Salt (12 page)

TEN

Tarl walked down from the sickhouse by himself. He wore new trousers and a shirt and doublet, and carried the black-bladed knife in a thong at his waist. Dog came at his side, staying so close his shoulder brushed Tarl’s knee at every step.

Hari met his father at the door of the house by the creek. They clasped hands formally, then embraced.

‘Tarl.’

‘Hari, you came for me. I had no hope . . .’

‘My friends helped me.’

Dog growled jealously at the closeness of the pair.

‘These people, Hari? These Dwellers, what do they want?’

‘Nothing, Tarl. They saved you because you could be saved. They saved me.’

‘And now they want to know about Deep Salt.’ A look of fear, a shudder, moved across his face as he spoke the name.

‘You’re well now,’ Hari said, but he wasn’t sure. Tarl’s skin seemed looser, his hair was streaked with yellow and grey, and the black depths of his eyes had haunted movements, like creatures hiding deep in jungle trees.

‘The council’s waiting, Tarl. Come inside.’

Tealeaf and the old man, Gantok, sat at the table, with Pearl on a low stool by the window.

‘Welcome, Tarl,’ Gantok said. ‘We’re pleased to see you well.’

‘Is this your council? Only two?’

‘Our voices go out to everyone who wants to hear.’

‘So it’s true. Dwellers can speak without speech. I’ve heard of it but didn’t believe it.’

‘It’s an ability we have,’ Gantok said, in a satisfied way. ‘Xantee is with me. It was she who brought your son from the city.’

Tarl’s eyes fixed sharply on Tealeaf. Women took a lowly place in the burrows. ‘Who’s this?’ he said then, looking at Pearl.

‘She is Pearl. She came from the city too.’

Tarl’s hand moved to his knife. ‘She’s Company.’

The dog growled.

Quiet, Dog, Pearl said, and it sank at Tarl’s feet with a puzzled look.

‘Hari,’ Tarl said, ‘she’s Company. Company dies.’ He drew his knife.

Hari stepped in front of him. ‘No, Tarl. She’s my friend.’

‘Look at her white skin. Look at her eyes. Company has blue eyes. She dies.’ He raised the knife.

Tarl, Tealeaf said softly.

He did not know where his name had come from. It held him motionless.

The knife is Dweller. It trembles in your hand. Put it away.

‘You, woman? Is it you who tells me what to do?’

‘Pearl has turned a corner from Company. Put your knife away. Tell your dog not to bare his teeth. We’ve nursed you. Danatok, who carried the torch, lies sick still. Put off your own sickness. Put off your lust for blood.’

Pearl saw Tarl struggle for words and saw that his anger would break out again. She wasn’t afraid. She would stop him easily. But she did not want to bully or command. Her mind today was like a cloth shaken out in the wind. Hari’s was the same, she could tell, although he still had creases from his father.

She said, ‘Tarl.’

‘The girl speaks. No girl speaks until she’s told.’

‘Tarl,’ she said, ‘it’s true, I was Company. But not any longer. I was House Bowles. Not any longer. I turned away from them and came here with Hari, and now I’m Pearl, nothing more.’

‘I heard on the ship a girl from House Bowles was chosen for Ottmar’s wife.’

‘I ran away.’

‘Ottmar of Deep Salt.’ His hand tightened on his knife.

‘And Ottmar is king now. The families are dead. My family too. Ottmar hunted me to be his slave. So don’t hate me. The old ways are gone. There are new things to fight.’

‘Pearl speaks the truth,’ Gantok said. ‘Put away your knife.’

Slowly, after a struggle, Tarl obeyed. The number burned on his forehead faded from red to white.

‘Sit with us at the table. Tell us what you learned in Deep Salt.’

Tarl sat down. ‘I am not,’ he said haltingly. ‘I do not want . . .’

‘The place is terrible, we know.’

‘First – you must tell me what’s happening in the city. There’s fighting there and Ottmar calls himself king. But what is happening in the burrows?’

‘Dwellers are watching. They move in the shadows and no one sees. Xantee hears all they say to her.’

‘What do they say?’

‘It’s true, Ottmar calls himself king, even though he’s only Company with a new name. He’s ruthless, he likes to kill, and he kills everyone who stands in his way. The families are dead. House Bowles is dead. But it’s harder than he thinks. The cities in the south and east are in rebellion, and there are men there who also call themselves king. And in the city itself the clerks rose up and made an army, and then the workers rebelled and everyone fights everyone else and Ottmar’s army can’t crush them all. Some of the Whips too have rebelled. So Ottmar has long battles ahead.’

‘But the burrows?’ Tarl said.

‘Yes, the burrows. They fight. There’s a man called Keech . . .’

‘From Keech Burrow. He’s their best hunter.’

‘And another called Keg . . .’

‘From Keg Burrow.’

‘Each leads his own band of hunters and they make raids in the city. The Whips don’t dare go in the burrows any more. There are bands of women too, killing with knives.’

‘From the Bawdhouse,’ Tarl said. ‘Who leads Blood Burrow?’

‘We haven’t heard. It will be many years before Ottmar can be the king he likes to call himself. But he is the strongest and will win. And they say he has a son, Kyle-Ott, a burned boy, who’s even crueller than him. The city has bad days ahead.’

‘No one leads Blood Burrow. There are none who could,’ Tarl said. ‘So Keech will try. He’s tried before. I’ve got to go back.’

‘No, Tarl,’ Hari said.

‘Hari, I’ve got to. There’s something . . .’ he turned to Gantok . . . ‘something you must know. Keech isn’t the only danger. I have to take the people of Blood Burrow away from there.’

‘The danger comes from Deep Salt,’ Tealeaf said.

‘Yes. Deep Salt.’

‘Then tell us, Tarl.’

His face seemed to collapse. It was as if his skin was not fixed to his flesh or his flesh properly to his bones. Dog crept under the table and lay across his feet.

‘I can’t find the words for it,’ Tarl said.

‘Then say no words. Remember, if you can, and let me take it from your mind.’

Shivering a little, he obeyed. He laid his trembling hands on the table and fixed his eyes on them as though seeing his own flesh might hold him together, and painfully, slowly, he brought out his memories for Tealeaf to see.

She spoke silently to the others, in Tarl’s voice, with his burrows sound:

They took me, Tarl the Hunter, from People’s Square, tied to a cart. They dragged me through back streets of the city to a barracks at the city wall. They gave the others clothes, but none for me. They gave them food, plain food, and a crust for me, because a Whip was dead and a clerk wounded. They said I was a savage and must be chained, and they chained me to another like me, a scrawny twisted fellow who spat and howled. He too was chosen for Deep Salt. They held us in a cell for four days, then marched us to Port and put us on a ship – one of Ottmar’s ships. Others were there, going to the salt mines, but only I and Krog – that was his name, not a burrows man but a city man, taken for murder – were for Deep Salt. Krog spat and howled, but he howled from fear, for on the first night, in the cell where they kept us apart from the rest, he made a loop in the chain and hanged himself on a spike fixed in the wall. He would rather have death than Deep Salt. I could have stopped him but I did not. If a man chooses to die, it’s his own choice.

Hari made shallow breaths, with his eyes fixed on his father. Pearl sat bowed, with her hands hiding her eyes.

In the morning, when they found him, Tarl’s voice, unsoftened by Tealeaf, went on, they carried him out and threw him over the side. I thought they meant to throw me as well, but they struck off my chains and tied me to the rail and flogged me and left me bleeding there. All day I stayed, with no water, and the sun beating down. But I am Tarl and I would not beg and would not die. Instead I listened as the sailors talked and I learned what was happening in the city. Ottmar had made himself king. Company, Great Company, over the seas, had fallen and no ships came any more, and Ottmar had learned of it first and moved in the night. His Whips took those he called his enemies as they slept, all the Families, all the Houses, the men, the women, the children too, and gave them no trial and no choice, but threw them off the cliff in the dawn. All of them, while Ottmar watched. The sailors said they came down screaming like gulls and as heavy as sacks of wheat in the hold of a ship, and lay broken on the rocks, waiting for the tide to wash them away. House Chandler, House Kruger, House Bowles, House Sinclair and all the rest. The sailors laughed at it. Nobody loved the Houses, they were glad to see them go. Except, I heard the sailors say, one was saved, from House Bowles, a girl called Pearl, who was the most beautiful, and she would be Ottmar’s new queen.

Tarl looked at Pearl: ‘They didn’t know you’d run away. Ottmar must have hidden it. No one runs from marrying a king.’

Pearl sank her face deeper in her hands. Her mother dead, screaming like a seabird; her sister who thought only of pleasures, and shed tears and slapped her maid if a hem was crooked, screaming too, with her gown trailing like a wing behind her; and her father, a proud man who would never plead, falling like a swollen sack and bursting on the rocks. She thought of Hubert, with Hari’s knife flashing towards him. Hubert, in a way, had been spared.

She felt Hari’s eyes on her and lifted her hands. He tried to smile. She heard his silent voice comforting her, but there was no comfort.

They cut me down at nightfall, Tarl went on. They threw salt water on my back and chained me in my cell, with a pannikin of water and a heel of bread; and we sailed on, how long I don’t know – there were other stops on the way and we waited there. Then we came to a port where carts rumbled and men shouted and soldiers marched on the wharf. They were leaving for the city on another ship to strengthen Ottmar’s army. Whips unloaded us and packed the salt mine workers into cattle trucks and hauled them behind a steam engine up into the mountains where the mine gaped like an open mouth. Me they put in another cell, where three others waited, all of us for Deep Salt. Four days we were there, perhaps five. It was dark, I couldn’t tell. They pushed food and water through a hole in the door, and we fought for it.

Tarl looked at Tealeaf: But I am Tarl and I got my share. Keeping myself strong was all I thought of. I still thought I would be able to escape. Then they brought us out into the sunlight. They shackled us and marched us along a track by the railway, and I thought: Deep Salt’s up there, in the mine. But I was wrong. We turned away, following a narrower railway towards a grey hill between green hills, and came at night to a hut beside an oil lamp on a post. A sentry stood there, guarding an iron door in the base of the hill. This then, I thought, is Deep Salt. This is nothing. One sentry. I will break out of here. I hid a stone in my hand to work on my chains, but the sentry saw and only smiled.

We waited all night. In the morning a new sentry took the place of the old. It was midday before a jigger worked by two prisoners came along the line to the iron door, pulling a cart in which two ghosts sat. Ghosts, that was what I thought.

Tarl shivered. His hands moved convulsively. My mind was not my own, he said, still speaking through Tealeaf. Hunger and the sun burning down had made me weak. When I looked again I saw they were men dressed in some metal I’d never seen, like iron, but softer, and grey like the sores that scab a man dying from the sickness of the drains. They wore it like clothes; their hands were covered, and their heads, and they wore plates of glass over their eyes. They moved as if they were sick, or old and tired, from the weight they carried on their bodies. There was a clerk with them, an Ottmar clerk with the Ottmar emblem. He waited at the door for the ghosts to come. One of those men, the grey ghosts, held a little box made of the same grey metal. The other had a bolt gun, fully charged.

The clerk took a key from his belt and one from the sentry and opened the iron door. A puff came out like gas from a broken grave, and he cried at the Whips to be quick. They reached inside, into the dark, and pulled out a cart running on rails that led away. They put water on it in a barrel, and food in a sack, and left enough room for the ghosts to sit. Then they chained us behind, the four of us, and pushed the cart into the tunnel and closed the door. It made a sound like – Hari (he looked at his son), it was like the great lid that falls when they lock slaves in the hold of an iron ship. And yet I thought: Wait. Wait and see. I will break out of here.

The cart began to move. It was on a pulley. A rope ran behind it and in front. Somewhere in the hill men were pulling us towards them. There was no light. But I was first in line, and I stepped up and rode on the cart without the ghosts knowing, and I listened to them. Their voices boomed inside the metal pots on their heads and echoed in mine. So I learned what Ottmar planned to do.

The ghost with the box said: We must be quick. I don’t trust these suits, I don’t trust the gloves, and the glass doesn’t keep it out. I’ll take a handful. Only one. And get it in the box, then out of here.

The other, the one with the bolt gun, said: What will he do with it, Ottmar, the king?

Learn it. Study it, the other said. And when he knows, we’ll take it into the burrows and open the box and the light will come out and burn the vermin in their hiding places. They’ll sicken and die and our city will be clean. Then Ottmar will go into the plains and use it to kill the rebels. And into the jungles to clear out the savages who live there. And one day, when he knows it better and knows the weapons it will make, we’ll sail over the seas and conquer the old lands and rule there. We have a glorious future. But . . .

The other waited.

We must be in and out of here without a breath. I’ll be quick and you be watchful. Shoot any man who comes close.

So I knew, Tarl said, what Ottmar planned. But I didn’t know what this thing was they would hide in the box. I rode and waited. I would seize the bolt gun when I had seen. I would kill the ghosts. I would lead the slaves of Deep Salt out into the sunlight and kill the sentry and kill the clerk and steal a ship and sail to the city and arm the burrows and use this weapon, whatever it was, against Ottmar. That was my plan. I made it in an instant.