The sight of the engineer being led from the hut at gunpoint was not encouraging.
A fierce-looking Murthian emerged from the hut after him, and addressed the crowd. There was general consternation at his words, and many glances thrown sideways at Frey. Then one of the scouts gave him a rough shove, and he was pushed along in Silo’s wake. He thought about calling out to his friend, but decided it would only get him a rifle butt in the kidneys.
So they were being taken somewhere. Great. He was as much in the dark as ever. Being a leader was hard enough for him, but it certainly beat being the feller who didn’t get to know shit.
It seemed like most of the camp was following as he and Silo were led along a barely visible trail through the jungle. Silo was the object of everyone’s interest: Frey was an unimportant afterthought. It pricked his pride a little, even in their current predicament.
He soon lost track of which direction they were going. For a time, there was only the maddening sound of the insects, the distant hoots and growls of things he’d rather not meet, the heat in the air and the damp clothes sticking to his body, the steady trudge of his boots on the red earth.
Then he saw a face he recognised. The Murthian woman who had greeted Silo so enthusiastically in the camp. She’d fallen into step alongside him. She was a striking woman, with the body of an athlete and broad shoulders. Her face wasn’t exactly the kind of beautiful that Frey went for, but it had a statuesque quality about it that was hard to ignore. She had the same umber skin as Silo, and thick black hair in coiled ringlets, held back from her face with a beaded band.
‘You speak Vardic?’ he asked. He remembered how she’d cowed the scouts before, and hoped he wouldn’t get hit for speaking.
She looked him up and down, her eyes cold. ‘Yuh. Name’s Ehri.’
‘Frey. Can you tell me what’s happening?’ he asked, when his escorts didn’t seem inclined to interfere.
‘We goin’ to the warrens,’ she said.
‘The warrens? Like rabbit warrens?’ Frey asked hopefully, envisioning fields and daisies.
‘What down in them warrens, it ain’t rabbits,’ she replied.
Frey cursed. ‘I bloody knew it wouldn’t be rabbits.’
She studied him, apparently unimpressed. ‘What’re you to Silo?’
‘I’m his capt—’ he began, then corrected. ‘His friend.’
‘You the reason he came back here?’
‘Reckon he was trying to help me out. I’m in a certain amount of trouble, see. Long story.’
‘He must think a lot o’ you, to set foot in this place again.’
‘What is this place?’ Frey asked. ‘What happened here?’ He motioned towards Silo, a bald, lean figure just visible through the trees and the crowd. ‘Who is that feller?’
‘You don’t know? Thought you were his friend?’
‘Hey!’ Frey said, offended. ‘I’m friend enough to respect his privacy.’
She considered that for a time, then turned to his escorts. ‘You idiots don’t speak a word of Vardic, do you?’ she asked. One of them sneered and said something in the fluid, musical tongue of the Murthians. She ignored him and spoke to Frey again.
‘Who was he?’ she said quietly, her eyes on the captive walking ahead of them. ‘He was a hero.’
Frey did a double take. ‘Him?’
‘I was still young when he turned up in camp,’ she said. ‘Right away, we knew he was dangerous. I mean, people were afraid of him. He had that madness in him. Like when someone’s so angry they can’t stand it, so they bury it under a whole pile o’ calm.’
Frey thought about that for a moment. ‘Him?’ he asked again.
‘I guess you don’t know him that way.’
‘You bloody guess right!’ said Frey. ‘The Silo I know wouldn’t get angry if you cut his feet off and hung ’em round his ears.’
But is that really true? Didn’t he chuck a Sammie off a roof once? Hasn’t he been stewing ever since you hijacked that train? Shouldn’t you really have paid a bit more attention?
‘So what did he do?’ he asked, when it became clear that Ehri wasn’t in a hurry to speak again.
‘What he did was kill Sammies and Daks,’ she said. ‘You didn’t never see nobody wanted revenge as bad as he did. For what they did to our people, what they did to his family, to him. He wanted blood off ’em, and he got it. Akkad, he was the leader back then. At first, he was worried about Silo, but he saw how the camp got inspired by him. Other people, they worried about gettin’ enough to eat, about hidin’, about all kinds o’ things. Silo, he just wanted to get even. That kind o’ single-mindedness, you gotta respect it.’
She was looking ahead as she said it, and there was something in her voice, a hint of wistful fondness. Frey thought she’d felt more than respect for Silo at one time. He might not have been the most perceptive of individuals, but he reckoned he knew enough about women. Well, all except Trinica, anyway.
‘So what then?’ he urged. He was amazed to hear of this side of Silo’s character. He wondered what other secrets he might unearth about the rest of his crew, if only he could be bothered to dig.
‘Akkad felt which way the wind was blowin’, I guess,’ said Ehri. ‘Took Silo under his wing. Eventually he got to be second in command, and by then they was great friends. Silo was always there with some new plan, some way to sabotage this or blow up that. Awful good at solvin’ problems, he was: he could overcome anythin’ if it meant he got to kill some Sammies or free some of our kin at the end of it.’
Frey put the pieces together. ‘This Akkad feller, he’s still your leader?’
‘Yuh.’
‘So I’m guessing he and Silo had a falling out?’
‘You could say. See, Akkad was always puttin’ the brakes on Silo. He saw himself as the sensible one, lookin’ out for the good of the settlement, makin’ sure we didn’t risk too much, makin’ sure most of us came home alive. And that was fine by us, don’t get me wrong. The two of them, they were some combination.’
She motioned towards the fierce-looking man Frey had seen before, whom he assumed to be Akkad. A woman and three children were walking near him, picking their way through the undergrowth.
‘Then Akkad had a son,’ she said. ‘I guess that was what did it for him. Suddenly he had something to protect, something to really protect, and he wouldn’t take no risks no more. I mean, he put the brakes on everythin’ Silo tried.’ She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and sniffed. ‘Pretty soon it became obvious what he was about. He wanted to stop hittin’ the Sammies. Called it a pointless waste of life, that we couldn’t do no good that way. It was like a fly bitin’ a rushu, goin’ up against the Sammie Empire.’
‘And Silo didn’t like that,’ Frey guessed.
‘Lotta people didn’t. Split the camp. Some reckoned we’d do better to build a new life here in the jungle, try ’n’ make the most of what freedom we had. Some of us, it didn’t sit well that we should be hidin’ while our kin were out there bein’ worked to death. One of them was Silo.’
‘Reckon I see where this is going,’ said Frey. He squinted as a spear of sunlight found its way though the canopy and dazzled him.
‘Yuh,’ Ehri replied. ‘So did Akkad. Silo, he never wanted to kill Akkad. Just wanted to knock him off his perch. But Akkad din’t see it that way. A bunch of ’em, they tried to take over the camp, but Akkad outsmarted ’em. Some got away, but they was all caught or killed in the end. ’Cept Silo. The rest that were still alive, Akkad made an example of ’em. Took ’em to the warrens.’
‘The warrens without the rabbits?’
‘The same.’
Frey steeled himself. He had the unpleasant looming sensation that usually accompanied imminent bad news. ‘And what happens in the warrens?’ he asked, wincing.
‘What you think happens?’ She frowned at him. ‘You get eaten.’
Frey sighed wearily. ‘Bollocks.’
Twenty-Five
T
he Murthian Word for Irony – Mother – Dying in the Dark – Shooting Fish
The entrance to the warren was a circular shaft, a jagged throat of red stone in the jungle floor, some distance from the camp. There was a wooden pulley off to one side, and a worn rope dangling from it, which split at the end into a pair of stirrups. Frey was put next to Silo, and they stood together at the edge while flies sucked at their sweat. He looked down. It wasn’t so deep that he couldn’t see the bottom, only a dozen metres or so. But that was plenty deep enough.
Akkad gathered everyone around, and he gave a short speech in Murthian. Frey didn’t need a translation. He could tell by the tone that it was some self-justifying horse-arse declaration as to why he felt it necessary to lob his prisoners into a pit full of hungry whatevers. Some of the audience – mothers with sickly children, or the elderly who looked sick themselves – groaned and murmured at one point. Most of them didn’t seem too happy about what was going on. He wondered what kind of deal Silo had tried to cut with the big man, but whatever it was, it hadn’t been enough to wipe away the memory of that failed coup. The engineer was stone-faced as the judgement was rendered.
After that, they were made to put their feet into the stirrups, one foot each, and they clutched onto the rope as they were swung out over the pit and lowered down. Frey caught sight of Ehri in the crowd, standing with the smaller man he’d seen her with earlier. He had an arm round her. Her face was full of anger; his of sorrow.
Then the rock of the shaft obscured them from view. The insects became muted and everything was uncannily quiet. His world narrowed to a circle of dusk overhead. He and Silo held on to the softly creaking rope, so close they were practically hugging, and they sank through the air, which cooled quickly as they descended.
At the bottom of the shaft was an uneven chamber, with several openings at its edges that led into shadow. The light from above, weak though it was, seemed fierce and warm in contrast to the chill darkness that lurked at its edge. Frey looked around without enthusiasm.
‘How do I get into these situations?’ he moaned to no one in particular. He felt like he should be scared, but he hadn’t seen anything to be scared of yet. Vague threats of danger weren’t enough to bother him. Not when he’d seen so much of the real stuff.
He was still looking around when something dropped through the air and hit the ground next to him, making him jump. It was a hemp sack. He could see the hilt of his cutlass within, and the grip of a pistol.
‘We get our weapons?’ he asked Silo.
‘Yuh,’ said Silo, pulling open the sack. He handed Frey his pistols and cutlass, and took his shotgun and dagger. Frey checked the pistols, found they were empty, and then saw Silo counting through a handful of bullets and shells.
‘Any particular reason why they didn’t just shoot us?’
‘Gunshots make noise. They tryin’ to hide.’
Frey rolled his eyes. Silo was feeling obtuse, apparently. ‘Chop our heads off, then! You know what I mean.’
Silo handed him bullets for his pistol. ‘Ten there. I got five shells.’ He started loading them in to his shotgun. ‘Old law. Murthians ain’t s’posed to kill each other. We got enough people doin’ that already.’
‘But they can be abandoned in a . . .’ Frey looked around. ‘What is this place, anyway?’
‘Ghall warren.’
‘Ghall?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t know a word for ’em in Vardic. You’ll meet ’em soon enough. They hunt the river banks at dusk, come back to the warren when the sun goes down. We got till then to get out of here.’ He chambered a round with a loud crunch and gazed steadily at Frey. ‘Best way for a Murthian to die is to die fightin’. Most in the pens don’t get that chance. Free Murthians . . .’ he trailed off. ‘It’s the way it is. Gotta respect your own.’
The remaining objects in the sack were a pair of flintstones and a pair of wooden torches, their ends wrapped in fabric and covered in viscous pitch.
Frey looked up at the mouth of the shaft. The rope was being winched back. ‘You put a lot of people down here?’
Silo knelt and began chipping the flintstones together. ‘There was hard justice in the early days. Some people, they din’t take to the bigger picture too well after all the desperation they was used to in the pens.’ He struck a spark, and a torch ignited. ‘People stole. Hoarded food. Men fought over women, sometimes killin’ one another. We din’t have no courts out here like in Vardia, nor no time for ’em either. Needed a deterrent for the bad folk.’ He straightened. ‘Later it got used on good folk too.’
‘Your friends?’ Frey asked, as he put his cutlass and one of his pistols into his belt.
Silo’s shoulders tensed for a moment. Then he relaxed, lit the other torch and handed it to Frey. ‘Let’s get movin’.’
Silo led the way, with an urgency and purpose to his movements that Frey wasn’t used to seeing. He headed for one of the exits from the chamber, thrust his torch inside. A fissure too narrow to pass through. He tried another, and seemed to like the look of it better. Then he picked up a stone and scratched a mark on the wall.
That’s a good idea. Marking our route so we don’t go round in circles. I should’ve thought of that.
Frey followed Silo into a cramped tunnel. As the light from the shaft faded behind them, the reality of their predicament closed in on Frey, tight and hard as the rock that surrounded him. Away from the jungle heat, he suddenly felt very far from safety. Whatever was down here, Silo clearly felt it was something to be reckoned with. That was all Frey needed to know. That, and the implication that no one had ever come out of here alive.
They emerged in another chamber, kidney-shaped and more cramped than the first. The only illumination came from their torches now, and shadows jumped in the crevices. Frey began to feel claustrophobic. He couldn’t stop thinking about the tonnage of stone all around him, the sheer immovability of their surroundings. Everything around them was dead and tomblike. The scruff and scrape of their boots was an invasion of the silence.
‘Your mate Akkad’s a nasty bastard, to think up something like this,’ he muttered.
‘Weren’t him,’ said Silo. ‘Was me.’
‘You what?’
Silo looked over his shoulder. ‘My idea,’ he said. ‘Din’t have much tolerance back then for them that didn’t subscribe to the cause.’
Frey sucked his breath in over his teeth. ‘What’s the Murthian word for “irony”?’ he asked.
‘Ain’t one,’ Silo replied. ‘ ’Sides, I’m here ’cause I put myself here. Man’s just a great big sum of the choices he made on the way, and what he did with what Mother gave him. Ain’t no irony to it, or otherwise.’
‘Mother?’ Frey asked. The word jarred; it seemed excessively formal, coming from Silo. Scuffers used ‘mama’ and ‘papa.’
Silo’s dark eyes glittered in the torchlight. Then he turned away, and didn’t say anything else.
Frey watched as Silo made his way around the edge of the chamber, thrusting his torch into various gaps and fissures.
‘What are you looking for?’ he asked, when it became apparent they weren’t moving.
‘Breeze. Ain’t none.’
‘Then that way’s good as any,’ he said, pointing at the largest exit he could see.
Silo grunted, made another mark, and headed into the fissure he’d indicated. Frey followed. It was narrow enough to pass through if they hunched their shoulders. After a dozen metres it was blocked by a fall of rubble. Silo lifted his torch and said ‘Reckon we can climb up.’ So they did.
The upward shaft was even narrower than the fissure, and more uneven. Frey had to squeeze his way through gaps that were barely big enough for his hips. His cutlass scratched the rock and caught on corners as he struggled after Silo.
He was beginning to sweat again, and this time it wasn’t the heat. The smoke of the torches was thickening the air and making him cough. The sour taste of suppressed panic gathered in his mouth. H
e had visions of all that weight of stone coming down on him. Damn, he didn’t want to go out that way.
He needed to talk, to take his mind from the oppressive gravity of his surroundings. Silo had made it pretty clear that he wasn’t interested in talking about ‘Mother,’ but the way he said it made Frey think she was something more than a parent. He made a rare intuitive leap.
‘You a religious man, Silo?’ he asked.
‘Show me a Murthian that ain’t,’ came the reply from up ahead.
‘Mother?’
Silo stopped and looked back down the shaft they were climbing. ‘Don’t, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘You ain’t gonna understand.’
But Frey wouldn’t be deterred. He’d suddenly developed a keen interest in anything that stopped him thinking about where he was. ‘Just saying,’ he continued. ‘If you got any prayers up your sleeve, we could use ’em right now.’
‘Don’t work that way,’ said Silo, who had resumed his clumsy ascent. ‘She ain’t into interventions. She bring a man into the world, and she watch ’n’ weep at his troubles, but every one o’ her children gotta make their own way. Just like a real mama.’
‘Not like mine,’ said Frey. ‘Bitch dumped me on the doorstep of an orphanage.’
‘You reckon that’s why you spent the rest of your life tryin’ to get attention from women?’ Silo asked.
‘Probably,’ Frey admitted. ‘Couldn’t give a flying cowshit about the reasons, to tell you the truth. Shagging’s fun.’
Silo gave a deep chuckle and shook his head. ‘You some sort o’ feller, Cap’n. Don’t think I never met anyone like you.’
Frey grinned. Absurdly, in the midst of all this, he was enjoying himself, albeit in a slightly hysterical kind of way. He’d learned more about Silo in the last nine minutes than he had in the previous nine years. He felt closer to his engineer than he ever had before, and that wasn’t only because he was practically crawling up the man’s arse.