Kelven's Riddle: The Mountain at the Middle of the World

by Daniel T Hylton

  For four days more they went along the slopes of the hills although the direction of travel had changed slightly. The sun, which had usually come up over the front of the wagon, was now coming up obliquely opposite Aram. This meant that the tangent of their travel was aligned somewhat to the north of due east. The daily regimen of water twice and food once at evening had not been altered, except for the marked change in the quality of the food. It was by far the best he’d ever eaten. This puzzled him but there was nothing within his limited horizons to explain the reasons for it. He settled for being grateful.

  About mid-afternoon on the fourth day of the seventh week, the caravan crossed a narrow bridge, turned to the southeast and went up along the north side of a steep-walled canyon through which ran a substantial stream. Out the slats, Aram could see tumbling water verged by tall slim trees with needle-like leaves and branches that swept downward close to their trunks. Later he would learn that these trees were conifers, pine, fir and spruce. When he caught a glimpse of the stream, it was clean and clear, frothing its way among smooth boulders to settle occasionally in deep pools. Cool breezes filled the canyon with a sweetly pungent scent.

  After a couple of hours, the caravan came out of the narrow canyon into a small circular valley surrounded by rumpled hills with conifers clustered in the hollows of the slopes. Growing out on the open hillsides were intermittent large patches of blue-gray brush. The floor of the small valley was level and open except for stands of tall broadleaf trees over against the hills. The wagon train made a wide loop around the valley before stopping near a grove of these trees.

  When all the wagons were halted, the overseer, who’d not spoken since the first day’s instructions, and had forbidden the men to speak to each other, appeared at the door to pass out the evening’s meal.

  “What do you think, boys?” he said, and his face bore a tired, sinister grin that exposed stained, gapped teeth. “Here’s your new home, and now that you’re here, I can go back to my old one. Good luck with your new friends.”

  Aram was overjoyed that at last they’d be getting out of the dark and filthy interior of the wagon, but the overseer made no move to release them.

  “You know what to do with the bowls,” he said. “It’s been anything but a pleasure dragging your sorry asses to this godforsaken place.” With that he locked them in for the night.

  In the morning, it was a lasher that flung the door open and then a foul-looking, bald and skinny overseer with a pinched nose and small, dark, flinty eyes entered and unshackled the men from the wagon’s interior. When the overseer finished turning the locks, the lasher grabbed the chain and jerked the men roughly from the wagon.

  Because of their extended imprisonment, and the damage done to their feet, none could stand easily. Aram, however, instinctively knew that to remain on the ground was to invite punishment. He got to his feet quickly, standing as tall as his cramped muscles would allow, and yanked Decius upward as well. His instincts proved to be correct. The skinny overseer set about kicking any man who remained prone.

  It was discovered then that the man who’d been at the front of the wagon on Aram’s side was near death. The overseer examined him while the lasher looked on. When the overseer stood and shook his head, the horned monster drew his sword, pushed the point into the man’s neck and sawed his head from his body. It was a sudden, stunning reminder of the men’s true status.

  Aram was horrified by the casualness with which the deed was done but there was worse to come. The man from his wagon wasn’t the only casualty. Of the forty-two men in the other wagons, two were in such bad condition that they were killed as well, in the same cavalier manner, and three had already died somewhere en route, their rotting bodies hauled along without regard to decency or the welfare of their fellow travelers.

  And there was another ominous surprise. Somewhere during the trip, two more lashers had joined the caravan. After the slaughter of the weak and diseased, the three monsters moved off to one side and watched disinterestedly as the overseers disposed of the bodies and set about organizing the surviving slaves. Aram was one of the first to be positioned in line and was left alone while the others were being sorted, so he took the opportunity to survey his surroundings. To him, a man who’d never seen anything but flat ground, it was astonishing.

  The wagons had been drawn up in a circle on the eastern side of the small valley near some tall trees with broad, pale green leaves. Surrounding the valley were high hills broken here and there by rocky outcroppings and indented with wooded hollows. Besides the mouth of the canyon, which was behind him on his right, the line of hills was broken in two places, once in the northeast, which was to his left and in another place on his right to the south.

  There was the sound of water from behind him and though he did not dare turn and look, Aram gathered that the stream that tumbled westward down the canyon was there and issued from the gap in the hills to the northeast. A dirt road led through the gap in the hills to the south beyond which there was a glimpse of more open country, larger than this valley, and at some distance beyond that, more hills.

  At the eastern extremity of the valley, over against the base of the hills, there was a long, low structure made of stone. Its outer wall was punctuated every few feet by rectangular doorways, fifty or more, more than enough to accommodate all the men in the transport. Aram realized that he was looking at his new home.

  II

  After being numbered, the men were unchained and directed toward the long, low building set against the hills. As they stumbled along, Aram looked through the gap to the south and saw that beyond there was indeed a large, wide-open area bounded in the distance by more hills, higher and rockier. Because the valley where the wagon train had stopped was quite small, barely more than thirty or forty acres, it occurred to him that the road leading southward through the gap probably lead to the new fields of his labor.

  Between the wagons and the low building, four newly set posts marked the corners of a rectangular assembling area. On the eastern edge of the assembling area, next to the building with all the doors, a water tank stood on stilts with showers protruding from beneath it. The men were marched through the cascading water four abreast and were allowed to stand in the stream for a few minutes and scrub their bodies clean of the grime of nearly seven weeks’ transport.

  After all had passed through the showers, they were led toward to their new housing. Once there, they were ordered to stand facing the assembling ground while each man was assigned to housing and then they were fed. Afterwards, clothing was brought, roughly sized to each man, and two sets each were distributed. They were allowed to dress and every man was given a bag of wheat-meal and a small pot containing the sweet sauce, which they were allowed to put away inside their huts.

  These were no more than individual cells, six or seven feet wide by eight feet deep with no windows, the only point of ingress and egress being the narrow door opening onto the assembling area. The single item of furniture consisted of a sleeping mat placed on the floor at the rear of each hut. When they had finished dressing into their new clothes the men were again ordered to line up and the wiry overseer addressed them. He held a short whip similar to that used by the lashers and he flicked it against his leg as he spoke.

  “You have been brought here, to the very edge of the civilized world, to open up new ground and make it produce for the glory of His Magnificence, Manon the Great, lord of the world, and for the benefit of his loyal subjects everywhere. His choosing of you for this task should be a cause for pride. You will take your instructions from me, but you will be governed by your masters who will be ever present.” Here, the overseer glanced briefly down and his small, narrow eyes slid in the direction of the massive lashers standing a little to his left behind him. “If you do well, you will not only be allowed to live, but will, in time, be given women to help share your beds and your burdens. If you do not do well, you will most certainly die. And it will not be a quick or pleasant death
.”

  As he was speaking the wagons out in the valley turned and began to move away down the canyon. The drivers put the whip to the teams of oxen in obvious desire to quit the lonely outpost among the hills. The men watched them leave with a variety of emotions. Aram was certain that his feelings were quite different from all those around him. The overseer’s words “edge of the civilized world” reverberated through the secret chambers of his mind like the ringing of a clear bell of hope, promising a chance at liberty.

  With a snap of his whip, the scowling overseer regained their attention.

  “You will find that I will not be ignored. Slaves you are and slaves you will always be. Only the strength in your arms and legs gives you any value. I’m sure this has been satisfactorily demonstrated by the fate of those men who could not properly endure the journey to this place. Remember that lesson always. Your masters,” again his eyes darted down and to the left, “have graciously decided that you will not go to the fields today. I suggest you go into your huts and rest, for tomorrow you will work.”

  Aram was grateful for the respite. It was now just early afternoon and would be several hours before the sun dropped below the hills to the west, allowing for a long, much-needed rest. Feeling a curious pang of emotion, he stopped for a moment in the doorway and looked to the west.

  Beyond those hills, far away, a thousand leagues or more across the plains, milcush was no doubt sprouting in the sodden fields of his youth and his cache of food had long since rotted. Very likely, he would never see those fields again in the course of his life. He went into the hut and without undressing laid his battered body down on the woven mat on the floor. Despite everything, he was asleep in minutes.

  The ringing of a gong awoke him early in the morning. He went outside and found the stump of an old tree to one side of his doorway. Sitting on it he ate his first breakfast in more than a month while across the canyon to the west and north the hillsides began to color with the sunrise. The huge bodies of the lashers moved about in the morning gloom, shadowy and sinister.

  A half-hour after the ringing of the gong, the overseer lined the men up and they marched along the road through the gap in the hills to the south. It was a cool morning and Aram’s muscles were stiff but he was anxious to get to the fields and survey his new surroundings for the possibility of escape. This new place was wilder and perhaps more dangerous, but it might also allow for a better opportunity to flee. Throughout the long miserable transport from the plains, Aram had firmly decided one thing; within the year he would either be a free man or a dead one but he would no longer be a slave.

  They marched south out of the dim canyon into the northern fringe of a long, broad valley that sloped gently from east to west, encircled by hills. To the east, on their left, beyond a long upward slope that ended, far away, in a mottled jumble of black foothills, the massive ramparts of a dark mountain blocked the body of the rising sun. Before them, to the south, the valley sloped gently away toward a line of rocky, steep-sided hills, and there was the sound of rushing water in that direction. On their right, towards the west, a half-mile or so from where the road entered into it, the valley floor merged with low, grassy uplands tufted with scattered stands of brush.

  Across the valley, in the pale light of early morning, Aram could see the white froth of tumbling water. There was a river, or at least a fair-sized stream on the valley’s southern border, scouring the base of the steep ridge of hills as it rushed westward toward the convergence of that rocky spine with the gentler hills on the west.

  The ridge on the north that separated the field from their sleeping quarters ran generally east and west. As this ridge ran to the west, its steep contours broke and crumbled gradually into rounded and rumpled hills and merged with the grass and brush covered uplands. As it ran the other way, eastward, it became rather more sharply defined, almost like a dike, driving into and eventually being swallowed up by the broad rocky slope that rose toward the massive bulk of the distant mountain.

  That broad eastern slope fanned out as it rose toward the foothills below the mountain and was strewn with rock and patches of brush. It gained height gradually and must have spanned a distance of twenty or thirty miles before it touched the distant foothills. The river flowing along the southern edge of the valley issued from somewhere in the region to the south of that slope.

  The valley that the men would turn into fields was about twice as long, east to west, as it was wide, north to south. Tall grass, rooted in rich black soil, covered the valley floor. All the arable ground in the valley, three or four hundred acres more or less, was marked into square sections by stakes driven into the ground and connected by lengths of twine. Each square looked to be about an acre or so in size.

  Shovels were stacked neatly at the end of the road and these were handed out. Each man was directed to a plot of earth containing several squares marked by the stakes and instructed to begin turning the soil. Aram was given a plot at the far southeastern corner of the valley near the river where the grasses were intermingled with low brush at the base of the eastern slope.

  Because he was assigned to the extreme southeastern part of the field, Aram found himself laboring under the cold black eyes of a lasher. The three enormous lords had positioned themselves at the corners of the valley, one at the corner where Aram worked, one over on the northeast at the juncture of the separating ridge and the eastern slope, and the other at the gap where the stream exited to the southwest. The skinny overseer was stationed at the northwest, near where the road entered the valley.

  It seemed evident that escape, something that was not considered a possibility for slaves out on the plains, had been considered here. But as the morning lengthened and the work got organized, Aram noticed that the lasher spent most of its time watching the ground out beyond the perimeter. It soon became apparent to Aram that its efforts were directed more toward preventing something coming in out of the wild than stopping the slaves from escaping into it. He wondered what could be present in the countryside round about that required the size and strength and ferocity of a lasher to prevent its killing or capturing the slaves or otherwise hindering the work in the fields. And he wondered what that might mean for his plans to escape into the wild.

  He was glad that his body was strong and had remained in reasonably good condition during the long transport from the plains. He’d regained a good bit of his health during the last week of the journey. And now, after just one night sleeping on a normal bed, his strength was remarkably improved. By the end of the first day’s work, he’d made serious inroads into his plot of ground and the lasher had taken more interest in his neighboring workers than in him. Until he knew a bit more about his new surroundings and had a solid plan for escaping, he intended to exhibit meekness and to mind his work.

  Decius had been assigned to a group of plots just behind him and slightly further into the field. Over the course of the next week, as Aram worked that way, he intruded as far as he dared into the smaller man’s area in an effort to help him keep the pace and avoid punishment. Decius had suffered terribly during the transport from the plains, but with Aram’s surreptitious help gradually began to recover his strength.

  As the days passed firmly into spring, Aram finished turning one plot after another. He kept his head down at all times when he was in the field, but often his eyes were turned outward toward the surrounding landscape. Whenever he was faced away from the lasher, he studied the countryside as he worked, especially to the east, south, and west. To the north was the low rocky ridge through which the road led back to the sleeping quarters. Aram rarely saw much of the country to the north of the small valley where they slept because it was usually dark when the workers left the assembly area in the morning and always fully dark when they returned at night. As a consequence he took no interest in the region to the north.

  To the west the northern ridge converged with the gentle grass and brush covered hills that rose slightly higher as they trailed away. In that
direction, far to the west, Aram knew that those hills eventually submerged themselves in the flat soil of the great plains. He soon lost interest in that direction as well, as it led back to more populated areas.

  On the southern border of the field there was the river, wearing away at the base of the rocky spine of hills. On most days, it was a gentle gurgle of sound, a pleasant aural backdrop to the backbreaking work of the day. After a hard rain, however, it would roar and then, if he looked in that direction, Aram could see a roiling muddy current. The river would be impossible to cross during any of its flood stages, but even when it wasn’t flooded it was an impressive stream and would be a formidable barrier. So it was to the east that his hopes lay, and it was in that direction that Aram looked the most.

  The broad valley that he was helping to transform into rich farmland rose gently toward the east until it became lost in the broad slope that supported, here and there, patches of stubby gray brush. As the slope rose away toward the jumbled foothills at the base of the distant black mountain, it grew gradually rougher and rockier and there were areas of piled rock where nothing grew. These outcroppings were odd; it was as if rock had poured directly out of holes in the ground like a liquid and then hardened into rough globules. To Aram it looked rather like a giant had probed the ground with a huge pike, grubbing randomly in the earth as he crisscrossed the area.

  Further east as the slope gained height toward the foothills; it was punctured here and there by tall spires of jagged stone, like the magnificent ruins of abandoned towers. Eventually, the slope merged with the distant foothills which were themselves but minor precursors to the great broad-topped mountain rising beyond. Aram could not begin to guess the distance up the ramparts of the mountain to its summit regions, but it was vast; the many black and broken peaks seemed to plumb the very depths of the sky.