The Gathering Storm

by Kate Elliott

  “I don’t know.” Shards of memory flashed in his mind like lightning, burned into his eyes. “You are skrolin. My people called you that once. It was one of your kind who gave me this.” He brushed his fingers over the gleaming armband, cool to his touch although its surface burned as though it were hot. “I remember the great city. A shining city.”

  “Ah! Ah!” They stirred, sighing and groaning, and fell silent again. Their milky eyes swirled and stilled. A few brushed fingers over rock before curling back up into their crouch.

  Pewter-skin spoke. “Tell us of the city.”

  “Are you going to eat me?”

  “Eat you?”

  “The bodies of my people. They are thrown down here for your food; and then you give silver to the miners in exchange.”

  They huffed, all their breath whuffing out. Dust stirred on the floor. First one, then a second and third, and finally all of them uncurled and with a rolling gait scurried out of the chamber, leaving him alone. He rubbed his filthy hair, shivering with fear and exhaustion as he struggled to get his bearings, to remember, but he could make sense of nothing. He possessed only scraps, like the chipped and broken ornaments the skrolin draped around their gnarled bodies. Nothing fit together.

  Hadn’t he seen a woman with wheat-colored hair, her belly swollen with pregnancy? She had betrayed him! But he wasn’t sure how. It seemed as if anger and sadness had been his companions, but even they escaped him now.

  He staggered to his feet, hit his head on the rough ceiling, and collapsed back to his knees while pain wept through him. It was all he could do to draw breath, let it out, and suck it in again. Once the world, every fiber of his being, had not hurt so much, but his head hurt all the time now. That was why he had been blind and mute. That blow to the head had damaged him.

  When had it happened?

  He couldn’t recall.

  A butterfly touch fluttered over his back. He jerked up, saw Pewter-skin folded into that boulder curl just beyond arm’s length. There was something wrong with the creature’s smooth skin; the lack niggled at him, but he couldn’t place it. He couldn’t remember.

  “Come.” Pewter-skin used sounds, touch, and gesture to convey his meaning. “You speak words that poison. The others turn away from you. We look away from the thing that offends us. But I think I first will show you. I think you are ignorant.” The skrolin unrolled and waddled away.

  Walking made pain lance through his temple with every footfall, but he followed as the chamber narrowed on all sides. He walked in a crouch until the ceiling opened up and the walls fell away to a larger chamber. Pewter-skin led him to a low opening, where he crawled on hands and knees over coarse rock then cautiously down a steep incline to a larger chamber ribbed with veins of a mineral he could not identify. A well-worn path took them along a branching tube, past two shafts that plunged into darkness, three stone pillars with rubble heaped to one side, and four branches forking off the main corridor whose ceilings curved so low he could never have hoped to squeeze through them. The ceiling in the main tunnel remained high enough that he did not hit his head, and finally, where the floor ramped up, Pewter-skin scuttled through an opening and he scrambled up behind him, scraping his knees and palms although the soles of his feet were so callused that not even the rough rock edges could cut them. The ceiling and walls opened up with startling speed to a much larger cavern, and he sucked in a breath in surprise, inhaling a smell as thick as bubbling yeast in a closed, warm room filled with rising bread.

  White growths, like huge mushrooms, grew in tidy rows and discrete clumps across the floor of the cavern. That powerful smell pervaded the air. He coughed, blinking back the stinging aftertaste of putrefaction that made his eyes water and his tongue turn dry. Life cannot grow from dead rock.

  Corpses lay in stages of decay. The freshest bloomed heavily with a funguslike mass; elsewhere, a few last sprigs decorated bones as the spongy fungus devoured the last shreds of the living.

  Pewter-skin plucked a handful of the white stuff and ate it.

  “We live in a trap. Clavas keeps us alive. The empty ones give nourishment to the clavas. So we trade silapu for the empty ones. We cannot eat the silapu, though some say we could in the time of the city. In that time, we were a strong and clever people, handsome and crusted with growths. Now we are sick and dying, even the free ones.”

  “Where are the free ones? Why are you in a trap?”

  “Come.” Pewter-skin beckoned.

  He followed through the garden of corpses and bones and into a tunnel streaked with discolorations that glittered as he passed. By the glow of his armband he picked out veins and crystals grown into the rock. Sparkling grains slipped under his feet. Tunnels branched out to either side and crossed over and under where shafts pierced down or up until their path bewildered him and he knew himself lost. Pewter-skin led the way unerringly, and after an interminable time that might have lasted the length of a hymn or a hundred years they squeezed between twin pillars and he stared up in wonder. The ceiling and walls of this wide cavern shone where the light reflected off it, although the walls faded to darkness not so many steps away. The floor was unusually level. Here the skrolin had used scoured bones to build a strange architecture: a pyramid of skulls; an archway woven of thighbones cunningly trimmed and threaded together; a wharf constructed of linked rib cages; shoulder blades and pelvic bones arranged in a crude miniature temple or governor’s palace.

  “This is the tale of the city,” said Pewter-skin. “We try to remember.”

  “Why can’t you remember?” he asked.

  “The tale is told from one to another through many lives, but we forget if it is true, or if it is false.”

  “The trap you speak of? Is that a true tale, or a false one?”

  “Ah!” The sound cut, edged with rage, resignation, and sorrow. “Come. Come.”

  A trail bifurcated the bone city, leading them past the eerie structures to the far side where ceiling met floor. There, at the joining, a narrow passage ramped down.

  “This is the trap.”

  He smelled water. He got down on hands and knees and crawled forward into a tunnel far too low for him to stand upright. He hadn’t gone more than a body’s length when his hands met moisture. He touched liquid to tongue, spat it out, and wormed back out.

  “It tastes like sea water.”

  “Such water is poison to us. Through that tunnel many watches ago we come, thirty of us, seeking luiadh. The earth shivers. The feet of the wise ones far to the north shift and tremble. The waters rush in to trap us here where the tunnels run in a circle. We cannot get out.”

  He had to sort through this speech. “These tunnels you live in now are a dead end. The tunnel you came in through filled with water because of an earthquake. Now you are all trapped here.”

  “Yes. Fourteen of us have emptied, but we the rest endure with the clavas.”

  “So you trade silver to the miners in exchange for the corpses, which are the soil on which your food grows.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is this tunnel that leads back to your home?”

  “Yes. Through this one we came. This tunnel is the path to the home, where the tribe roams the long caverns.”

  “Is there no other path?”

  “None. Many watches we have looked. Many watches we have dug. We wait in a trap.”

  “Can you not climb to the surface? Find another entrance into the depths?”

  “The Blinding burns us. The water poisons us. We cannot reach them. We are in a trap.”

  “Can you not dig your way back? You are miners, are you not?”

  “We dig in the earth. We dig, but slowly. We who came to be trapped here scout only when first we come here. We left the strong tools behind. Also, we are too few to dig so far within the span of our life. We will die here, waiting. One by one.”

  He nodded. “I’ll go. I’ll swim as far as I can and see if I can get to the other side.”

  “The wat
er does not poison you?”

  “No. I can’t drink it, but it does not poison me as long as I do not drink it.”

  “Why.”

  “I don’t know why. The salt is too strong. That’s why we can’t drink it.”

  “No. Why do you help us? Do you not wish to escape back to the Blinding?”

  He sank down cross-legged, rubbing his eyes. “Why would I not help you? You are trapped. Maybe I can free you by telling your kinfolk that you still live. If I climb back up the shaft, they will kill me, so I am doomed anyway. Maybe God sent me here to help you, seeing your need.”

  “Who is God?”

  He laughed, and the sound of laughter spooked Pewter-skin, who leaped backward and rolled up into the curled position, like a turtle retreating inside its shell. Yet his laughter acted like a knife, cutting one of the strands of the rope that chafed him. So many things bound him: his empty memory, his aching head, the mystery of his anger and grief. Still, laughter was its own enigma, a tonic to ease the burdens of life.

  “Let me gather my strength first. I am so tired. I hurt. I need water to drink. Share your clavas with me, if you will. Tell me your stories while I rest. Then I will see how far I can swim.”

  3

  ZACHARIAS’ days fell into a routine. On fair mornings, Hugh presided over the schola, such as it was, with certain likely children seated on the ground before him as he taught them to write and read. Zacharias was never allowed to come close enough to listen, for if he had, he would have learned to write and thereby have a means to speak, and it was obviously Hugh’s intention to prevent Zacharias from ever speaking in any form again. He had, therefore, to content himself with scratching letters in the dirt with a stick when he thought no one would observe him, and from these bent and crooked symbols he tried to puzzle out a meaning, for since he knew the liturgy by heart surely he must discover the secret that allowed words to be poured into letters, the Word that brought forth Creation according to the Holy Book in which he no longer believed. Yet there was something, surely, to the Logos, the thought and will that nestled at the heart of the universe, its kernel, its soul—if the universe had a soul. If any man had a soul.

  Hugh had long since given up his soul, yet how might a man appear so beautiful and so kind and at the same time hide within himself such a poisoned heart? How could any great lord stand so patiently before a dozen dirty Salavii peasant children and teach them their letters? A pious churchman might, who hoped to see them become deacons and fraters in their turn who could minister to their countryfolk and thus bring their heathen relatives into the Light. Did that mean Hugh was a pious churchman? Or a cunning fraud? Yet he labored in support of King Henry and Queen Adelheid as their loyal servant.

  These contradictions Zacharias could make no sense of. He did not understand a man of such elegance who could nevertheless live in this wilderness without complaint, keep his hands clean and yet bloody them with such cruelty as cutting out an innocent man’s tongue, teach snot-nosed common children like any humble frater and yet walk among the great nobles in Darre with the arrogance of a man born to the highest rank. Be ruthless and yet seem so compassionate when mothers brought hurt children to his care, or his soldiers confessed their cares and worries and little crimes to him, for which he always prescribed a just penance leavened by the kiss of mercy.

  If I did not hate him, I would love him.

  The weeks passed as spring flowered around them. The church rose plank by plank, and many nights Hugh took Zacharias, Deacon Adalwif, and the other clerics to the crown where they studied the stars and the mysteries hoarded by the mathematici and prepared for the spell that would soon be their part to weave.

  “What of the miracle of the phoenix?” Deacon Adalwif often asked Hugh as they walked back through the earthworks by lamplight.

  “Did you see it with your own eyes?”

  “Nay, I did not, yet these Salavii folk and I were spared by the intercession of a saint dressed in the garb of a King’s Lion. The Quman army passed right by us while we were helpless and yet none were touched.”

  “A miracle, truly. But why do you think this miracle is linked to the heresy you speak of?”

  “I know it in my heart, Your Excellency. Do you not also? You do not condemn it, as you would if you did not doubt the old teachings.”

  Hugh did not reply, but his arm tightened on the book he carried with him day and night. He watched over that book in the same way he watched over Zacharias, who was never left alone during the day and was by night chained to the center post of the tent.

  The Feast of St. Barbara marked the first day of Avril of the year seven hundred and thirty-five. Thirteen days later the Feast of St. Sormas dawned with a shower of rain followed hard on by a balmy south wind that chased the clouds away. As the novices gathered for their schooling, two excited Salavii boys informed Hugh that the waters had receded enough with the coming of spring that he could, if he dared, creep into the burial mound.

  “What does he mean?” Hugh asked Deacon Adalwif.

  She shook her head. “Nothing holy, my lord presbyter. This is an old grave mound such as the ancient ones erected over the bodies of their queens. That is why I insisted we build the church. I would have built it atop the hill to hallow the site and make it holy, but I could not obstruct the crown. Nevertheless, some of the children discovered a pool last summer and a hole that leads deep into the hill. They meant to crawl in, but I put a stop to it. There’s no telling what might lie inside an old grave mound like this one.”

  “Surely you are not superstitious enough to believe in evil spirits, Deacon?”

  “Nay, nay, not at all, Your Excellency.”

  “Best that I investigate for myself, if the way is clear,” said Hugh, although Zacharias thought his color unusually high. “In that way, Deacon, drive out any lingering evil from this spot.”

  “Of course, Your Excellency,” she said, looking relieved. “It has not been easy to keep the older boys from exploring where they will. One poor lad drowned in the river last autumn.”

  “Let the children show me the entrance. I’ll take Brother Zacharias to carry a lamp and Gerbert to guard the entrance behind me so none follow.”

  “You’ll take no others in with you?”

  “Have I anything to fear? The bones of the heathen dead have no power over me, Deacon. Nor over you either.”

  “Yes, my lord. In truth, my lord, you have the right of it.” But she still looked frightened.

  And why not? Zacharias had leisure to reflect as Gerbert waded into a knee-deep pool of water lying up against a precipice cut into the high face of the earthworks about halfway around the hill from the little village and their camp. A trickle of water had, over the years, eroded the face of the earth away to reveal an entryway, two stones capped by a lintel, once buried, Zacharias supposed, by the tumulus and now half concealed by a curtain of moss. If the children hadn’t explored here, none of the others might ever have noticed. Gerbert hacked away the moss with his sword.

  “Come.” Hugh held a lamp aloft as he waded into the water and squeezed through the opening.

  The spring sun laid a warm hand across Zacharias’ shoulders, quite in contrast to the freezing water that iced his toes and calves as soon as he followed Hugh into the narrow tunnel, which was just higher than his head and quite dark. His hand shook, causing the light from his lamp to tremble as it illuminated stone walls incised with spirals and lozenges. He was afraid of the dark, but Hugh frightened him more. The corridor widened enough that a man might slosh through the knee-high water without scraping his shoulders on either wall.

  “What’s this?” murmured Hugh.

  Zacharias almost ran into a queer scaffolding that, twisting out of the water, was filthy with pale worms which after a moment he recognized as the remains of rotting feathers.

  He retched, struck so hard by memory that he emptied his stomach into the water before he could stop himself.

  “I pray you,” sa
id Hugh, stepping sideways to avoid the stink, “what is wrong, Zacharias?”

  He couldn’t answer.

  “Ah.” Hugh groped in the water and fished up a skull patched with tufts of black hair. “I take it these are the infamous wings of a Quman warrior, and this, I suppose, his head. He must have crawled in here to die after the battle. This certainly is no ancient queen laid to rest by her devout servants. Come.” If the matter now floating like scum atop the water disgusted him, he gave no sign of it, although it was difficult to interpret his expression in the shifting light and shadow that played across his face as he moved on.

  Sweating and anxious, Zacharias waded obediently after. The tunnel floor sloped imperceptibly upward. The water receded and gave way to a shoreline and grainy earth as they walked cautiously into the darkness. Hugh halted to study the symbols carved into the stone: more spirals and lozenges, and long strips of hatching and even, here and there, dots and lines that looked like a calendar. What if Hugh found another daimone imprisoned here and let it capture Zacharias’ body? He whimpered.

  “What was that?” Hugh asked, pausing, then went on.

  The tunnel opened into a broad chamber, a black pit made eerie because of the flickering play of their lights over the floor. The walls remained in shadow, and the ceiling lofted so high above them that it, too, was hidden.

  “There she lies, poor soul.” Hugh walked a circuit of the chamber, shining his lamp into three alcoves built into the corbeled chamber. Shaking his head, he returned to the stone slab that marked the center of the chamber.

  “I had thought I might find Blessing here with her attendants,” he mused, more to himself than to Zacharias. “But perhaps that was a false vision, not a true one. It makes no sense. Why would Sanglant leave his daughter sleeping beneath one of the crowns? Held in safekeeping? Yet I can still find her. Surely that was Liath traveling in the same manner we walk through the crowns. Who was traveling with her? A sorcerer of great power; I felt her power in my bones.” He knelt beside the skeleton laid out on the slab. The dead queen gleamed under the light because the gold that had once decorated her clothing had long ago fallen in among her bones.