He rolled on his back. This Pretani-built house was dark, the only light the crimson of the banked-up hearth. There wasn’t the faintest glow from the seams around the door flap. It must still be the deepest night, long before the dawn.
The Pretani men were all around him, big powerful men who slept at night in the furs they wore all day, and the house stank of meat and sweat and damp, of farts and piss. One of them was snoring – Hollow, probably, but it could have been any of them.
Beyond the house walls there was silence. The Pretani often complained about the crying of the Eel children in the night, and they would go out and throw stones at the kids in their pits until they shut up. But there was no crying tonight.
That scream, though. Had he dreamed it? His dreams had been disturbed recently, dreams of stone monsters rising up through rich, placid waters – dreams of Leafy Boys pouring through a forest canopy like monstrous birds…
There was a low rumble, like thunder rolling deep in the belly of the earth, and the house shook. The Pretani growled and mumbled in their own guttural tongue. True hadn’t dreamed that.
And now there were more screams.
He rolled off his pallet, grabbed his boots and made for the door flap. The night was pitch-dark, moonless and starless, the spring sky a roof of cloud. The only light came from the glow of the big communal hearth. The air was sharp, it was still some days before the spring equinox, and his breath steamed before his face.
A heap of torches had been made up by the fire, reeds tied tightly around lengths of ash branch, to allow night working. True snatched one of these and lit it quickly.
Then he ran towards the quarry workings. He glimpsed others following, Pretani. The Eel women the Pretani used peered from their own house, and True saw their pale, scared faces. Soon his booted feet ran on bare rock, where the turf and peat had been stripped away for the quarry. The three great pits were pools of darkness ahead of him. He slowed deliberately; it would do nobody any good if he fell and smashed his head. But he saw dust rising from the furthest pit, heard more screams.
He hurried that way. The screaming grew louder, the cries of children piercing his head like a flint knife.
At the lip of the pit he knelt and held out his torch. He knew every grain of the walls beneath him, every pick mark, every blood splash; in the last few months he had seen these pits dug out by his own people. He could immediately see what had happened.
The rock here came in layers, some of it the smooth, rich sandstone the Pretani preferred, and the rest a harder limestone. When all the easy stuff had been extracted from the surface they had had to break through the limestone layers, and then they had widened the pits under the limestone, working out to left and right as they drew out the precious sandstone. Now, he could see, a big chunk of the limestone shelf had broken away, crumbled and fallen into the pit, and had taken masses of the upper layers with it.
The pits were always full of people, day and night. Most of the Eel folk slept down there, save for the senior ones like himself who supervised the rest and the women favoured by the Pretani – men, women and children huddled in pits with a bit of skin for protection from the cold. Every morning the children had to clamber up the knotted ropes to bring out the waste, the shit and the piss buckets.
He could see movement at the bottom of the pit, through the dust. Bodies moving like worms, splashed with blood, reaching for the knotted ropes. The screaming was unbearable.
‘By the great oak’s blight.’ It was Hollow, at his side, panting from the run. He was bare to the waist; he had come out without his hide tunic. True thought he saw concern in his broad face. There were worse than Hollow.
‘Here,’ True said in the heroes’ tongue. ‘Hold this.’ He handed Hollow his torch, and reached for a rope. ‘I’m going down. Get more people. Bring help.’ This was the only occasion True had ever dared give orders to a Pretani.
Hollow nodded, his face drawn. Holding up the torch, he turned and yelled for others to come.
True worked his way down the rope, clinging onto the knots with hands toughened by months of labour, his booted feet walking down the broken wall, his way lit only by the uncertain light of Hollow’s torch. He could taste the rock dust in the air. The screaming grew louder, and now he could smell blood and shit. He felt as if he was sinking into one of his own nightmares, but this was more vivid than any dream.
He reached the end of the rope, and dropped the last short distance to the bottom of the pit. One foot landed on somebody, a child, who yelped and got out of the way. There were more torches overhead now, and he could see a little better.
People huddled against the walls. Fallen boulders, big rocks, blocked the cave they had dug out, following the seam. Clearly there were people stuck back there, behind the boulders. He could hear their screams, the yells for help.
Blood seeped from under one of the boulders, a big one by his feet.
He was frozen, unable to act. He thought he saw a faint blue glow in the night sky over the pit mouth. Dawn soon. More people gathered around the pit, men and women, both Pretani and Eel folk. The screams of the children seemed to be bringing out a common humanity.
Somebody grabbed his arm. It was Loyal, the girl he had been courting when the Pretani had come, the girl he had saved from being torn apart by the strips of hide – the girl who now warmed his bed, though whether it was for love or because she thought it gave her the best chance of staying alive he could no longer say. Now she had gashed her head, her hair was matted with blood, and pale brown dust coated her hair, her skin, her clothes.
She said, ‘Help her.’ He could barely hear her over the screams.
Something in him came back to life. ‘Loyal-’
‘I was half-awake. I heard the rocks – I rolled out of the way. If not, it would have been me under there – oh, True, you’ve got to help her!’
‘Who?’ But he already knew the answer: she meant Honest, her little sister, the only other member of her family who had survived the months under the Pretani.
She pointed to the boulder at his feet. ‘True – please!’
Gently he pushed her away, and studied the rock at his feet. He saw where he could get his hands under it, where to plant his feet. He braced, bent his legs to keep his back straight, and locked his hands at the narrower end of the boulder. Then he heaved, pressing with his legs. Loyal joined him, hauling with her own callused hands. The muscles in his back tightened, and the blood rose to his face until he felt his head would burst. Yet the rock lifted, just a little, and with a final heave they pushed it aside.
As it rolled away he looked down at what he had revealed. Loyal pushed forward, but he grabbed her and held her away.
Honest had been lying on her back. Her body, loosely covered by a hide wrap, looked at peace, her legs bent slightly and resting to her left side, just as if she was sleeping; her right arm was draped over her body, covering a bone amulet. But the falling rock had caught her on the head and left shoulder, bursting her skull like a heel stamping on an overripe fruit.
‘She couldn’t have felt anything,’ he said to Loyal. His own voice sounded strange to him, and he wondered from what deep pit he was dragging up these words of comfort. ‘She must have stayed asleep, never even waking.’ But he remembered the single scream that had first woken him. ‘And her spirit…’ He didn’t know what to say about Honest’s spirit. Their priest had died soon after the move to this place of rock and labour.
Others were coming down the ropes now, bearing torches that lit up the dust-laden air. Hollow was among them. He started to snap out orders, and the people, Pretani and Eel folk alike, began to get organised. Some of them were already hauling aside the rubble.
True pushed Loyal towards a rope. ‘You go up. Try to find Resin.’ The Pretani priest was a poppy-addled fool, but he had a good heart, and had been known to offer comfort to Eel folk in distress.
‘Get me her amulet.’
‘Loyal, just go-’
‘Please.’
He braced himself, then reached past the rock with one hand and grabbed the girl’s amulet. He tugged its thread hard, and to his relief it broke easily. He studied the little amulet as it lay in his hand. It was pale white, just a bit of broken deer antler, with a carving of the Great Eel wrapped around a central rod. Now it was splashed with blood, and greyish, slimy stuff. He wiped it off on his tunic and handed it to Loyal. ‘Now go.’
