The Elemental Jewels (Book 1)

by Jeffrey Quyle

Grange gave a moan of pain and anguish.

  “There’s a bucket in the corner if you need it,” Garrel offered.

  Grange shook his head, then leaned back and shut his eyes. “I was going to dance with Lurinda. I was going to play in the band,” he moaned.

  “You can forget all of that for now,” Garrel said. “Maybe in a few months.”

  “Months?” Grange asked in an agonized whisper.

  “The other prisoners here say that criminals are being rounded up and shipped out to work at a labor camp in the mountains. The Tyrant wants to build a canal, so that his ships don’t have to pay fees at Falls City,” Garrel explained.

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Grange whispered.

  “Neither do I. I was hoping you could explain it to me,” Garrel sighed.

  They sat in silence then, and Grange drifted off to sleep, leaning against Garrel’s shoulder.

  When he awoke there were sounds in the prison ward. A jailer was delivering food to the cells, with a companion who carried a lantern, and another who carried a mace. Their bowl of food was slipped on the floor through a slot, and then the bright light moved further down the hallway past them.

  “I’m hungry enough to eat it. I’m just not going to look at it,” Garrel announced as he walked over to the pan and sniffed it gingerly. He made retching noises while Grange remained on the bench, and then Garrel returned. “I’m not that hungry after all,” he explained.

  “So Hockis isn’t in prison?” Grange asked.

  “Not as far as I know. I only know what the patrol men told me while we were being arrested,” Garrel replied.

  The next day Grange felt better. He was still sore, but he could tell the sore spots were healing. When the daily food delivery came, there were extra guards, and instead of slipping a pan through the slot in the door, the guards opened the door completely.

  “Up and on your feet,” one of them said. “You’re done here.”

  “Are we free?” Garrel asked as he stood and approached the door. Grange followed him.

  “No, you’re on trial,” the guard said. “Now move along; we’ve got others to pick up.”

  They left the room and had shackles clamped around their ankles, then began to shuffle through the dim passages of the prison. The guards stopped several times, and a dozen other prisoners were added to the chained shackles, then the procession climbed up three flights of stairs.

  Grange was blinded when a pair of double doors was opened, and sunlight came streaming in as the chain gang slowly walked out of the prison into a drab, stonewalled yard. Two minutes later they entered another building, and then were taken to an austere hearing chamber, where a judge sat at a high desk, and several other guards were positioned.

  “The accused will stand in the box,” the judge ordered, as the chain gang was led to a cage in front of the judge.

  “By the authority vested in me by the most righteous ruler of Verdant, the Tyrant, I find you all guilty of the crimes you stand accused of,” the judge promptly said. “You all are hereby sentenced to death by hanging, at sunset today.”

  The men in the cage gave voice to a variety of howls and shrieks of protest at the unexpected proceeding.

  “Through the leniency of the Tyrant, I may offer you the opportunity to commute your sentence to five years of labor in service to your nation. Those of you who wish to receive this boon shall so claim mercy,” the judge immediately instructed.

  “I claim mercy,” Garrel instantly shouted, as did a half dozen others, while Grange stood in silent shock.

  “Having heard all of you request the mercy of the Tyrant, I grant you all the remainder of your lives.

  “The prisoners will be attired,” the judge ordered.

  A guard unlocked the cage, less than a minute after it had been closed and locked.

  “Approach me one at a time, and move slowly,” the guard ordered.

  The prisoners approached him in the order that the chains allowed. As they did, each was unlocked from the chains, and escorted by a guard to the back of the room, where they were ordered to disrobe, then handed a bright yellow shirt and pair of yellow pants. Within minutes, they were all reattached to the shackles, and stood out like a bowl full of lemons as they waited in the back of the courtroom. The judge left his chair without ceremony, and the guards took them away.

  There were cries and shouts and wails from the prisoners as they were led away.

  “I have to see my wife,” one man cried.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” another tried to claim.

  “My business will be ruined; my family can’t survive,” a third said, just before a guard uncoiled a whip and began lashing it viciously at the protesters. There were more cries, until the lash fell more widely.

  They left through a doorway and came to a courtyard, in an incongruously extravagant portion of the palace grounds, with beautiful towers, and walls with windows and balconies looking down upon the arrival of the prisoners. They found another squad of forlorn prisoners in the same yellow clothing waiting for them there, with more guards surrounding them.

  “All hail the glory of the Tyrant,” one of the officers present shouted, and the guards all looked up at a high balcony, where a man in luxurious robes was accompanied by a pair of young women., The guards saluted, and the man waved back diffidently.

  A large pair of gates opened in one wall.

  “Now start running, you dogs. Start running towards your destiny, and your chance to contribute to the greater prosperity of Verdant,” the officer shouted the command. Some of the guards starting jogging, and the prisoners did too, awkwardly as some tried to run, some tried to walk, and some didn’t try to move at all, though the chain bound them all together.

  Grange took a step forward, then jerked to a stop and tumbled forward when the man behind him stood still.

  “Get up, you lazy criminal,” the guard with the whip shouted, and Grange felt the painful sting of the leather rip through his yellow shirt, leaving a welt on his back.

  He scrambled up, then nearly fell again as the man in front of him tried to start to run. Grange threw his hands down in front of him, bounced his palms off the pavement, and regained his balance precariously, though he scrapped the skin off a patch of his hand.

  The group began to lumber along, as it passed through the gate, and they gained an awkward pace when they found themselves out in the city, under the observation of the residents. There were jeers and hoots from both sides, while the guards kept screaming obscenities and urging them forward along the road.

  Grange looked over at Garrel, who was connected to a separate chain, one that ran parallel to his own. Garrel was like Grange, young and in relatively good physical condition. The two of them were comfortably running along at the slow pace of the group.

  “What are we going to do?” Grange asked Garrel in a low voice.

  The whip immediately cracked in the air near his face, making him swerve dramatically, and nearly loose his balance.

  “No talking among the filthy prisoners,” a guard shouted.

  “Now pick up the pace. We’ve got a long way to go,” another guard said, as he ran alongside the foremost prisoner in the front of the file of prisoners.

  The awkward pace tried to go faster, and slowly the men gained a rhythmic stride that satisfied even the sadistic officer in charge of moving the men to where ever they were going. The whip ceased its use, and the only sounds were the heavy breathing of the men, the rattling noises from their chains, and the scuffling of their feet on the road, as they passed out of the city. They left the paved streets inside the city walls behind, and began to traverse the dusty country highway beyond the city. It was a heavily traveled road that carried much traffic, leaving the surface of the way rutted and pitted in many spots as it followed the path of the Great River, which flowed from the east to the west in the broad, fertile mountain valley that was the home of the nation named Verdant, and its capital city named Fortune
.

  Grange was in a daze, a long, consuming state of shock. He knew that his whole world had crumbled, that the great promise of one day soon had turned into a permanently lost dream. But the speed of the whipsaw, the change from being so high to falling so low made him numb, almost catatonic, and the brutal treatment by the guards drove him deeper into darkness. A tiny spark of resolute hopefulness barely glowed inside, wondering if he could somehow escape, and return to the city. But the chaffing of the metal cuff around his ankle painfully disabused him of that notion.

  The guards ran the prisoners for miles, until they reached a small post at the confluence of a small river that ran into the Great River.

  “All prisoners into the water; everyone into the ford,” their chief guard shouted at the exhausted men in chains. The road was a shallow ford across the stream, just a couple of hundred yards away from the mouth of the river.

  A fresh set of guards came out of the post, as the prisoners plunged into the water, then shouted and squealed in shock. The small river’s waters were icy cold – the water flowed directly down from the snow fields at the tops of the mountains south of the Verdant valley, so that the water was painfully chilled.

  Grange stopped moving, as the rest of his chain gang also stopped. He bent low at the waist, his hands resting on his knees. He looked down, where he saw that his yellow pants leg was orange around the ankle that was manacled, the result of the bloody chaffing the shackle had inflicted upon his leg, and he saw tendril of fresh red blood seeping away in the current of the water as he stood in the stream. The water was so cold that it quickly moved from painful to thankfully numbing, taking the sting out of his ankle as the cold overwhelmed his nerves.

  “Good bye animals,” one of the guards mockingly called, as the escorts from the city turned the prisoners over to a new set of guards, who stood ready and rested.

  “Stop your sleeping, and let’s get to work,” the commander of the new escort bawled. “Everyone pick up a bundle,” he pointed to a pile of canvas packs next to the post building.

  The prisoners started to wearily walk over to the post, when the man in front of Grange suddenly went berserk. He lunged at a guard as he passed him, trying to grab the man’s spear. The chain around his ankle pulled him up short of his target – he fell on his face, his fingers inches short of the spear, while he pulled Grange and another prisoner off their feet with his desperate effort.

  The guard jumped back, then mercilessly slammed the spear down into the prisoner’s back, making him scream, then stiffen, and collapse into silence.

  “Who’s got the keys?” the guard asked in a bored tone, as the living prisoners looked on in shocked horror. “You,” the guard pointed the bloody spear point at Grange, “carry the body over and throw it in the stream, so that it gets washed away,” he commanded.

  Another guard brought a metal key, and unlocked the shackle from the dead man, then from Grange, who hastened to obey the hard-hearted guard’s command. He hadn’t known the dead prisoner at all, he reflected. He’d stared at the man’s back for hours, seen the muscles cramp up and heard the man’s labored breath, when Grange’s world had constricted to only seeing what was directly in front of him during the run. And now that man was dead.

  Grange lifted the dead man’s body, reluctant to look at his face because he didn’t want to see what death looked like, and carried the heavy body on his back to the stream, where he lowered the body as respectfully as he could into the water, then watched it float slowly in the current, headed towards the larger river beyond.

  “Please watch over his spirit,” Grange gave a momentary prayer, thrown to any and all deities who might be listening, in the hopes that the dead man’s own god might hear.

  “Come along,” the guard called. “Stop mooning and get going; pick up your pack.” A minute later he was reattached to the chain, and walking with the other prisoners through the ford in the river to resume the day’s trip. They ran on for hours more, the prisoners exhausted, but still moving to avoid the slash of the whip across their backs.

  At sunset they passed through a small village, then entered an enclosure, and were led into a crude barn.

  “This is where you’ll spend the night. Each of you has your bundle, with your bedding and food for the next four days. There’ll be guards at the door, so don’t try to leave the barn,” their guard told them as the two dozen prisoners stood uncertainly in the barn’s dim interior.

  “Will you unchain us now?” one prisoner asked from the back of the group.

  “No,” the guard laughed. “You won’t be unchained until you reach the work camp. Get used to each other,” he advised.

  “But what about a toilet?” the prisoner wanted to know. “How do we,” he paused without finishing the question.

  “Watch where you step and hold your nose,” the guard gave an evil grin, then shut the door, and slid the clasp shut on the outside of the door frame.

  The circumstances were miserable, but Grange and the others were all too exhausted to care any longer. They settled in and all fell asleep until the guards opened the door shortly after sunrise the next morning.

  “Eat your breakfast! We leave in five minutes,” a guard shouted into the barn. The men desperately tried to prepare for departure, and the guards mercilessly drove them out of the building five minutes later, sending them into another long, grueling day of running. One of the prisoners died at midday; when they stopped for the noon shift at a guard outpost, the man lay down, and never got up.

  That night they slept in an open field, still chained and guarded. And the following day the routine resumed, except that they finally stopped following the river, and started to climb into the mountains, at the western end of the valley that was the nation of Verdant. The third day was nothing but climbing through the mountains, following the large excavated ditch that was expected to become a shipping canal someday.

  Grange was as dull and exhausted as any of the prisoners. Every step was agony as the shackles cut his ankle, and his muscles strained and ached from the brutal regime of unending exercise. He had no opportunity to speak to Garrel, nor did any of the prisoners speak more than a word or two, as they struggled to hold onto life and sanity under the brutal circumstances.

  Two more prisoners died in the mountains, overcome by the stress.

  “They took the easy way out,” one prisoner managed to express his opinion.

  On the fourth day, they ran along the rough road that had been leveled beside the future canal bed, always rising upward through the mountains, and Grange was vaguely aware of the dark mountains that rose ahead of them in all directions. There were no villages, no people, no cabins – only the empty, desolate mountain wilderness of stones and trees and streams, with snow and ice far overhead on the mountaintops.

  They reached a large encampment shortly before sunset, where hundreds of laborers were housed in tents, while a substantial garrison of guards lived in stone and wood fortified homes. There was a large, open kitchen cooking food for the laborers, a store where the guards could buy supplies, and even a few women walking through the camp, to Grange’s surprise.

  “You’ll be housed with the yellow squad,” the officer from their last escort of guards informed them. He gestured to the guards, and a pair of them went about removing the shackles from the legs of the survivors of the journey. “We’ll escort you to your quadrant, and sign you in. You’ll be responsible for yourselves after that,” he said tonelessly.

  They walked for ten minutes through the camp, through areas where all the laborers wore red or orange or blue clothes. They drew stares and jeers and indifference among those they passed, but they soon came to the yellow sector, and were led to a large stone building.

  “Line up and give your name,” a new officer ordered, as they passed by a window at a porch, one by one, being identified.

  “You’re in Tent Three,” the guard clerk told Grange when he had his turn to give his name.

  “Wh
ere is it?” Grange asked.

  “Next to Tent Two, I imagine,” the man said dismissively. “Move along.”

  Grange trod a few feet out of the way, then stopped. Like all the new arrivals, he still carried his bundle of supplies. He still had some of the dried food and hard bread he had carried, for he’d been too tired to eat at night. His blankets that he slept in were dirty, but dry and still intact.

  “”Where are you?” Garrel slouched over next to him.

  “In a nightmare,” Grange answered. “Tent Three,” he grew realistic. “How about you?”

  “I’m in Tent Five; they must be close together,” Garrel concluded. “Let’s look over there,” he nodded to the right.

  “Is this Tent Three or Five?” Grange asked thirty seconds later, when they reached a yellow tent in the middle of a row.

  “Have we got some new volunteers?” one of the two men sitting in front of the tent asked as he inspected the two arrivals. “It’s about time Yellow got some fresh meat. We’ve about killed ourselves trying to meet quota. You’ll come in handy.

  “Go down three tents to Tent Four and tell Matey you’re new. He’ll work you into the system,” the same man instructed.

  The two accordingly trudged down the track between rows of tents and stopped in front of Tent Four, where a burly man stood at attention.

  “What do you want? Move along,” the man said.

  “We’re new. Someone told us to see Matey,” Garrel spoke up. “We can go to our tents,” he added.

  The man turned and looked in through the tent flap, then pulled it open. “Go in,” he ordered.

  The two boys pushed the heavy material aside and stepped into the muted light inside the tent. A man sat in a chair behind a desk. There were two more men in the tent, and only one bed. All three men looked at Grange and Garrel as they entered.

  “What do we have here, new members of the construction crew?” the man at the desk asked.

  The two boys silently looked at one another, unsure of whether they were on the construction crew or assigned to some other task.

  “Were you sent here to work?” the man asked impatiently after the silence dragged out too long for his tastes. “Or are you here in a tour of the scenic mountains?”