Raptor (43 page)

“Dotterel,” she called me, giggling again, as we disentangled from one another. “Such a dawdler would not long survive underground. Come.
Move!
Or you will have a whole heap of miners on top of you.”

I rolled well away from the chute, and just in time. A spate of those men, each holding an empty basket, came shooting from out of the darkness into the torchlit, salt-walled corridor in which we had landed. Each man spryly sprang to his feet from the pile of pine boughs, to make way for the next, and then less eagerly plodded on along the hall. Beyond the procession of men, I could see another file of them coming from inside the mine, bent under their baskets, being waved on or briefly halted by a foreman who stood at the bottom of a ladder—an exceptionally tall ladder, built of very thick beams and rungs—up which the miners toiled into the darkness above.

When I could breathe again, little Livia led me along the corridor, around various corners, along other halls that branched off one another. Each was brightly and quite enchantingly lighted, and it required torches only at distant intervals to accomplish that because, from each torch, the translucent salt walls gathered the illumination and diffracted and diffused it for a long way in either direction. So, between the brilliant red-yellow splotches of torchlight, we walked in a mellower glow of orange radiance, emanating equally from walls, floor and ceiling, as if we were inside the world’s largest jacinth gem. In some manner that I could not discern, every part of the mine was vented and the vents were interconnecting, reaching clear to the outside of the mountain. Everywhere inside, there was a faint but perceptible breeze that not only supplied fresh air at even the deepest levels but also whisked away the torches’ smoke and prevented its discoloring the salt at all. In almost every hallway there was a constant traffic of heavy-laden men passing opposite to Livia and myself, and empty-basketed men trudging along with us, but some of the side corridors were totally empty, and I asked why.

“They lead to places where the salt has been worked down to bare rock, and is exhausted,” said the child. “But I am not going to take you to any of the mine’s faces currently being worked, for there is always danger of a cave-in, and I would not expose a guest to such peril.”

“Thank you,” I said sincerely.

“However, there is one particular place I wish to show you. And that is quite a long way. Both in and down.”

She gestured, and I saw that we stood at the head of another dark chute, the miners again standing aside for us. Here Livia played no fooleries, and I bowed politely for her to go first. This time, as I followed, I found the swooping ride on my apron rather exhilarating. But we again wound our way through many corridors, then down another long chute—and more corridors, and more chutes—and I began to feel uncomfortable. In my youth, as I have told, I spent much time inside the tunnels and caves behind my beloved cascades in the Balsan Hrinkhen, but those had only taken me deep within a cliffside, not down and down and down
under
it.

It seemed to me that Livia and I must by now be back on a level with the town I had left in early morning. That would mean that I had a whole, huge, high Alpe bulking over my head, held from collapsing onto me only by walls and ceilings of salt. And salt, I reflected, is a notably fragile substance. But the passing miners showed no signs of fearfulness, and the girl went blithely along, so I gulped down my discomfiture and followed where she led. Now she turned off from the traveled corridors into an empty but nevertheless torchlit one. That got wider and higher as we progressed, and suddenly opened out, and we were standing on the edge of a vast cavern, empty of any other people but more brightly lighted than any of the busy walkways had been.

It was very like those Balsan Hrinkhen caves that I have described, but this surpassed them, both in size and in splendor—for what had there been formed by apparently melted-then-congealed rock was here fashioned of salt: fluted columns between floor and ceiling, lacework and draperies and motionless waterfalls around the walls, spires and steeples and pinnacles upthrust from the floor, long icicle-like pendants dangling from the vaulted ceiling. Everything was of good and marketable salt, but so marvelous were the salt sculptures that, in all the centuries or millennia that the mine had been worked, these things had been preserved undefiled.

The miners had gone to a great deal of trouble to illuminate this place. It must have been harder work than mining, to affix torches all around and up the arching walls to the very roof of the vault, as they had done. The resultant firelight, diffused throughout the translucent salt shapes, reflected back and forth inside the soaring dome of salt, almost like echoes made visible, gave me the feeling that I stood no longer within a jacinth gem but at the heart of a flame.

With proprietary pride, Livia said, “All this was made by nature, but the miners added some things man-made. No one knows how long ago.”

She beckoned me to one side of the cavern and showed me.

Into a wall that nature had neglected to adorn, the miners had carved a small but entire Christian chapel—hollowed out, then furnished with an ambo table built of salt blocks and slab, and on the ambo stood a tall pyx and a taller chalice, both sculptured from rock salt.

“Like the better people in Haustaths, some of the miners have long been good Christians,” said Livia. “But most are still pagan, and they too, long ago, added a work of their own.”

Into the side of the cavern directly across from the chapel, they had carved a temple. This hollowed-out space contained only a man-sized salt statue, crudely done but more or less man-shaped, and evidently meant to be some god. Then I saw that the figure’s lumpy right hand leaned on the wooden haft of a hammer with a stone head tied on by thongs, and I realized that the statue represented Thor. One other thing about the temple: its interior was caked with soot and smelled of smoke—the only place in the mine that I had found thus blemished—and I asked Livia how that came to be.

“Why, the pagan miners make sacrifices here,” she said. “They bring the animal here—a lamb, a kid, a piglet. A fire is laid, the animal is slain in the name of some god, then it is cooked. The celebrants eat the meat.” She shrugged her slender shoulders. “The gods get only the smoke.”

“And your Christian father
lets
the pagans do that?”

“The Christian elders of Haustaths make
sure
he lets them. It keeps the workers contented and it costs the mine nothing. Now, Thorn, are you well rested? It is a long way back, and we cannot slide
up.”

I grinned and said, “I believe I can negotiate the ladders. Would you like me to carry you, little girl?”

“Carry me?” she said scornfully. “Vái! Try to
catch
me!” And she scampered off along the corridor that had brought us here.

With my longer legs I did not have to strain to keep up with her, and I made sure that I kept up, or I should assuredly have got lost along the way. I do admit that, when we climbed the last ladder and emerged from the mine’s entrance, I was panting and perspiring and she was not. But then, I had climbed that mountain twice that day, once on the outside of it and again on the inside.

When I got back to the taberna, the caupo Andraías told me, with hiccups, that Wyrd had already gone to sleep and then gone to bed. I must have given him an inquiring look, for he said:

“Ja, in that order. He fell asleep at the table—hic—so my old woman and I conveyed him upstairs.”

So I dined alone, and I ate voraciously. When I likewise went up to bed, Wyrd’s snoring was like a mortal combat between a boar and an úrus, and the room was well-nigh foggy with wine fumes, but I was too tired for that to keep me from sleeping soundly.

Next morning, when we broke our fast together, and Wyrd again took wine, I waited for that wine to clear his head before I recounted my doings of the previous day. I told him of my having visited the mine, and what I saw there, and of my having met Livia and Georgius, and what they were like.

He grunted and said, “I take it that the daughter is a tolerable creature, but the father is one of those self-important mediocrities found in any rustic town.”

“That is my opinion, too,” I said. “But I feel I ought at least to feign respect. He
is
an Honoratus.”

“Balgs-daddja! He is only a plump oyster in a small oyster bed.”

“You sound even more fractious than your usual self, fráuja. Is the wine so sour?”

He scratched in his beard, and said soberly, “Forgive me, urchin. I am lately despondent and uneasy of mind. The mood will pass. The wine will help it to pass.”

“Why the mood? On our arrival here, you had no such mood. Consider, fráuja. We have plenty of money, we need not work, we need only enjoy ourselves and we are in the pleasantest of places for doing that. What have you to be despondent about? Or uneasy?”

He continued to fidget with his beard, and muttered, “By his own head that St. Denis carried under his arm, I do not know. Perhaps only because I am an old man. No doubt fretfulness is another sign of growing old, like the dimming of my eyesight. Go, urchin, and disport yourself with your new friend. Leave this old one to drink away his melancholy.” He quaffed a long draft from his mug, and belched. “When I recover… in a few days… I will take you hunting. Hic. Just for sport… a kind of game you have not hunted before.”

He disappeared behind the mug again, so I made no remark except a noise of exasperation, and strode angrily from the taberna into the market square. As on every morning, it was full of people, mostly women buying their comestibles for the day, and the vendors from whom they bought. I was surprised to see Livia loitering among that crowd. I had told her where I was lodging, but I wondered what had brought her all the way down from the mountain at this early hour.

“I came to visit you, of course,” she said. “And to show you our town.”

That day she showed me the interior of the Church of Mount Calvary, which also served as the chamber for the town council’s meetings and as a repository of oddments from Haustaths’s past: things discovered by local miners, house-builders and gravediggers over the years. Those included numerous articles of bronze jewelry, corroded and green with verdigris; and the much better-preserved corpse—as wrinkled, brown and leathery as its garments—of one of those dwarfish ancient miners found by his ages-after fellow miners.

Then we visited the workshop of an aizasmitha. He did not make jewelry in the modern fashion, such as I had seen (and occasionally purchased) elsewhere. He deliberately copied those antique articles in the Calvary church repository, only restoring them to what they would have looked like when new: arm and ankle bracelets, shoulder fibulae, dainty daggers that were not so much weapons as ornaments for the waist, necklaces and breast pins, all of bright shining bronze.

When it was time for Livia to return home and sit down with her tutor, I walked with her as far as the upper heights of the town. Then I went back to that aizasmitha’s shop, for I had seen there something I wished to buy for myself, but had not wanted Livia to see me buy. That would have perplexed or shocked her, because it was an article definitely made to be worn by a woman. It was a breast guard of a style so old-fashioned that I never afterward saw another for sale anywhere, or worn by any other woman but myself.

It was a simple contrivance, as would be expected from the early artisans who made all those primitive ornaments, but it was at the same time most ingeniously designed and extremely handsome. It consisted basically of a very long, slender rod of bronze, about the thickness of an eagle quill, but artfully curled into twin spirals that wound in opposite directions. The left side spiraled to encase a woman’s left breast from the nipple outward, then, from the upper bulge of that breast, the rod curled down into and across the cleft of the bosom to coil again, from the outside of the right breast inward to end at its nipple. To either side was attached a thong, for the wearer to tie behind her back. On the smith’s bench the whole apparatus simply lay flat, but when clasped across the bosom, those spirals opened and expanded to become a sheath for the separate breasts, both a protection and a decoration. So I bought one, not for armor, but to enhance the visible protuberance of my breasts whenever I should next dress as my female self. It was a rather costly purchase, but I judged it worth the price to make me, when I chose to be a woman, look that much more feminine, shapely and attractive.

The better part of many days thereafter I spent in company with Livia, because Wyrd remained sunk in his inexplicable despondency, sodden with drink. I returned to the taberna only to take an occasional evening meal and to sleep and to break my fast before going out again. Other meals Livia and I would occasionally buy at some other taberna in the town, and once we dined with her father in his grand house. But most often she and I would be far out in the countryside when hunger overtook us, so we would seek the cottage of some woodcutter or charcoal-burner or herb-gatherer, where the housewife could be induced, for a modest sum, to lay out some simple fare for us.

One morning, when Livia and I had planned to spend the day exploring an area that she knew to be totally uninhabited, I went into the taberna kitchen and asked the caupo’s old woman to pack for us a hamper of bread and cheese and sausage and to fill my flask with milk. While I waited, Andraías also came into the kitchen and drew me aside to say:

“Akh, Thorn, I am worried about our friend Wyrd. He has visited here many times before, but I have never seen him like this. Now he is refusing even to
eat.
He subsists entirely on wine and beer. He says his mind is too troubled for him to be able to swallow food. Does that make any sense? Cannot you persuade him to get out into the invigorating forests or onto the lake or
somewhere?”

“I have tried persuasion,” I said. “And I can hardly order him out. He would so resent a minor’s giving orders to an elder that he would likely get drunker than ever. But you are more nearly his age, Andraías. Suppose you simply tell him that, for his own good, you will serve him nothing more.”