The hours fell into a numb, deadening routine. The leather bags came and went. Faintly, through intervening rock, Tagart could hear other picks at work, the occasional muffled hum of men’s voices. At long intervals an overseer climbed down the shaft to supervise progress.
Halfway through the shift a wooden gong sounded at the top of the shaft: the signal to break for food. An old man brought them bread and bowls of boiled meat or beans and lentils. The same gong sounded at the end of the day when the shift was over and the miners were marched up the grassy slope of the hill, past piles of timber and white rubble, to the canopies and poles of the slaves’ quarters.
* * *
Bewry was dead. Segle knew that her term in the kitchens would soon be coming to an end. Luckily Blean, the mines Trundleman, had no direct authority over her, but she had seen him watching her as she worked, and now that Bewry was gone and they no longer needed to make him compliant, there could be little reason to deny Blean’s request much longer.
It made no difference to her. Her life, the tribe’s honour, had finished. The end had come in that moment at Lepe when the soldiers had appeared. She remembered the look of the sea, green waves blending to grey in the strait, foam crashing on the shingle as the tribe wandered the tideline. In pairs and threes oystercatchers, black and white, flying just off the beach, piped from their red beaks and fought the wind in the troughs. Over the expanse of saltings and samphire to the west she remembered the wild cries of the curlews and godwits and the distant noise of the gullery where the Guelen had spent a week living on eggs; and she remembered the smell of the marshes, of brine and rotting weed, the air somehow making your skin more smooth, and when you licked the back of your hand it tasted of the sea. And she remembered another sound, urgent and dangerous, emerging from the roar of the surf: hounds.
The soldiers had outmanoeuvred them, coming from the east along the shoreline. Others had appeared from the woods on the landward side. There had been nowhere to run but into the mud.
Segle emptied another bag of oats into the cauldron. Now Bewry too. She was past tears. She thought of his small body lying somewhere in the bracken and a little more of the light went from her eyes.
At first she had believed the story, that Tagart had killed him, but now she was not sure. She did not know. Boak, she had heard, had defended him last night. Did that mean anything? And what had he said to her about a promise? She could think now of nothing but the strength of his grip on her wrist. His words had escaped her. But his eyes had not, nor had the sound of his voice. In them she had recognized her own kind.
“More beans here!”
Segle pushed the hair from her brow and went to obey.
* * *
“So from what you have told me,” Tagart said, “there can be no escape from the cage, nor from here. That means we must wait our chance and break from the bathing party.”
It was the fifth day. Tagart and Boak were working alone in a minor gallery at the bottom of the main shaft. Tagart had recovered some of his strength. The injuries sustained on his walk were healing, his eye had opened, and regular food and sleep were bringing back tone and balance to his muscles and limbs. Work underground was arduous and unpleasant, but he was young. The output of the other slaves was well within his capacity, and he saw no reason to extend himself. For long periods when lightly supervised he and Boak would sit and rest, taking up their picks and hammers when they heard the creak of rungs which meant an overseer was descending. The overseer in charge of the main shaft, named Stobas, was a broad-faced man with pale blue eyes and straight black hair, shoulder-length, tied into a pigtail. Like all the overseers, he was himself a former slave who knew no existence but Valdoe.
“He’s coming,” Tagart said, and crawled into the end of the gallery, where he began to hammer conscientiously at the chalk.
Stobas appeared at the mouth of the gallery, swinging himself off the ladder and into the tunnel. He carried a lamp with him, and in his belt a blackthorn truncheon fitted with a wrist-strap.
“Work is slow here,” he said. “You’re lazing.”
Boak said, “The seam is harder at the end, master.”
Stobas briefly examined the rock face. He scratched it with his thumbnail, wiped the chalk off with his index finger. “More bags or you’ll both be beaten,” he said.
“Yes, master,” Boak said.
Stobas paused at the ladder. “Didn’t you hear the gong? End of shift. Get above ground.”
At the top of the shaft, in a wide cavern, the ladders became a permanent staircase of worn and chalk-stained planking which led into a sloping tunnel with daylight at its end. Tagart and Boak emerged, squinting against the sunset.
“Full count!” another overseer cried out, as Stobas stood surveying the ragged ranks of slaves, three deep, thirty yards long.
“To quarters!”
The men turned and wearily started up the hill, guarded by the overseers and the squad of soldiers sent from the Trundle at times of shift change. Other soldiers kept watch during the day and night at each exit from the mines, armed with spear-slings and bolas.
Following a mass breakout some years before, the watch on the slaves’ quarters had been reinforced. A system of head-counting at shift change, meal times, and on entering and leaving the sleeping cage reduced still further the opportunities for undetected escape. Similar vigilance attended the details formed for timber cutting, water haulage, and the like, or when, twice a month, small groups of slaves were taken down to the river to be cleaned. If a slave did manage to escape, his chances of remaining free were low. Teams of tracker dogs with their handlers could be dispatched from the Trundle within minutes.
The men of the night-shift were counted out and passed down the hill to the flint workings; Tagart and the others were counted into the refectory and in silence sat down to their meal.
Bewry’s sister was there. On several occasions over the past four days Tagart had met her eyes, but since the incident on the first evening they had not spoken, for he and Boak had always been seated well away from the cauldrons. But tonight, as they were the last in line, they were put at the end of the table nearest the big clay hearth. Segle moved to and fro; as Tagart watched her, he realized with a pang what he had not admitted to himself before – that she reminded him in her movements and attitudes of his wife.
“What is it, my friend?” Boak said.
Tagart shook his head.
Warily Boak kept an eye on the overseers. “What’s troubling you?”
Tagart could not tell him. He did not know how to put his feelings into words. How could he explain what his life had been; how could he describe what had been taken away? “I do not like captivity,” he said at last.
Boak whispered. “Then are you serious about escape? Or was that just talk?”
“You said you’d changed your mind today. If you want to come with me, I plan to break from the bathing party.”
“We’ll never do it. They bring the dogs down to the river.”
The overseer passed behind them. Tagart continued handing dirty bowls to the serving-slaves. Segle was two tables away, not near him. He looked at her and she half turned, and Tagart knew that she was aware of him as he was of her.
“You’ve never been in a bathing party,” Boak hissed. “I know what to expect. There must be another way.”
“How did the other man do it? The nomad?”
“No one knows.”
“Then it must be the bathing party. When are we due to go?”
“The day after tomorrow.” Boak sneaked a glance over his shoulder at the overseers. Their attention was elsewhere. “It’s too dangerous. Even if we get away, where can we go? Where can we hide?”
“In the forest. No one can catch me there. If you come with me, you will be safe too.”
Boak looked doubtful.
Tagart shrugged. He needed Boak, or at least, he needed someone who knew the routine. But once on the loose Boak might well prove a hindr
ance. “Decide tomorrow,” Tagart said.
Boak nudged him to silence. An overseer had come to stand by the cauldrons, idly watching the ladlers at work. Now the freshly filled bowls were being given out. A grey-haired woman had been serving Tagart’s table; Segle spoke a few words to her.
Deliberately Segle came over. Her presence beside Tagart was almost tangible, and even before she opened her mouth and spoke he sensed something shared, wordless, a sensation he had only known once before. But her face was hardened by determination and as she slid the bowls on the table she spilled a little of their contents and he saw that her hands were trembling.
She looked straight into his eyes. “Did you kill my brother?”
Tagart slowly shook his head.
“Then was it Fallott?”
“Would I kill a future hunter, one of my own?”
Her expression softened and Tagart knew that he had been believed, that she now regretted her first feelings. He felt an urge to touch her hand and physically to confirm what had passed between them in looks, but she was already moving away, back to the cauldrons.
3
The following morning dawned windy and grey; spots of rain began to fall as Tagart and Boak stood in line, waiting to be ordered underground.
Blean, the Trundleman in charge of coordinating the mines, a man of forty, unapproachable and fastidious, appeared from the Trundle and at his leisure made his way downhill. His black hair was cropped short, close to his scalp, and twice a day he scraped off his beard with a flint razor and seaweed mucilage as soap. No detail of the mines was beneath his attention. Today he had discarded his lynx jacket in favour of a sealskin cape fixed at the throat with a cherrywood clasp.
He arrived. “Six more for the west workings,” he said. “Take them from the main shaft.”
With jerks of his finger, Stobas indicated the six slaves who were to be reallocated. He chose carefully. If productivity in his section fell he would lose privileges, but if he gave Blean men who were obviously old or infirm he would incur disfavour. He picked one old man, a youth with scarcely a beard, two brothers who were well known as reliable workers, and, smiling inwardly, Stobas indicated Tagart and Boak. At his command all six joined the remainder of the day-shift for the west workings.
This was an old part of the mine, nearly exhausted now, providing flints that were hardly better than those that could be picked up off the ground anywhere along the downs. The shafts had gone as deep, the galleries as far, as the flint seams and the difficulties of ventilation allowed. Blean was anxious to complete work there and make a start on new excavations further down the hill.
“Have you decided on escape?” Tagart whispered to Boak as they waited. “Are you with me?”
The other man was unwilling to meet his eye. “The bathing party is tomorrow.”
“What of it?”
“Tomorrow is too soon.”
“Not for me.”
“We must prepare. Let’s go tomorrow just to look.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I must get out.”
“Leave it another half month till the next bathing party. We can do it then.”
Tagart was adamant. He refused.
“But why?”
“Crale Day.”
Further conversation was impossible. Tagart and Boak were teamed with the old man, Maphen, and a dark, intense foreigner named Chorn, then issued with lamps and picks and a water-bag, and sent down the ladders to a wide gallery thirty feet below the surface. For much of its length its walls and roof were boarded and supported with timber. Broken picks littered the floor. Maphen set lamps in crevices and alcoves, and Chorn started work on the rock-face even before the rest of the shift had finished climbing down past the gallery mouth. Tagart and Boak exchanged glances; Boak wagged his head in mock amazement.
At a lower level men were shouting orders and responses. Boak explained that the gallery below theirs was being closed. The six extra slaves had been needed to help reinforce the shuttering, retrieve the ropes and bags, and dismantle the ladders.
“You have still have to answer me, yes or no,” Tagart said to Boak, shovelling rubble back. The work was beginning to make him sweat. Chorn, the foreigner, was hacking at the chalk as if he bore it a grudge. “You must tell me if you are coming.”
“I know.” Boak felt himself standing on the edge of a precipice. But, realizing it, he already knew he was falling.
“What have you decided?”
“Let it be tomorrow.”
“So you’re with me?”
“Yes.”
The attempt was doomed. Boak knew it as well as he knew his own name, but he no longer cared. He had been affected by what Tagart had been saying day after day. At first he had refused to listen. He knew the boy’s words for what they were, ignorant and immature; he knew the hard reality. A slave at Valdoe could not get away. They would both be caught. But he also knew that even if they were, like the nomad who had tried it, tortured and put to death as an example, even then he would have made an attempt, a gesture, futile perhaps, but he would have been free for a few moments, no longer in bondage, no longer in the service of those who had made themselves his masters. He would have shaken them, brought a moment of uneasiness to the Lord of Valdoe, a man he had never spoken to, a man who despised him as a slave. It would be worth it for that alone.
The first gong sounded. Work in the gallery ceased. Stew was brought down the shaft in leather satchels and given to the miners in the wooden bowls left in each gallery for the purpose.
“Stew good,” Chorn said. He was sitting with his back to the shuttering, picking fragments of meat from the bowl, raising his fingers to his open mouth, head tilted back.
“Make you work faster,” Tagart told him.
“Ya.” Chorn nodded. He noticed Maphen. “Old man,” he said. “You not eat. I eat for you.”
Maphen waved his words away. He was tired. The lamps were sputtering. He shut his eyes and rested his head against the boards.
Tagart finished his stew. It left an oily taste in his mouth. “Pass me the water,” he asked Chorn.
Chorn did not understand.
“The water. Give me the water.”
Comprehension came to his face. “You want water.”
As he handed Tagart the leather bag there was a low, barely perceptible vibration, a kind of distant groan, in the strutted roof above them. The boards at Maphen’s back moved. Tiny streams of dust showered down. Then, from a deeper level, a loud, dull booming rose up the shaft and was followed by a series of percussive cracks as if structural beams were breaking. Behind Tagart the boards rattled and jolted and two of the lamps tumbled from their alcoves.
“Get out!” Boak screamed. “Get out!”
But even before they could scramble to their feet the ceiling props were no longer vertical and in the moment before the last lamp went out Tagart saw broken boards collapsing and the shape of boulders and dust and slabs of chalk falling in a solid roar, burying Maphen and Chorn in ton after ton of crushing pressure, catching Boak as he struggled towards the mouth of the gallery, and Tagart himself was being buried, struck by the fall, pounded across the shoulders and back, on his head, his legs, pinned to the floor by the intolerable weight of rock above him. He was unable to move, unable to breathe, utterly caught, his face being forced with increasing insistence downwards. A little more and he knew his cheekbones would fail. They would give way under the unbelievable weight and his skull would be pushed in from behind. The ground had not yet stopped moving: it was still shifting, grinding, settling, filling in from above and at random the vacancy of galleries and shafts tunnelled out below.
He lost consciousness. The voices woke him.
At first he tried to accommodate the voices in his dreams, but they resisted, growing louder, intruding, annoying him: he wanted only to be left in peace. The voices made him frown. He was made to listen as his warm landscape dissolved and he became suspended in bla
ckness and cold.
“Is anyone left alive?”
“Knock if you can hear us!”
Silence.
“You slaves, dig there and see how far in it reaches. There may be a pocket.”
Tagart heard rocks being pulled aside, dull and hollow.
“Is anyone in there?” Blean called out.
After a time someone said, “It is Gauhm’s will.”
Tagart began to remember what had happened.
The voices were not far away, three feet at most. Tagart raised his head and found it free. He could move his arms also. He felt them. They were not broken. He put his fingers to his face and discovered blood.
“She has taken them in this gallery too. Back to your places.”
The blood was in his beard. He traced it back to his nostrils and the warm ooze was slippery on his fingertips. From his nose he ran a finger along his teeth. One at the front was broken. The rest were intact. He probed them with his tongue. The taste of more blood, fresh blood. His hands were shaking.
“How many lost in all, Stobas?”
“Seven below and four here, master.”
Pain sliced into Tagart’s chest at each intake of breath. The bruises felt as if they extended down both his sides and into his buttocks.
“Eleven lost in all, then.”
The Stone Arrow Page 15
