bodies to the top, gingerly wrapped in thick shrouds of canvas, word had got around. Work was at a standstill and an audience gathered at the shafthead. Even the Cymric bonded-labourers were craning their necks over the wattle walls of their corral. Trevan's expression discouraged direct enquiry but the foremost could see for themselves that the dead men... weren't the right shape.
Samuel scowled at the low buzz of speculation and realised he was losing control of it all. Thoughts of 'it all' made him scan the whole mining camp and appreciate just how much he'd undertaken. All these men, all this gear, all these efforts, and to what end?
The end of two, maybe three, lives - so far - came the inner answer; not that he'd lose much sleep about them. All via pursuing the end of General Mott's ambitions, and the end of some ancient niggle of the Church and… the end of love for one woman (and her end too, being honest). That was ultimately where all this came from: clearing his way to her end: love and lust in unspecified proportions. Was just that worth all this?
He wouldn't always have conceived it in those crude terms. He could have any number of women, for money or the asking. So, did it absolutely have to be that one? Did he really still feel the same way?
It was a crushingly dangerous question to pose, but one quality Samuel still retained was his courage. He was willing to abide by whatever the response. So he asked - and received confirmation. Not one faint-heart brain cell failed to step forward screaming 'yes!'
Though fresh returned into daylight, Trevan’s first few moments above ground had been dark. He now shrugged off the bad memory and moved on. Yes, all this was all worth it; and by comparison there was nothing else to worry about.
Except possibly.… His survey of what he had wrought expanded to take in the setting and surrounding hills.
‘Who are they?’
His staff had been keenly anticipating his first words, hopeful of all-compassing explanation. Their grudging faith was misplaced in every respect. They followed his pointing finger.
‘Just some idlers, Mr Trevan.’
‘Been there all morning,’ added one of the tally-clerks, a known window-gawper.
Samuel had learnt to prefer instinct over dull-dog reason every time, and instinct told him that the distant knot of figures staring down on them were not well-wishers. And both ways of thinking equally disapproved of their formation and their standing too still.
‘Reach out to them, Wizard,’ he ordered briskly. ‘Tell me what they want.’
The magician had to screw up his piggy eyes to even behold them at all.
‘Too far,’ he said, dismissively. ‘Magic, yes - miracles, no.’
For his part Samuel couldn't see a distinction, but declined to argue.
‘If you say so. Then go below and test if the sorcerous membrane by the pump station has been ruptured. Perhaps our missing man went through there.’
'And perhaps the stench and goo will wipe the smirk off your chops,' he thought to himself.
Samuel let him waddle off a few paces before shouting:
‘But travel in the tub on your own: we don't want the chain breaking!’
He had the satisfaction of seeing the man's shoulders clench.
‘And you,’ he addressed the security staff as though they'd failed him, ‘go fetch those nosy 'idlers' up there. I’m told the devil finds work for idle hands: so let's save some souls from Satan!’
U[U[U[U[U[U[U
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'A CATECHISM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE'
or
'THE HA'PENNY CATECHISM'
First published (in English as well as Latin) Winchester 1745.
Imprimatur: + Richard Challoner, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Revised and reprinted from time to time. This edition 1996. Total printing over 30 million copies.
Approved by the archbishops and bishops of United England, and directed to be used in all the parishes thereof and appertaining thereto.
1. Q: Who made you?
A: God made me.
2. Q: Why did God make you? ...
...
327. Q: Which are the four sins crying out to heaven for vengeance?
A: The four sins crying out to heaven for vengeance are:
1) Wilful murder.[ Genesis 4 ]
2) The sin of Sodom.[ Genesis 18 ]
3) Oppression of the poor.[ Exodus 2 ]
4) Defrauding labourers of their wages. [ James 5 ]
************
cHAPTER 34
‘Too late, I reckon.’
‘For what?’ said Samuel.
‘For saving his soul – like you said: from Sa-....’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know what I said. More to the point, what about the rest of them?’
‘Gone, Master Trevan,’ exclaimed the soldier. ‘Vanished off the face of the earth. Don't see how, but they were all gone 'cept matey here.’
Samuel wasn't happy. He'd been through all this 'gone' business shortly before and it had turned into trauma. How come all bar one of the group on the hill evaded detection by his swarm of horsemen? On the other hand, they'd at least solved one mystery - at the cost of posing another.
‘Has he said anything yet?’
‘Nothing as makes sense,’ replied the captain of the pursuit. ‘He just stood there grinning and awaiting us. We had no trouble out of him: not as such….’
Samuel didn't swallow that trailing hook-line. He'd make his own judgement.
They'd confined ‘matey’, the once missing, now found, third mine guard in the site office. Everyone who'd had contact with him was dropping hints that all was not well. Samuel had got the message a dozen times over but refused to entertain them by running with it.
‘And how could he have got right up there?’ he challenged the searchers, taking a different tack from the one they wanted. ‘He hadn't been gone long. Did you see any open shafts that might connect with the mine?’
They shook their heads. Trevan's scowl deepened.
‘Why not just rejoice?’ asked the Wizard, who was standing alongside.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘That is what the Good Book advises, Mr Trevan. Matthew, chapter 18: 'If a man have a hundred sheep and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray?’’
‘Yes, thank you so much, Wizard, for the scriptural comfor-....’
‘‘And if so be that he find it, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.’ Need more be said?’
The Wizard had recently re-emerged to confirm that the unseen barrier by the pump-station had indeed been breached, but was now closed firm against them once more. His session below had not dismayed him, nor inverted his grin. Samuel knew he shouldn't let himself be goaded but he was striving against an expert. Retaliation was irresistible.
‘On reflection, Mr thaumaturge, I now see you're absolutely right. So come with me and rejoice over this lost sheep. Tell me what you make of him.’
The Wizard, otherwise occupied, hadn't heard all that Trevan had. He accompanied the little group to the site-cabin free of trepidation. Even the two sentinels posted by its door didn't alert him.
Fortunately, Samuel knew a little of the lost-and-found guard's prior state: because he couldn't judge the present without knowing what went before. This was a local man, beyond the first flush of youth; almost of yeoman status, though not above accepting wages to supplement his farming. A captain in the militia, a family man and churchwarden; well respected in the area. He was a natural choice for a supervisor and general help. Trevan had spoken to him once or twice, though what about wasn't recalled. He’d given the impression of a pillar-of-society sort.
Such people don't normally flash lascivious smiles or manipulate their parts, or leastways not before an audience. The arrival of Trevan's party didn't stop or abash him. He had no 'hello's' for them, or any words at all. His freshly bloodied nose seemed no bother.