The Healer (6 page)

Payne pressed himself against the back wall of the shed, quite certain that he shouldn't be seen but equally certain that he wasn't going to miss this. Such tender bodies! Fat and thin, hairy and hairless, all pink and mottled and glistening with sweat from their run. Within a minute the sweat froze, coating their skins in a layer of rime. It had a faintly
greenish tint to it, which was odd, for frozen sweat was ice and should have been a frosty white. Or better still, thought Payne, no color at all, no frost to begin with, for to be naked in this cold was madness.

But this madness seemed to have a purpose, for as soon as they were covered in their coats of ice, the men bent down and picked up their toothless combs and began to scrape it off, building up little piles on the edge of the scraper, which they then carefully scraped into the jars. They were thorough and meticulous in their collection: not a single inch of their suits of frost was left untouched. For areas they couldn't reach, a partner helped them.

It was over quickly. The men obviously had done this many times before. And what exactly was it they were doing? Payne wondered. Some sort of bonding ritual? A rite of passage? A bizarre new sport? By now he knew a thing or two about humans, but he'd never seen or heard of this. It was a mystery, as baffling as no doubt it was profound.

Once they had their clothes back on, they slowly left the field, carrying their jars with great care, some in their pockets, some in the crooks of their arms. Most of the jars were about half-filled with the pale green ice. There was no running now, no jostling in the line, no jogging. They were more like weary monks, plodding homeward. At one point the sun happened to strike a number of the jars, kindling them with an emerald glow, and then it seemed that they were carrying lanterns.

Their path from the field took them by the shed, and it didn't take long for Payne to realize his danger. He'd read stories of what happened to people who stumbled onto secret rituals or rites. How they were flayed alive and had their tongues cut out and were hung from trees and disemboweled, and not necessarily in that order.

Unfortunately, there was nowhere to hide, so he did the only thing he could think of, quickly retracing his steps up the snowbound road, then turning around and pretending to be just arriving. Whether it fooled anyone, he never knew. The men didn't seem to care about him one way or the other. All save one.

Covert halted in his tracks when he saw him.

Payne responded with a timid smile. This was a man he liked, more courteous than most, a man whom he'd done well for. His smile, however, was not returned. Covert waited for the other men to pass, then made his way over.

Payne welcomed him. “It's good to see you. You look better.”

But Covert's face was dark with anger. He shook his jar in Payne's face. “Look at this! Look at what you done!”

Like the other jars his was half-filled, but the contents, instead of being a pale green, were opalescent. As they should have been, thought Payne.

“I don't understand.”

“You said you'd do me right. That's what you said. But look. Look.” Covert could barely control himself. “Three years. Three long years, that's what it took me. Now look what you done.”

“You were sick,” said Payne. “I healed you.”

“You took what was mine is what you did. You robbed me.” He sounded so distraught. “Never trust a healer. That's what they say, and now I know why.”

He held up the jar, gazing at it with a kind of longing, then hurled it against a tree, where it shattered. He started back up the hill, but after a few steps stopped. “I've got a memory, healer. Being ignorant's no excuse. I owe you one.”

That night Payne had a dream. Or part dream, for part of it he was sure had happened. He was back in Gode. His brother Wyn was walking down a dusty road to join up with his friends. It was nighttime, and Payne was tagging along behind him. Wyn kept telling him to get lost, but Payne kept pestering him, until finally Wyn gave up and said fine, do what you want, you will anyway, but don't blame me if something
happens, you're on your own, don't look to me for help. Which is how it often went. They rounded a corner and came into an open space, a field outside of town, flat and empty. Wyn's friends were waiting for him, five or six of them, all boys, all dressed in the hooded robes that grown-ups wore on special occasions. The moon was out, and as soon as Wyn joined them, they took off their robes and dropped them on the ground. And then they started dancing in the moonlight, naked.

It was a funny dance, and they were goofing around and clowning it up, but then from somewhere a drum began to beat, and they formed a circle and started twisting their heads and stretching out their necks and presenting them to one another, and darting their tongues in and out and hissing. Payne sat outside the circle, mesmerized and a little frightened. He had never seen this dance before. None of the boys had, though every single one of them had heard of it. The Viper Dance was infamous. More than a century before it had spawned riots and was, some claimed, responsible for the uprising of ‘09. Ever since that time, it had been banned. This was how the boys imagined it, what they thought it might or should be.

One of them detached himself from the circle and sauntered over to Payne. He was a mean boy, one of Wyn's friends Payne didn't like, a bully. He pulled Payne to his feet, and then he somehow got his clothes off, and before he knew it, Payne was dancing naked like the others. He was scared to death but couldn't stop, and he kept looking to Wyn for help. Wyn glanced at him and made a face as if to say “I told you so,” then looked away. The mean boy grinned at this, and at Payne's uneasiness, and he made the hissing sound and flicked out his tongue and thrust his meli closer. Payne danced on helplessly. His throat was choked with dust, and he could barely breathe. And then, in horror, he watched the boy snake out his arm and thrust a finger toward his meli.

Desperately, he tried to wake up, and he did, only to discover that the same thing kept happening, the waking was a dream, too. He tried to cry out but had no voice. Then all at once Wyn was at his side.

He shoved the boy away, and backed him down. Then he helped his little brother get his clothes on. He was gentle and comforting, not gruff as he sometimes could be. He threw an arm around Payne's shoulder, and Payne huddled in its shelter, shaken but safe. He adored his brother. He felt like boasting as they walked away. Who but Wyn could have done this thing? Wyn the protector. Wyn the giant. Payne idolized him.

Between his own busy work schedule and the site boss's forgetfulness or disinterest Payne had all but given up hope of going underground and seeing the inner workings of the mine. It was a surprise, then, when a miner showed up at his door one day, offering to give him a tour. It was a quiet moment in the healing center, a rarity, and Payne leapt at the chance.

The man's name was Slivey; he'd worked at Pannus for a good ten years. He had fair hair, narrow-set eyes and a broad, spadelike nose that bent across his face at a crooked angle on account of being broken, by his recollection, at least a dozen times. Payne recognized him as one of the men who'd been on the playing field that day. He seemed quite friendly.

He took Payne to the dry and outfitted him with the basic gear. Rubber boots, oilskin coat, safety belt, gloves. There was no hard hat that came close to approximating the shape of Payne's head, and the one they finally settled on was so big it seemed to float above his head rather than
fit it. Slivey next chose a lamp for him and tested its battery. It seemed to work fine, the lamplight strong and powerful, but for some reason he decided to replace it with a different one. He showed Payne how to strap it to his belt and then how to clip the lamp on. Its weight pulled the rim of the ill-fitted hat aslant across his forehead, nearly to his eyes, and Slivey laughed. “That looks good,” he said. “Shows you got attitude.”

As they made their way through the adit, he instructed Payne on procedure and basic safety measures. “You hear a bell, that means a skip's coming, you move to the rib. You hear a siren, that means there's been an accident, you get yourself out as fast as you can. Watch your head. Don't walk into timber sets. Watch your feet. Don't get tangled up in hoses. And be damned careful of the ventilation tubing. You punch a hole in that, you're robbing air from the boys at the face. It's like stepping on their throats. Rails, too. You catch a foot, next thing you twist an ankle. And don't get separated. Rule number one is no man goes down alone. We stick together. Do not forget that. Don't leave your partner and don't let him leave you.”

Payne was grateful for the advice, though he didn't understand it all, and of what he did understand, he only absorbed about half. He was too busy adjusting to the strange new environment, which at present involved trying to negotiate the ever-deepening darkness without stumbling, hitting his head, or otherwise injuring himself. The problem with the headlamp was that it only pointed straight ahead. It did little to illuminate objects to the side of him. And there was a rail and ties to watch out for around his feet, and puddles of water whose depth he couldn't judge. It was a tricky business being a miner.

Gradually he got the hang of things and started to feel more comfortable. The adit tunnel was tall and wide and, to his head at least, posed little danger. He still had a tendency to stumble, but if he matched his stride to the distance between ties, he could walk a little faster, which was a timely realization, for he'd fallen behind Slivey and needed to catch up. But then he heard a bell and froze.

He knew it meant something but couldn't remember what. In the distance he saw a single light approach and thought perhaps it was a miner. He stood and waited as the light grew larger and the bell clanged on. He heard a yell, and then in rapid succession had his breath knocked out of him by a blow to his chest, was lifted off his feet, then launched sideways. He ended up sprawled against the rib with Slivey on top of him. A second later, a fully laden skip rumbled past.

Slivey rolled off him and got to his feet, brushing off the dirt. Payne was embarrassed, bruised and shaken.

“Go on, get up,” said Slivey.

Payne did as he was told.

Slivey's headlamp shone in his eyes, half-blinding him, then swept across his body as though examining it. He couldn't see the miner's face, but he could imagine its expression.

Seconds later, the light swung away, and in a flat voice Slivey repeated himself. “You hear a bell, you move to the rib. You hear a siren, you get out. Don't get separated. Don't wander off. Now let's get going.”

This time Payne stayed as close behind the man as he could without tripping. The shoulder he had landed on throbbed, which seemed to heighten all his other senses. For the first time he heard the drip of water. He smelled the dampness in the air and tasted something faintly acrid and metallic in his throat. He saw shadows dance on walls. In front of him he watched the darkness dissolve and the tunnel unfold as if by magic.

Distance, he found, was hard to judge, and he stayed glued to Slivey, until at length the miner halted. They had reached a wide, low-ceilinged room that was obviously man-made. Lights were affixed to its walls, and in the middle of the floor was a covered metal booth occupied by a man at a control panel. Bolted to the floor outside the booth sat an enormous steel drum wrapped with a thick wire cable. Coming off the drum, the cable line was taut, and Payne followed it to its point of attachment, a metal cage partway across the room. The
set of rails that they'd been following disappeared down a haulage drift in the opposite direction.

Slivey spoke to the man in the booth, then ushered Payne into the waiting metal cage. His nerves a bit more settled, Payne snuck a peek over the side of it and had just enough time to feel a draft of air in his face before being unceremoniously yanked back. Slivey muttered something about a death wish. Payne protested. He had nothing of the kind. He was curious, that was all. Slivey growled at him to stay put, and an instant later, with a lurch the cage descended.

Every hoistman, Payne later learned, had his own distinctive way with the levers that controlled the movement of the cage, a sort of signature touch, and this one, he decided, had to have a tremor in his hands the way it jerked and jumped. Either that, or he was doing it intentionally—perhaps every newcomer got hazed this way. Slivey didn't seem to mind, but Payne felt uneasy. It was pitch black, and as they banged and rattled downward, his stomach churned and he had visions of a cable snapping, followed by a long and mortifying fall.

But they reached the bottom without incident. The shaft, Slivey told him, was three thousand feet deep. And that was just the beginning of the mine. The current working levels were several hundred feet deeper and reached by foot. He asked if Payne had had enough.

“Enough?”

“You ready to go back?”

The idea, in fact, had crossed his mind. “Not at all.”

“Good,” said Slivey. “Excellent. Follow me.”

He led Payne down a long and gently sloping decline, his pace steady and sure-footed, the advancing cone of his headlamp pointed straight ahead and never veering. Payne had to walk a little faster than he wanted, and his breath came a little harder, too. The air was not as fresh or wholesome as it was outside, and it stung his lungs to breathe it. According to Slivey, this was due more to the dampness than the cold. It never froze so far beneath the earth, but it never
warmed up either. The temperature pretty much stayed the same year round.

“No seasons in the hole,” he said. “No hurricanes, no sandstorms, no blizzards. It's a steady place to work with a steady climate. Only thing that changes is the rock. She keeps you on your toes. Keeps things interesting.”

For a miner he was talkative, and Payne was grateful. In some real way it made him feel safe. When he stopped talking, the idea of where they were began to weigh on him, how far beneath the ground, how massive the mountain overhead. Massive and oppressive. He trusted Slivey, but his every instinct told him that this was not a place for him to be. His body needed fresh air, sky and natural light. Instead, it felt compressed and trapped. It wanted out, and he had to exercise an iron will to keep going.

It helped somewhat to know they weren't alone. Nearby were hundreds of other men, although you couldn't tell by listening. The drifts were so long and twisting, and the rock between them so thick, and the air so heavy, that sounds were either deadened or entirely absorbed. Once, far-off and muffled, he heard what he assumed was an explosion. Otherwise, save for their muted footsteps, the drip of water and the low sibilance of air flowing through the ventilation tubing, it was quiet. This world did not seem one to suffer noise.

At the foot of the decline was a crossroads, and without hesitating Slivey proceeded to the left. They passed another crossroads and then a fork, and the drift began to narrow. At the same time the air began to thicken with dust. The light shed by their lamps, which had been bright yellow, turned a hazy brown. No more than ten feet ahead of him, Slivey's figure blurred.

Payne hurried to catch up with him, and all at once a bomb seemed to go off inside his head. Next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, seeing stars. Then he felt a hand grip his and pull him to his feet.

“You can do it that way,” said Slivey, “but it's better if you duck. You
don't want to go and knock your cribbing loose.” He searched the ceiling, what he called “the back,” with his headlamp. “Stand back a little.”

Head pounding, Payne retreated several steps. Slivey pulled a crowbar from his belt and, keeping his distance, poked at the back with the pointed end. Some pebbles fell and he jammed the bar in a little deeper, levering it downward. Suddenly, a chunk of rock half the size of his body came loose and thundered to the ground. It raised a cloud of dust and made Payne jump. Slivey studied the back awhile and poked at it some more, then satisfied, moved on.

The timber sets grew more frequent on account of the testy rock, which, according to Slivey, needed extra bracing. The wood in the sets creaked and moaned, and in his brave but uneasy heart Payne moaned a little, too. Then Slivey halted, announcing that they'd reached the face. Through the haze about fifteen feet away Payne could make out two men. One was bent over a box, fiddling with some wires attached to what looked like sticks. The other held what could have only been a jackleg drill. It was, as Vecque had said, a monstrous thing, with a huge and heavy body and a drill bit not an inch less than six feet long. It looked like a giant, legless mosquito, though surprisingly, the miner wielding it was not a giant at all, but he handled it with ease, as though the trick involved not size or strength so much as leverage and agility. Both men wore ear protectors but only one of them wore a mask. Slivey was also maskless, and Payne made a mental note to talk to him about that. The air in the heading was bad enough as it was, stale and stagnant and oxygen-deprived, without the added dust from drilling. He was happy, though, to see the ear protectors. Without them the noise of the drill would have been deafening.

After a few minutes, Slivey touched his arm and motioned for them to leave. When they were far enough away to hear each other, he explained that the men were getting ready to shoot a round.

“A round of what?” asked Payne.

“Dynamite.”

“I'd like to see that.”

Slivey shook his head. The rock was pretty ratty, and things sometimes happened. He didn't want someone with no experience to be nearby if something did. Besides, it was time they headed out.

Slivey offered Payne the lead, and flattered, he accepted. By this point he felt more comfortable and self-assured, although that might have simply been the knowledge that soon he would be breathing fresh air and standing upright aboveground. They passed the first fork, and at the crossroads he confidently took the right-hand branch. Then he came to a fork he didn't quite remember. He turned to get Slivey's advice, but Slivey wasn't there. He felt a little stab of apprehension, which he put aside. It was silly: the man was right behind him. Probably had stopped to fix some bit of cribbing. He waited for the reassuring beam of light.

A minute passed and then another. Neither light nor man appeared. Payne refused to worry. Slivey knew what he was doing. But after a bit more time he turned around and headed back.

He retraced his steps to the crossroads, where he paused, trying to remember which way they'd come. There were four drifts fanning out in four directions, and he took a few steps into each one, looking for something that might jar his memory. To this point he'd been too embarrassed to call out, for it would have been an admission that he was lost; but now, his anxiety rising, embarrassment took a back seat to the desire to be found. In a modest voice he said Slivey's name, waited, repeated it a little louder, then cupped his hands and shouted. The sound died almost as soon as it left his mouth. It was as if the mine had opened up its own mouth and swallowed it.

In one of the passages the air seemed just a bit fresher than the others, which gave him hope that it might lead him to other men. But after a hundred yards there was a fork, and he had to choose again, and this time both drifts seemed the same. Or almost the same—on close inspection one was slightly narrower and lower-backed than the other, and, reasoning
that a smaller drift was less likely to be a major branch, he took the wider one. But soon this one narrowed, too, and when he had to stoop his head to keep from banging it, he knew that he'd gone wrong. At this point it occurred to him that maybe he should stop moving altogether and wait for them to come to him, that wandering around willy-nilly might make it harder to be found. For surely they were looking for him—any second he expected to hear voices and see a light.