West of January (22 page)

He sighed again. “And sometimes the sheep catch the dogs.”

Before I could ask what nonsense I was supposed to have heard, someone shouted a warning. Orange scrambled to his feet, telling me to do the same. Sleepers were hastily kicked awake, and the whole paddock of slaves lined up at attention as a party of ants approached. And then we were divided into gangs and marched off.

And I was shown what my father’s hymns and prayers had never succeeded in explaining to me when I was a child—what Hell was.

—2—

T
HAT FIRST DESCENT INTO THE PIT
was worse than anything I had yet endured at the hands of my captors. I was assigned to a gang of five other men and a woman, under the supervision of a weedy, tufty-faced youth. He sent the others off to their labors and looked me over contemptuously. Then he gave me a list of the punishments he could inflict on me if he chose: confinement in total darkness, clawing, mutilation, lingering death. Him I could have broken in half with my bare hands, but he had his panther at his side, so I cringed and groveled and promised to be a good slave.

At the mouth of the mine we met the other shift coming out. I was told to choose a man of about my size and take his gear. Thus I found myself pulling on a stinking leather smock, stiff with old sweat and dirt, shabby and patched and abrasive. It barely reached my knees. The rest of my equipment consisted of a metal helmet, a pick, a canteen, and a candle. The ants, I noted, also wore iron-toed boots and heavy breeches. I would have settled for the breeches. I was ordered into the tunnel.

We were close to High Summer, and there were always fifty or more living beings in those workings, not counting cats, yet the dusty air was bitterly cold. I had never known cold before in my life. I had seen darkness in the waters beneath the seafolk’s grove, but this darkness had a weight and solidity all its own. The tunnel sloped gently, going on and on, relentlessly deeper, branching often. The faint flicker from my light showed rough wet walls pressing in on either hand. Ahead of me was thick, heavy blackness, into which I must force my unwilling body.

Worst of all, though, as I stumbled and scurried ahead of my sneering guard and his four-pawed enforcer, was the sense of being buried, of the mountain peak squeezing in on me. I had been reared under the limitless sky of the grasslands. This living burial was in itself a torment more terrifying than almost anything I could have imagined. The cold and the smell of rock and the darkness knotted my insides in spasms of fear.

Eventually we took a smaller branch, then another, and came at last to a dead end. The ceiling was so low I had to crouch, and the whole cramped space was visible, even in the faint glimmer of my tiny candle and the ant’s lantern. I was puzzled by a steady clinking, for I could not see where it came from, and it echoed mysteriously all around.

“The one.” The kid pointed at a row of small holes around the cave at floor level, looking barely larger than miniroo burrows. I hesitated, nauseated by the weight of mountain above me. The boy gestured and the panther sank on its haunches, snarling. Quickly I lay down with my clutter of equipment and began to wriggle in.

And wriggle…and wriggle… The walls spread out, but the ceiling stayed right above my head. The floor was cold and wet and abrasive against my legs. Water dripped continually. I could hear that I was being followed, and I was pathetically grateful for the company.

At last the journey ended, the two of us lying side by side on our bellies, facing a vein of crumbling black rock that was obviously worth much more than I was. If I tried to raise my head to look at it properly, my helmet struck the roof. The tunnel was wide enough that I could have just touched both sides by stretching out my arms, but floor and ceiling sloped sharply to the left. I was hard against one wall, the kid almost leaning on me. Two battered buckets were there, waiting for us.

“You fill ten buckets.” The contemptuous voice was at my ear. “The black stuff. None of the white—that’s dross. Like you. As you fill each one, you shout for another, and the woman will bring it.”

“Yes, master.” And the echoes whispered,
master, master.

“You stop and come out when the candle dies. If you haven’t done ten, you’ll be encouraged to do better next time.”

“I’ll try, master.”

“You’d better, slag. Look back.”

I twisted awkwardly around and saw two eyes glowing in the faint flicker of the lantern.

“Sliver will be checking on you,” my driver said. “He can see you even without light, and you won’t hear him coming.”

“I’ll work hard, master!”

“Yes, you will. If I don’t hear that pick going, I’ll send in Sliver.” He gestured with one hand. A big padded foot stroked the back of my bare calf. I squealed and the boy laughed.

“Next time he won’t have his claws sheathed.” He took his lantern and began to scramble away, then thought of a last warning. “Work forward, not sideways. If the cut gets too wide, the roof will fall.”

“I’ll remember, master.”

“This one’s too wide already.” He departed with a clatter and scratch of boots, leaving me in a silence broken only by the clink of my pick and the harsh breathing of a man working as hard as terror could drive him.

─♦─

How long? I don’t know how long I was a slave for the ants.

I survived, and perhaps nothing in my long life is quite so strange as that. Many seafolk were brought in after me; obviously the ants had expected the great migration. All they had needed to do was set a trap by the first fresh water. Seafolk came easy.

Seafolk went easy, also. Those gentle people made very poor slaves. Strangers to violence, they just lay down and died.

The third or fourth batch after mine included Whistler, one of the boys from my own tribe. He brought nightmare news of women giving birth in coracles as they were towed through the madness of the Great Canyon. Several had died most horribly, including Sparkle. I spoke but once with Whistler, for after his second shift he tried to run away. I was lucky to be underground at the time.

His news should have killed me faster than the panthers killed him. I had been very fond of Sparkle—indeed, I would have sworn that I had loved her as much as man could love woman, for I had not then learned what true love is. Her death seemed to mark her as just one more victim in the wake of disaster I trailed—my parents, Violet, Pebble, Sparkle. Anyone I ever cared for died, it seemed.

And her death was entirely my fault. Even in the worst parts of the canyon there had been quiet pools where a boat could have lingered. Had I not been so stupid as to let myself be caught by the ants I would have been there, in that canyon hell. A little common sense and Sparkle would have lived. Even young Whistler said that much, and I believe it still.

I was a seaman—I should have lain down and faded away, as so many of them did. Even if I could escape from the ants’ nest, where would I go, what would I gain? My tribe was already lost on the vast South Ocean. I had no family there anyway, for not one child was recognized as mine. The ant who caught me had thrown away my angel tokens, but I had long since lost any desire to be an angel. Sparkle’s death was as much the fault of Brown-yellow-white as it was mine, and the prisoner Orange was no hero to admire. The angels had failed to save the herdfolk, they had destroyed my idyllic life in the grove—or so I thought—and they apparently could do nothing about these monstrous slave-owning ants. I hated and despised angels. I had no wish to be an angel. I had no wish to live at all.

Some slaves just seemed to dissolve; that was an easy death and one I prayed for. Some tried to escape or fight back, but I was far too craven to risk what happened to them.

All the other captives went mad—some in one way, some in others. But we all went mad after our fashion. All of us.

─♦─

“Knobil?” The whisper came as I crouched at the trench. On one side of me a lumbering hairy herdman named Koothik was mumbling prayers, as he did all the time, everywhere. On the other side was Orange, the former angel.

I whispered back under the madman’s gabble and the loud drone of insects, keeping my head down. “Sir?”

“I am planning an escape.”

“I’m with you.”

“It will be very dangerous. Many of us will die.”

Here was the answer I had been looking for! “Of course.”

“They don’t seem to have any weapons but cats. If enough men with shovels go for a panther, some should survive.”

“Of course.”

“We’ll strike in the mine door at a change of shift. Take the bosses hostage.”

“Great!” It would be a quick death, and that was all I wanted.

Koothik rose and lumbered away. Orange’s whispering grew more urgent. “Try to enlist two more leaders. Be very careful who you talk to. Report back when ready.”

“Will do,” I said, without moving my lips.

“Better to die bravely than Unger on as a slave.”

“Absolutely!”

“Brave man!” the angel whispered, and he walked away before anyone noticed our conversation.

Then I realized what he had just said.
Brave
man? Me? That was the only time while I was a slave of the ants that I ever laughed aloud.

─♦─

The first three men I approached turned me down flat, and I began to grow desperate. There were so few sane enough to trust!

Before I could try a fourth, Orange was betrayed or else became too obvious. As he came trudging out of the mine at the end of shift, he was ordered to halt in the middle of the settlement, near the stream, while the rest of us returned to the paddock. There was no trial, no explanation, no announcement. He was left there in full view, a naked man dribbling sweat onto his shadow, alone, waiting. He soon fell over, and the life of the compound went on around him regardless, as if he had already ceased to exist. A single cat guarded him, replaced by another when it grew weary.

I suppose he died mostly from thirst. He could hear and see the stream, but the slightest movement would bring needle claws slashing down. He did do some crawling, at the cost of much skin and blood, but when he neared the water itself the panther took him by the ankle and dragged him back to where he started. We knew he was dead when it began to eat him, and after that there was no more talk of mass breakouts.

I remember when I first realized that I also had gone mad. I was lying under one of the filthy hides, being cooked, trying to go back to sleep. Unfortunately some herdman had lain down alongside me and was croaking psalms to his Heavenly Father. I could hear him and even smell him, but I was too exhausted to move away.

“Shut up!” I muttered, not raising my voice in case I woke myself completely.

He did not hear me and would not have reacted if he had. I reluctantly cracked open one eye and saw enough of a blood-caked furry leg to recognize Koothik. By then he was mad as a mating bogmoth, uncomprehending, needing constant clawings to make him heed orders. He wailed on, in a hoarse monotone.

“Idiot!” I said. “Your god isn’t listening. Try another for a change.” There were many gods worshipped in the slave compound—gods hidden in rocks and trees, gods of air and water, wood and bone, many gods.

“If your god cared,” I said crossly, “then he would not let this happen to you!” Koothik was no older than I was, but twice my size, a shaggy young giant picked up by traders when he was a loner, or perhaps sold to them by his father. “You haven’t done anything to deserve this,” I told him, still prone under my cover, the earth gritting against my cheek as I spoke. “You should be lounging in a comfortable tent, counting your daughters, tended by adoring women, lots of them.” That was the life he had been raised for.

Koothik, of course, neither heard nor replied.

Then I had an inspiration. I raised my head and checked around, but there was no one else within earshot. “I’ll tell you something, Koothik,” I said. “A big secret.”

Koothik’s mind was not there to hear, but I told the rest of him. “He can’t hear, Koothik! Our Father lives above the grasslands, and he can’t hear us from here. But I’m going to go back to the grasslands and I’ll tell him what’s happening to his children. Then he’ll throw thunderbolts and stop it! Then he’ll help us!”

Koothik uttered thanks for grass and wool…

“It’s wrong to treat men like woollies,” I explained carefully, lying flat again. “But I have a plan, Koothik! No use praying here, Koothik! I shall go back to the grasslands and pray to the Father, and he will hear me there and then come and rescue us all!”

Now I can detect certain logical weaknesses in that plan, but then it seemed very reasonable, and very comforting. And yet somehow I knew it for the insanity it was.

I turned over, but I was too excited to sleep. I decided I had been foolish to blurt out my plan to Koothik. He might tell the ants, and they would be frightened and kill me. I decided to tell no one else about my plan.

—3—

N
OT LONG AFTER THAT
, I met Hrarrh. Again I was stretched out on the hot clay of the paddock, just drifting off to sleep. This time my cover was pulled away—a not uncommon event. I decided to resist. I was thoroughly exhausted after a hard shift in a place called the Canyon, where the slaves worked in couples and the supervisor could watch us all the time. The woman running me then was the worst in the mine, worse than almost any of the men. She had paired me with an inadequate adolescent, forcing me to do more than my share. I felt as if I had
earned
that cover, although all a slave could earn by any effort was temporary freedom from pain.

I sat up and jerked the leather back again. Technically this was fighting, and someone would be watching to see who won the exchange. Too many wins would bring a mauling, but I was one of the best workers, so I could hope to get away with minor offenses once in a while.

Adjusting the stinking hide over myself once more, I glared challengingly at the would-be thief lying facedown on the dirt at my side. Then I looked again. He was barely more than a boy, still round with puppy fat, and he had the worst case of sunburn I had ever seen. His back was a marshland of water blisters, and his shoulders were cooked meat. Every part of him was red and peeling. By pulling off the cover, I had hurt him. His eyes were screwed up in pain.