Beginning of year 631

Spring

Rain Moon

I spent five years of my life in Ifos.

My memory of the mines is an ugly and obscure thing, which I try to touch only by accident and which is difficult for me to put down on paper. Nevertheless, the triangle will remain engraved in my flesh until the day I die, an indelible mark of what was then, and which will always deprive me of the luxury of forgetting. Even today I'm able to summon the smell of the pit with terrifying ease.

First there was the pungency of the slags, the brick and clay furnaces that scarred an already broken landscape, spewing streams of white smoke. It was an aggressive scent, which took hold of the throat further down the valley and from which one could not escape. In Ifos, even dreams smelled of burning and molten iron. In the galleries there was ore and rock dust, alkaline smells that came from the impact of the tools, whose aftertaste was the same as blood. In the camp, the stench was that of despair and shit pits where the dead were sometimes dragged.

We were six thousand damned, working by day to break our backs, crammed by night into filthy barracks below the mines. More than half were Carmians, mostly criminals. The others came from the slave markets on the other side of the strait, Rajjans, Kadjins, Asalis, Paxians, former soldiers or swordsmen unfit for work in the fields or in the city, and whom even the galleys had not wanted. Brownians and Highlanders came in dribs and drabs, the living booty of the mercenary companies recruited by Hill, whose war with Wadd wasn't about to end. There were also a few escaped slaves, captured by the local troops, and even an occasional Val, who never lived long. We were the property of the doka Hiroï, one of the great carmian houses, and the torment of our bodies made them rich.

The day I arrived, I was given a poorly made bucket and assigned to a clearing crew, chained to a cordon of ten other weak and sickly slaves. We were under the command of a handful of akoï, seniors, who themselves depended on a foreman. The experienced slaves formed small groups among themselves, bands of men who were rougher and more dangerous than the others, free of shackles except at night, and who gained rare privileges from the masters and defended them with ferocity. Since it was their skills that kept the mines running, their lives were worth far more than those of the newcomers. We were seen as replaceable tools at best, prey at worst. Women and men were beaten or forcefully taken with general indifference, as long as it didn't slow down the pace of the picks, and our chains prevented us from defending ourselves.

The foremen were spitaï, members of the most unworthy carmian caste, freedmen or foreigners, free men who couldn't find work elsewhere. They lead the teams and the akoï to the mines, and fought over the most fertile seams with loud shouts and threats. Some even came to blows under the amused gaze of the supervisors. The first one who gave me the whip was called Otos and he was a devil with a human face who would have made Holen, the master of the stables for whom I had worked at the Lemis estate, look like a kind soul. He took pleasure in reminding us, before each day's work began, that the iron used to restrain us was marked with the stamp of Ifos.

The mines themselves were on the mountainside, a teeming anthill drilled into the gray stone of the carmian Wall. We had more than a mile's walk to reach the galleries from the camp, along a wide, worn path, muddy in winter, dusty in summer, lined with twisted pines and burnet. With irons on my feet it was a difficult route, one that had a reputation for killing more than the work itself. I don't know if it was true, but the ravine we had to walk along to get to the galleries was lined with bones, and I saw with my own eyes a man gone mad dragging his crew down to avoid the bite of the whip.

The labyrinthine network of tunnels into which we had to go next was narrow, and resounded with the din of complaints and the constant clanking of irons. Darkness was the constant companion of crews like mine, since the akoï that carried the lights illuminated the work of the picks and chisels. The full buckets were passed to the back of the line and we had to go out together to empty them, hobbling and stumbling over the rubble. We ate twice a day, soup and bread, and the best bits were never for us. Then we would go back to work. When night came, we returned to the camp, and it started again the next day. After ten moons of this treatment, four men of my crew had died of exhaustion, and I had fought with the others for their rags, which were used to stuff our chains. I waited for my turn to come, but I didn't get sick and the ordeal continued.

Something had died in me since Ulrick had been killed, and I had failed to snatch Brindy from the whorehouse of the canvas village. A great nothingness had opened up where I had once stood, with my mails and my spear and my resolutions. In its place was the triangle that had been carved into my cheekbone. Everything else had been swallowed, even before I reached Ifos. The impassivity of the carmian glances, as we struggled through the snow of the passes and as they finished off those whose feet were freezing, had been enough to establish what I already knew. I was nothing. Of course there was the discomfort and fatigue, the searing pain of the stick, but my body was no longer the temple of anything, nor did it hold anything to desecrate. I didn't think. I didn't feel much more. I suffered the rapes with the same apathy as the rest, my eyes stared into the void, and were lost in it. I ate rats and beetles when I was quick enough, I answered the few questions I was asked, I slept, I carried the ore, but it was all mechanical. I didn't give it any meaning or merit. The shackles I had been put in were the only truth I could accept: my existence belonged to others. I didn't care what they did with it.

I was awakened from this catatonia in an unexpected way, as one can leave a feverish dream with a start. On a morning of autumnal rain, a new arrival of slaves disembarked by the road to Orfys, kjiis freebooters captured by the rajjan navy, emaciated by the journey and malnutrition. The foreman Otos had his crews assembled, as he did every day before we started the ascension. After he had performed his prayers to the rising sun, a daily ritual that many of the slaves also engaged in, he ordered the overseers to pop the latch on my chains and put one of the filthy sailors in my place. "You'll carry the light now," he said without looking at me, and that was all. I wasn't dead. So I was akoï. It took me several weeks to lengthen my stride, and a few more to take the measure of what had happened. By then I had seized the shreds of freedom, and I was again - in spite of myself - something akin to a man.

It was difficult to resurrect from hell. The rivalry between the akoï and their crews was ruthless, their alliances fragile, their fights perpetual. They would stop at nothing to gain the favor of Otos and his kind. It was a carnivorous world, carefully nurtured to gobble up every last scrap of humanity. Foremen would sometimes trade one slave for another, as accidents occurred, or in the hope of assembling better crews, and enmities sprouted in the soil of hope, that of finding a more generous or less cruel master. There was competition in the task, and it was fierce. I soon realized that my place as lampworker, at the very bottom of the ladder, was a refuge in itself.

Among the damned we spoke the language of scoï, which is called "frank-sabir" when used by free men and "cheeky-chain" when it comes from the mouths of slaves. It was originally a merchant dialect, used in the ports of the Lower-Brown as well as in Rajja, Three-Islands and the Five-Cities, a simplistic mixture of brownian and carmian, of bessan and rajjan. As I already spoke two of these languages, it was easy for me to learn to gossip with the elders. Some of them told me their stories, most of them banal, some of them fascinating, some of them tragic, but it was always difficult for me to disentangle the truth from the falsehood, so much lying was a lever like any other in our relations.

Gradually, I was accepted as an unfortunate companion and was sometimes questioned about my scars or my tattoo, about who I had been before. I was forced to delve into the past, which was a painful journey, as I would expect. I began to have nightmares in which Ulrick and Narsilap, both of whom I had apprenticed to, were killing each other with knives. Sometimes the first-blade Sesh would be hanging nearby, his tongue swollen, when it wasn't captain Nad and his shredded body, whose eyes would turn black, like those of the Seïd demon who had sought to abduct me as a child.

As all of this came flooding back, I had to be careful and subtle to never lose face in front of others. Now that my emotions were timidly surfacing, I had to be careful never to let them overwhelm me. Snapping, shedding tears would certainly have signed my death warrant. I had to walk on the edge, deal with my former torturers whose interest could be aroused again. I mentioned my training as a soldier, taking care not to mention the Vals. I spoke of the man I had wounded to death in Lager, but placed the incident in Ac-Pass. I never mentioned Brown-Horn, because I knew that there still was a price on my head, and I had no illusions about what would happen if a foreman found out. In itself, I believe that these precautions were proof that I had accepted to live. That I had accepted to bend to the rules of this reduced universe, to have the privilege to breathe a little more, and to capture the tiny pleasures when they appeared without warning.

I went back to contemplating the sky, the clouds, the stars when I could. Sometimes, in the evening, we ate outside, crouched in the dust, and I soaked my bread with soup or saliva while letting my mind wander to the constellations. On the way to the mines, when the time was right, I would step aside to pick flowers or edible plants, pine buds, a stalk of yarrow. I would secretly swallow them, savor them, and save them for the days when the soup was too thin. I was spared scurvy. In spite of all the deprivations, I was growing. My figure was lean, my muscles fine and hard as the rock of the galleries. The others began to fear me. I didn't accept the rapacity of their rules.

In the summer of my fifteenth year, slaves assigned to lumbering turned their tools on their masters before fleeing, but they were recaptured in the foothills a few days later. They were nailed to the palisade surrounding the barracks and their agony lasted for days. The overseers cracked the whip to remind us that there was no escaping from Ifos. It was more than two hundred miles to the val country in the west, no hope by sea, whether to the north or to the east. To the south, the few passes were held by Carm's phalangists. And then, before going any further, it was necessary to escape the garrisons of Ifos. A small company of soldiers had their quarters on the road to the valley, between the town and the mines, and their only function was to ensure our docility. There couldn't have been more than fifty of them, but they knew their job. They had dogs with them, shaggy, evil beasts of war, trained to hunt men. When they had to intervene to supplement the supervisors, they did so in a zealous and brutal manner.

After the executions, new woodcutters were needed and I was chosen with a few others, because I was still strong and still had all my teeth. I was lucky. Some of the akoï had been looking for this kind of opportunity for a whole decade. I traded one foreman for another, the lantern for the handle of a worn-out axe, the stifling darkness of the galleries for the heady rustle of the pine trees. Even if the felled trees were mainly used to feed the furnaces, other crews took care of the transport, and the tumult of the mines became a distant scenery, to which I was no longer connected by much.

When the weather was good, we sometimes didn't return to camp for several weeks at a time. On such occasions, the overseers would chain us to the trees after dark, but that was better for me than the piling up of bodies, the moaning, the smell of disease and death. We were better guarded than the miners, but better fed and treated as well. The work was hard. It was at this price that we could leave the hell of the pit, and the monotony of the quarry. There was something treacherous about being able to walk along the sides of the valley at dawn and see the horizon, the hills of Carm that stretched as far as the eye could see, the white bastides that dotted the green countryside. It didn't take much to imagine leaving.

The bonds that were forged in the sweat of the cutting sites were different, less calculating and less carnivorous, far from the plots hatched in the darkness of the tunnels. Small gestures of attention or solidarity appeared that didn't smell of madness or inspire distrust. Embryos of camaraderie and even friendship, which I was careful not to let happen, because it would have broken my solitude in a way that was too illusory, and I wasn't ready for that. In spite of the voracity of isolation, I preferred to retreat into my memories, to walk through nostalgic monuments that belonged to me alone and that could not be torn away from me. This was nevertheless a shaky rebirth, an abandonment of savagery that soothed me for a while. It reminded me, in some ways, of the way I had tamed my battle rage in the heights of Culon.

And then there was this highlander girl who worked for a different foreman. She called herself Froggy, her head was shaved to avoid parasites and not to arouse the envy of men. She had a wide and generous mouth that I would have liked to see smile, and strange dimples were digging into her cheeks and chin. We were the same age. She saw in me what was left of sweetness, and knew how to bring it out in her own way. There was something breathless, tender and desperate between us, then we were separated and I learned later that she had died of the black fever. I was alone again. I began to think about Brindy.

For the next few years, Brindy occupied my thoughts obsessively, a sort of backlash against the way I had excised her until then. I kept remembering the orchard hill and our intertwined fingers, her cherry-colored mouth and the smell of her hair. I relived daily our reunion in Ac-Pass, that handful of unreal moments, the touch of her skin on mine and the sadness that haunted her eyes. I remembered the promises, the prophecies of the peregrine who had been there too, who had tried to use Brindy to lure me to Spinel. I meditated on his motives, his incomprehensible interest for my person. I replayed the tales about the king of the Elms, the Leafys and the ktoï sorcerers, looking for the slightest clue. Most of all, I embraced the last words the peregrine had spoken, churning them in my mind like pebbles ground by the sea. "You will find your answers in Spinel," he had said, "but you will find there above all what is dearest to you." I had suspected at the time that he was talking about Brindy. I had come to believe that he had probably taken her from the canvas village whorehouse even before I had led the rescue attempt that had resulted in my capture. I didn't know if I should be happy for Brindy if that was the case.

The moons followed one another tirelessly, to the rhythm of the axe and the maul. The whip, which no longer whistled in the clearings, became a secondary threat. I forgot about the patrols and the dogs. I began to entertain dreams of elsewhere, then of escape. I made futile, hallucinatory plans because I was suffocating, and on dull days, when despondency threatened to engulf everything else, I would sometimes skim the edges of the deepest ravines, wondering if the void would not be the guardian of some kind of deliverance. The overseers saw in my attitude the harbingers of revolt, as they had done with a thousand men before me. I was taken away from the tools as a warning, and relegated to the maneuver, where I could be better watched. Some people would have understood and would have pulled themselves together. I didn't. Death prowled around me, cloaked in the garments of emancipation. I owed my survival only to an abomination whose horror eclipsed even that of the pit.