George Mills (4 page)
[And fearful, too, of having to scale the fabulous, vertical piles, knowing they’d certainly fall, that no man could stand on the sides of such ramparts and parapets, that they would have to cling to the very trees if their bodies were not to be crushed and broken by the awful fall.
[But they didn’t have to. The merchant showed them passes in the mountains invisible to themselves, plunging between hedgerows of trees as he’d marched them through the forest. So they went up into the mountains, unaware, so gentle was the grade, that they were even climbing. “He’s good,” Guillalume said softly, “he’s very good, he knows just how the gardeners landscaped it.” And Mills thought but did not say, Why of course he’s good, you ninny, he’s an angel.
[And camped for the night. It was very cold, but the merchant built a great fire for them and that, along with the gear Guillalume had had Mills bring with them, was enough to keep them warm.]
It was late the next day that they saw the apparently makeshift and deserted town with its stark wooden cabins. “Boom town,” the merchant said as he hurried them through its single long and empty street to the lip of the shaft which they did not know was a shaft and started them down into the underground cavern which they did not know was a cavern. All they knew was that they were entering earth and they started to scream. (Independently they thought of all awful Chance which had brought them there, of Fate and annihilate alternatives. A thousand years later George Mills would, with disgust that he knew no languages and did not play an instrument, whistle the aleatoric music of license plates, thinking even when he caught a melody: the breaks, the breaks, my clumsy dribbleglass life——mourning in retrospect all missed chances everywhere, crying over spilled or refused choices. Thus, inventing a form of negative inspiration, the two Britons, who did not even know that that was what they were, abandoned philosophy and went to fear.) They keened, they whined, they wailed.
“Wieliczka sure,” said the merchant and urged them after him, holding out a lantern he had produced from his pouch and stepping into the dark, downsloping passageway. Mills and Guillalume shied but were coaxed back between the traces of harness earth by their guide. “Yes. Good, good. Yes. Be men. Good. Come. Come good,” he said, and Mills, who had really wanted adventure, thought that now that he was about to get it it would be in Hell. They were inside earth. As they proceeded they could feel the proximity of the earthen floor beneath their feet, the cool, close, smooth, slightly damp earthen walls on either side of them, the marl roof as high above their heads as tree limbs over a man on horseback. (Once George Mills had helped dig a grave for Guillalume’s father’s favorite horse. There had been sky, sunlight. He had stood at the bottom of the planet. He had not dreaded then—and to a certain extent did not, as he became used to it, dread now—the idea of such a grave. He had stuck his finger into one side of the horse’s clay tomb and gouged out some damp earth, licking it from his finger as a child licks chocolate frosting from a pot. “I should like,” he’d said, “to eat a peck of dirt before I die.” He had been observed and overheard and his remark repeated. Unconsciously he had invented the original version of a phrase—in those days, as in these, everyone invented
something
—which was to become a part of folklore, and, also without knowing it, given a name to a pathological urge—pica—which many of his descendants would share.)
And so they came to the underground cavern which they did not know was a cavern and which only the merchant knew was a mine. Not even the Polish miners who worked it knew it was a mine. They thought themselves farmers, agriculturists, as the merchant trader and the merchant trader’s father and the merchant trader’s father’s father who had discovered Wieliczka and recruited them from all round the Carpathians had told them, that they were salt farmers, convincing them that no cash crop would grow where salt had poisoned the soil, convincing them, too—this an argument begun three generations earlier—that they must forget about the bitter fruits and saline potatoes which they had managed to raise and on which they had subsisted and still subsisted years after the old man had gone down the natural shaft and discovered the natural payload of rare condiment beneath the earth there.
“What lucky men!” he’d said. “What fortunate beings! Blessed is the farmer who does not have to wait on rains, who can turn his back on the sun, who has merely to harvest, as a boy casually pulls milkweed to chew, what is and what’s always been already there, planted at the beginning by God Himself.”
The recruits objected that they would be working in the dark. He showed them how to make torches of dried grass. They complained of the effort it took to dig. He told them of the great plows ordinary aboveground farmers had to attach by heavy biting straps to the shoulders of their wives and children, of the hideous pain involved in turning and guiding furrows in the frozen winter earth. They objected to the smoke from the torches which got into their lungs and made them cough. He pointed out the constancy of temperature in their underground farm. They begrudged the heavy lifting they had to do. He showed them how to rig pulleys that would fetch great buckets of salt out of the earth. They cursed the cave-ins that killed them. He showed them how to shore up the farm with scaffolding and told them that everybody dies.
So it was a working mine that Mills and Guillalume had come to. In the ninety or so years of its operation—it still exists—the Polish salt farmers had learned to operate it with great efficiency and had come to scorn aboveground farmers, and to take pride in the rare spice—it was the merchant who had told them that salt was found only in Wieliczka—they brought up out of the ground and which the merchant or one of his partners—brothers, a son—came to collect every three or four months, bartering for it the stock—milk cows, rats, chickens, a sheep, alley cats, a dog—animals, to them, even more exotic than the caravan of camels on whose backs he took away the salt. The salt. The farmed food. For far-off kings, he said, for giants and emperors. (He drew an elaborate and fanciful map of the world for them, sketching in mythical kingdoms, weird and awesome topographies, showing them in realistic detail the thirty-five-mile radius of forbidding Carpathians around Wieliczka itself, the, to them, immediately identifiable landmarks around the salt farm, the latest channels and newest shafts. Then, beyond the actual thirty-five-mile ring around the real Wieliczka, charting hideous, frightening, impossible country—high Himalayan walls of sheer ice cliffs geometric as a flight of stairs and leading to lands that were constantly ablaze, these next to high seas luridly logjammed on his map with crocodiles, dragons, fierce seaborne lions and apes. “It keeps them down in the farm,” he would explain later to Mills and Guillalume. “It would me,” Mills said.)
“This stuff?” one of the miners said, holding out a palmful of salt. “Those emperors really like this? All it does is make me thirsty.”
“They’ve different digestive systems,” the merchant explained. “Water makes them thirsty. Keep digging.”
“We’re lucky, I guess,” one permanently stooped salt farmer said. “We’re bent down over a gold mine here.”
“Look,” said Guillalume, “isn’t that——It’s so dark I can’t tell really, but it looks rather like——”
“It is,” Mills said excitedly, “it’s Mills’s horse. Good old Mills’s horse,” he said, rushing up to pet it, “but where’s Guillalume’s horse, huh boy? And what have they done to you, fella?” He had to jog along beside the horse as he petted it and said these things, for it had been hooked up to a sort of subterranean merry-go-round, four horses forming a crude equine flywheel.
The merchant took them on a tour of the mine, proudly explaining the operation. The horses they’d seen dragged heavy spokes which were attached to a thick central post, one end of which was planted in the floor of the mine in a wooden pot. At the ceiling, hanging from supporting wooden struts, was a similar pot. The horses had been linked to these devices by complicated harnesses, great leather hames, hame tugs, traces run through bellybands, hip straps, breeching. The spokes ended in great shovel-like blades which rubbed along the sides of the mine, scraping flinders of salt from the walls. Adjusting the length of the spokes made it possible to make deeper and deeper incisions into the salt walls. A pit boss watching over the shower of salt judged when it was about to become critical and gave the order to clear the chamber. Then the scaffolding and struts were removed and the horses and men retreated into a heavily reinforced area. There they stood by while wreckers rushed in with mallets and pitchforks to bring down the chamber they had been working just moments before. A priest made a short prayer over the heavy drifts of salt, and the pit boss called in new gangs to harvest it. Meanwhile, in other parts of the mine, the farmers would be shaping new chambers and setting up new scaffolding. Then the horses were reintroduced and the process began all over again. It took about five weeks for a cycle to complete itself. There were, the merchant explained, approximately four complete shifts of men—chamber shapers, carpenters, wreckers, harvesters, salt carriers, pit bosses and horse talkers—on duty throughout the vast complex of the mine.
The merchant showed them—the mine employed a full-time cartographer—one of his maps. What they saw was astonishing—a nexus of honeycombs, larger, more elaborate than the greatest castle, salted cones and salted tunnels, salted chambers, salted halls, moats, amphitheaters, salted playgrounds, salted shafts. And, in black on the map, the great salt ruins where the delicate, saline architecture had collapsed, myocardial infarcts of salt.
“Best place to dig,” the merchant said.
“But wouldn’t there be——”
“Oh yes sure. Good yields. Many bushels. Bumper crops. Salt ruins best place to dig.”
“But where it’s collapsed, the salt, under all that——”
“Down there under? Oh sure yeah. The farmer boys. Tch-tch. But preserved. Looking good like new.”
M
ills was a horse talker. So was Guillalume. (The barbarian they had seen was actually a pit boss. It had been he who’d discovered and stolen their horses. The merchant, hearing the pit boss’s description of the horses and the markings on their saddles, had determined that the men would have to be stolen as well. “Need,” he’d said, “people who can talk to them.”)
Mills was always thirsty now. Talking to his horse, coaxing him along the orbit of the salt carousel, his tongue flecked with salt dust, his throat burned raw with the dry pebbles, gagging and talking baby talk, horse talk, nonsense, philosophy. He did not know what the other horse talkers told their beasts—the merchant was disinterested; it made him drowsy, he said, to listen; he did not like, he said, to stay long in the farm—because they spoke in what Mills did not even know was Polish, and in addition to his constant thirst, to the annoyance caused him by his great raw burning and wounded mouth, to his stinging eyes and smarting, salt-oiled skin like the sticky, greasy glaze of ocean bathers, there was the problem of finding things to say to it, of
saying
them, getting them out through the hair-trigger emetic atmosphere of his throat and mouth. And in the mitigated light, watery, milky as the hour before sunrise save where the torches, igniting salt, exploded into a showerwork of sparkler ferocity, white as temperature. But mostly the talk, what to say.
“Well, Mills’s horse, here we go again. Round and round, hey, old fellow? No, no, can’t balk, lad. We’re in this together. Got to pull your weight. It’s all teamwork here. Can’t let them other fellows’ horses catch us shirking. That’s it, that’s the way.
“It’s hard times, Mills’s horse, I’ll give you that, but we’ve seen better, what? Oh, but wasn’t it lovely getting here though, doing them countries, eating the fruits and choice cuts, the good cheeses and grand breads and everything shipshape in the posh weather! But all good things come to an end, they say, and it’s hard to keep the splendid up. So perhaps we’re for it now.
“What I think, my view of it, is they’ll keep us only as long as you pull your weight. These salt farmers don’t seem very good Christians to me, Mills’s horse, old fella, old boy. Awful bloody blokes they be. And their women——whoo. Can’t get near ’em. Smell as bad as the wreckers. Saucy strumpets though, I think. Ah, the wenches, Mills’s horse, oh the crumpet, ah the birds!
“But they’ve no manners, hereabouts, nor a bit of breeding. I showed them my handshakes, displayed my salutes. Water off a duck’s back, Mills’s courser.—No no, dray it, dray it, old shaft horse, pull it, old pony. That pit boss has eyes like a peacock’s tail. That’s it, that’s it.—Not like with Nancy, not like with Joan. They appreciated a bit of culture now and again. It wasn’t all dicky in the furry. There was respect, foreplay, handshakes and salutes.
“I’ll tell you a thing about females, old cob. Hey!
Hey!
Keep moving, old goer. Raft it, old jade. Trant it, punch, trant it! Caddy and fetch it, old four-foot and nag-pad, keep on, old cinchfarm, or they’ll turn you to tack. (Good Lord, Mills’s horse, you’re carrying me more than ever you did when I was only your rider.) What was I on about then? Oh——the women.
“All that gynecic crowd. Oh, the splendor and Orient glory——the fine, fair furniture of flesh. Prone, how like the Persian’s couch——the flufféd pillows of their breasts, the long, soft bolster of their thighs, their pink hips curving like the tiding sea. And their hair—oh, their hair, Mills’s horse—sable, gold, bay and wine like all the point-blank brights of heraldry, more potent than the ensigns, guidons, jacks and pennons of inspirate loyalty! Seated, how like the fabric’d thrones of kings and potentates, ease coiled in their laps like springs! The odalisque miracle of those candied cabinets, the smoked, spiked licorice of the cunts and the chewy charming sweetmeat of the ass.—Keep going, keep going, old sleigh-pull!—Their fumed groins like a perfect delta in geography, the salty hollows of their underarms and the perfect upholstery of their frictioned genitals. Oh,
oh.
(Hold up, hold
up
old grasschew!) How fashioned to function, how molded to use. Perfect and practiced as a ball. They say He made them from a rib. ’Tis proof of alchemy then and there’s juice in stones and soup in straw.