Darkwood

by M. E. Breen

  The man with the mole glanced at Annie. “New catch? That’s the third this month.”

  Chopper shrugged. “Hard times. Ask him if he wants to have a look at this one, since he’s here.”

  While Chopper untied her, Annie kept her eyes on Gibbet. The man with the mole was a big fellow, taller than Gibbet, but the impression she had watching them was of Gibbet looking down at the other man, like a parent barely tolerating the ignorant questions of a child.

  The men walked toward them. Annie wanted to hide, but Chopper stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders. Would Gibbet know her somehow? Would they find the white ringstone hidden in the hem of her skirt along with Gregor’s rock? Or the vial from Grandmother Hoop, buried in a pocket within a pocket so deep it almost reached her knees? What about the lock of Page’s hair, pressed over her heart?

  Gibbet looked her over carefully. Annie looked anywhere but his face. He peered at the top of her head. He inspected the end of her braid. He lifted each of her hands and examined the fingernails. His hands were as rough and cold as granite.

  “Turn,” he said to Chopper, and Chopper turned her.

  “Search,” Gibbet said next, and Chopper led her to a sagging canvas tent. A girl with stringy hair and a face like a dinner plate waited inside. She helped Annie undress and handed her clothes out to Chopper, then walked around her in a slow circle while Annie shivered.

  “Any marks?” Chopper asked when they’d finished. The girl shook her head.

  Chopper held up Page’s book. “The Trap of Vice, by Chilton Smalle. Serious little thing, isn’t she?”

  Gibbet frowned. “Anything else?”

  Annie held her breath, but the only things Chopper had uncovered were the inedible rinkle nuts and a red leaf she had picked up in the forest. He crumbled the leaf in his fingers.

  “That’s all, sir.”

  “And no marks.” Gibbet sounded disappointed.

  “Put her in with the rest?” Chopper asked.

  Gibbet shrugged and moved off, no longer interested. Chopper started after him. He was still holding Page’s book.

  “Wait, Mr. Chopper! Please, may I have my book?”

  Chopper handed it to her with a faint smile. “Expect to get some reading in, do you? Think again, kiddie.”

  The two men spoke for some time, or rather Chopper talked and Gibbet listened, his red line of a mouth tightly closed. At length Chopper gave a brief salute and Gibbet walked to a waiting wagon. He had already taken the reins in hand, and Annie was thinking how odd it was that a person of his stature should drive himself, when a young man ran up and spoke to him. Gibbet bent toward him, as though listening attentively. Then casually, without anger, Gibbet raised his whip and slashed it across the man’s face. He drove off, leaving the man rocking on his knees in the dirt.

  The man with the mole said only, “Shouldn’t have done it,” then untied her and brought her over to stand at the very edge of the cliff.

  “Now watch.”

  Iron rings had been driven into the rock at even intervals along the top of the cliff. From these rings stretched taut ropes, disappearing over the edge into the bare blue air. Men hung from the ropes at various heights along the cliff face, chipping at the rock with delicate picks. Around their hips they wore wide leather straps fashioned into a sort of seat, to which were attached woven baskets. They filled the baskets with the shards of ringstone they carved from the cliffs. From above the men looked like spiders dangling from silk threads, blowing back and forth across the surface of the rock with each strong breeze. While Annie watched, one man shouted a warning that he had dropped his pick. The pick grew tinier and tinier until it became invisible in the blue air above the blue river sweeping through the base of the gorge. She looked at the ropes straining against the weight of the men and their heavy baskets. Many of them had begun to fray where they rubbed against the stony cliff edge. One of the men hallooed from the end of his rope.

  “Number Four, up!”

  A man crouching at one end of the line of ropes repeated the cry. “Number Four, up!”

  Three stout men appeared from inside one of the tents. Despite the cold morning air, they wore only brief tunics over their pants and no shoes. The muscles in their bare arms looked ready to burst through the skin. One of them wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, as if he had been drinking.

  The men walked to where the ropes were tied off and sat down to put on their shoes. These were no ordinary shoes. Attached to the soles were metal spikes, three or four inches long and viciously sharp. The men stood in line, one behind the other, and began pounding their feet into the hard dirt. Then each man put his arms around the waist of the man in front of him, and the first man leaned forward to grasp the rope.

  “Ready?” he called out.

  “Heave!” The men threw their weight back simultaneously, and the rope inched up the cliff. The first man passed the slack in the rope back to the last man, who curled the rope around his arm.

  “Ho!” the first man called, and the three men leaned forward together.

  “Heave!” he called, and they all leaned back again.

  In this manner, faster than Annie would have thought possible, they hauled man and basket up the cliff. Chopper squatted at the edge to watch the man’s progress, his face impassive. Even before the man’s head had come into view Chopper had retrieved his basket and carried it over to a set of scales. Amidst all the crude equipment of the camp, the sagging tents and dented pots, the scales looked as if they had come straight from the palace coffers: gleaming brass and calibrated to a fraction of an ounce.

  Chopper was staring at the scales intently. He frowned and weighed the man’s take a second and then a third time. The heap of stone gleamed with a soft, bright light that looked as if it came not from the reflected rays of the sun but from within the heart of the stone itself. And the color! Each tiny chip of stone burned with the full spectrum of colors, as though a rainbow had frozen and shattered into millions of pieces.

  “Number Four, pat down.”

  At the sound of Chopper’s voice Annie felt the man holding her jerk to attention.

  The miner they had just pulled up was standing on his feet now. He was no more than skin draped over a skeleton; his hands, red and puffy from countless scrapes against the rock, looked too big for his body. While Annie watched, they removed each article of his clothing and inspected it. They looked in pockets and cuffs; they turned his long underwear inside out, poked into his socks. He had not been wearing shoes.

  Annie found she could not look away from his feet. Like his hands, they seemed to belong to a different, much larger body. The frost that had covered the ground in the night had not yet burned away, and she thought how painful it must be, the ice touching his skin.

  “Twenty minutes rest, Number Four, then start up at Thirteen,” one of the men with spiked boots said. The naked man bent down to gather his clothes from the ground where the inspectors had dropped them. He turned and walked wearily toward the tents. Red welts covered his back, some of the cuts just beginning to scab over, others still oozing blood. Beneath these were the fainter marks of earlier beatings, and beneath those the thin white lines of long-healed scars.

  The man with the mole took in Annie’s expression with satisfaction.

  “Light fingers, that one. A few days back we caught him with a chip under his tongue. Worth nearly a month’s rent in Dour County. But you know that.”

  All the water she’d drunk on the way over began to roil in her stomach like the sea during a storm. Annie swallowed hard, but she could not swallow the awful sweetness filling her mouth. Chopper had come to stand in front of her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and looked down at her almost affectionately.

  “Now you—you would never survive a beating like that. My men don’t know their own strength. They can’t tell the difference between a grown man and a child, once they get started.”

  Annie tried to twitch away, but Chopper he
ld fast. “Do we understand each other?”

  She looked him full in the face, then bent forward and vomited an ocean onto his feet. For several moments she remained bent over, staring at the partially digested fish head resting on the top of one of his boots. He didn’t move, didn’t react in any way, except by tightening his grip on her shoulders until she winced.

  “Is the child diseased?” someone asked.

  Chopper let her go. “Start her at Number Four. Smirch, my boots.”

  The man with the mole looked daggers at Annie but squatted down to do as he was told.

  Hauler, though bigger and stronger than Chopper, was friendlier and stupider. He held her arm loosely. “Ready?”

  “What is it you want me to do, exactly?” Annie asked, rather impressed by the coolness of her voice. Hauler stared at her blankly for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed.

  “Hoo!” He wiped his eyes. “Fresh!” He patted her shoulder with a huge hand. “I don’t mind fresh, but daylight’s wasting. Let’s get you over that cliff and start cutting.”

  “I will not—,” Annie began, but Smirch, red-faced, cut her off.

  “This is a kindness, believe me, letting you learn in the day. Chopper must like you.”

  “Fresh,” Hauler said again, as though that explained something. “And tall. Maybe head of the line?”

  “Maybe.” Smirch had picked up Number Four’s rope and begun to tie a series of complicated knots at one end, fashioning it into a seat.

  “Okay, step your feet in, like this.” Hauler looked at her expectantly. Annie shook her head. He frowned, puzzled. “You want to go over without a harness?”

  Annie gave in. Hauler showed her how to attach the leather belt to the rope seat, and then how to attach the basket to the belt.

  “Boots off.”

  Annie kicked at his hand. He scowled. “Too fresh.”

  “Why are you taking my boots?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Then he picked her up by the harness and carried her, one-handed, over to the cliff edge.

  “Now sit down with your legs straight out in front of you, and walk yourself backward down the rock.”

  Sit down into what? Annie thought. She looked over the edge into space. Far below she could see the blue river winding its way through the bottom of the gorge.

  “If you don’t climb down, I’ll have to push you,” Hauler said, making a sad face. Annie looked down again. The rope would run out of slack eventually, but how far would she fall before it did? Twenty feet? Fifty? She took a few small steps backward, until her heels stuck out over the edge of the cliff. Then slowly, slowly, clutching the rope with both hands, she began to sit back. She closed her eyes and imagined her uncle’s chair with its enormous cowhide cushion waiting to catch her. When she was sitting flat, the bare air as a seat, she began to inch her feet over the edge and down the rock face. The slack in the rope ran through her hands as the rope grew longer and the faces peering at her over the cliff grew smaller.

  “’Atta girl!” Hauler yelled.

  Finally, the rope ran out of slack. Annie hung there, fifty feet from the top, hundreds of feet from the bottom, literally in the middle of nowhere.

  The air felt much colder here than at the top. Wind blew up from the bottom of the gorge, buffeting the men on the ends of their ropes. The pale sun of autumn, while scarcely bright enough to warm her, dazzled the rock face so that Annie had to squint to look at it. Most of the men wore hats pieced together from scraps of cloth and birch bark.

  Men hung to the left and right of her, some closer to the top of the cliff, some more than a hundred feet down. The men did not talk or even look at one another. Annie felt in her basket for the chisel. It was sharply pointed at one end and blunt at the other, like a hammer. The routine seemed to be to whack the rock with the hammer end, then turn the tool around and chisel out the ringstone with the pointed end. Strike, spin, chisel. But where to strike first? She watched as one of the men closest to her began to push himself from side to side, gaining speed. He ran horizontally, backward and forward along the rock, until he gained enough momentum to leap over a bulge in the cliff face. He clung with expert fingers and toes to the rock on the other side of the bulge. By working his feet into cracks in the rocks he left his hands free to chisel at the vein he had spotted. So this was why they didn’t wear boots.

  Annie shivered. The wind never abated, cutting through her skirt, her petticoat, her woolen underwear, her socks. A pink gleam caught her eye. She clutched at the rock, finding fissures in which to anchor her feet. Sure enough, inches from her face was a fat vein of ringstone. Annie tapped at it gingerly with her pick. Nothing happened, so she whacked it. A chip of stone flew off. Annie tried to grab it with her free hand, but it slipped through her fingers and she tipped headfirst to one side. She gave a little scream and righted herself, clinging to the rock. When her heart had slowed down, she cautiously tapped at the ringstone again, experimenting until she could flake the stone off easily.

  The basket at her waist grew heavier. Her fingers ached from gripping the pick. One by one the men on either side of her called to be brought up. When Annie finally looked up, rolling her neck to ease the ache, she saw that only one man was left on the cliff face with her. He worked about twenty feet above her, hanging lopsided from the weight of his basket.

  “Number Five, up!” he called, his voice cracking with weariness. Chopper stuck his head over the top of the cliff.

  “Keep working, Number Five. You were below quota last shift.”

  “Sir, respectfully, sir, I’m awful heavy. My rope looks bad, sir.”

  Chopper didn’t answer. His head disappeared from sight.

  The cliff was silent for several long minutes, except for the sound of the man’s pick. Annie’s basket was full, and she was about to call for someone to take her up when she heard the man above her cry out. His basket, groaning with stone, had pulled him nearly perpendicular to the rock face. As Annie watched in horror, the fibers of his rope began to stretch and snap, one by one.

  “Five, up! Five, up!” the man shrieked, but it was too late. The last fiber of rope, frail as a human hair, snapped. The man hung suspended in the still air for one long, impossible moment, his mouth opening and closing, opening and closing. Then he fell, the basket bearing him down like a drowning man to the bottom of the ocean. He screamed as he fell, a long, high wail. Instead of fading away, the scream rose, spiraling up the gorge. Annie pressed her hands against her ears. She felt a sharp tug at her waist as they reeled her up. The scream went on and on.

  Cold. Cold, cold, cold, cold, cold. But at last the screaming had stopped.

  “Don’t take it so hard, now. These things happen from time to time.” Hauler set down the bucket. “We have a fellow who collects the fallen stone from the gorge,” he added, as if that would help. He took a rag from his pants pocket and moved to pat her sopping hair.

  “Get away from me.”

  “Now, now. You want a friend in me. You really do. I’m all the children’s favorite.”

  Annie met his eyes. “Where?”

  Hauler jerked his thumb toward the long, windowless building she had seen when she first arrived at camp.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Four solid walls! Real beds! It’s a nice place, the orphanage. Nice and warm. You see what the men make do with?” His thumb shifted to indicate the rows of limp canvas tents. “Stacked like cordwood in there, when the real weather comes.”

  “I meant why haven’t I seen any children? Where do they work?”

  “They work right here, of course.” Hauler handed her a blanket. He tipped his head to the side, regarding her. Then he smiled slowly, and Annie realized she had made a bad mistake, thinking him stupid.

  “The children work at night,” Hauler said.

  At first the beds appeared to be empty, blankets flung across them or heaped at the head. Then one of the blankets stirred and revealed a small hand, and Annie realiz
ed the beds were full of sleeping children.

  Before he left her, Hauler had told her she could sleep through the first night shift.

  “You had a nice take for a first timer. Chopper will be pleased.” He pointed through the open door. “You can sleep there, middle bunk. Tell everyone to shove back one. We’re a bit tight, but the babies can share.” Then he had patted her shoulder and pushed her through the door. “Night-night.”

  The construction of the orphanage could not have been simpler: two long walls, two short walls, a low-pitched roof. A door in the west wall that opened onto the path to the cliff. A door in the east wall that opened onto the privy. Three tiers of beds lined up along the south wall. No windows. No hearth. No lanterns. No light.

  If a cow wanders into the yard, be quick to shut the gate.

  She stood there stupidly until a bell clanged outside the door, startling her. The children all rose at once, as though they had not been sleeping at all, but waiting. The tallest child, a girl, slept closest to the door. She reached for a coiled rope hanging by her bed. Even in the dark, she moved with the confidence of long routine, but Annie could see her hands trembling as she uncoiled the rope. She tied one end to her wrist and passed the rope to the child behind her, who looped the rope around his wrist and passed it on, until the rope reached the smallest child. The boy, no more than three or four, struggled to make a knot, and Annie, unthinking, stepped forward to help him.

  “Who is it? Who’s there?”

  “Is it the Chopper?”

  “What’s happening?”

  The children buzzed with fear, knocking against each other in the dark. Annie kept still.

  “Step out!” called out the tallest. “Step, step, step!”

  At once they fell silent and marched behind her to the door. The girl rapped on it three times and it swung open. Torchlight flared through the opening and Annie felt rather than heard the faint whoosh of the children’s collective relief. They marched out the door and the man holding the torch shut the door behind them.