Bright Thrones

  Tonight, in the glamour of lamplight, emboldened by alcohol, he found her attractive. And she didn’t hate the idea as much as she ought to hate it.

  Hoarsely he said, “Your work both as a scribe and as a healer is superlative. That is more than enough; I hope you understand that.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed a lamp off his desk and retreated to the screened-off space at the back of the chamber where everyone, even Pearl, was forbidden to follow.

  Her whole body felt taut. Each slightest scrape and thump as he made ready for bed resonated like thunder in her ears, imagining him slipping off his jacket, pouring water into a basin to wash his face.…

  And yet it was genuinely odd that he performed such mundane tasks for himself, as only the poorest, unmarried Saroese men did. Lords and captains had servants or wives to make their home lives comfortable.

  He didn’t treat the Shipwrights as servants, and when they were out of earshot of the locals, they didn’t speak to him like he was their master. And really, now that she thought about it, why were they lingering here in this dusty desert settlement, living in unforgiving conditions, while he made his daily rounds in this and other nearby mining villages as if he was a humble mine doctor?

  The gleam of lamplight went out behind the screen. By the light of her own lamp she finished the surgical episode she was recopying. She didn’t mind working late because his observations fascinated her; the way he described the choices he made in his treatments was a glimpse of his mind at work. He was always looking for a better way, and that was what made him different from everyone else she knew. They all dealt in false coin, and they lied to themselves about the way they lived. But he didn’t lie. He saw that the world was injured with the same wounds and gashes that carved the flesh of hapless prisoners. He sewed up what he could, frowned at what he could not save, and told the truth about the appalling conditions straight to the faces of the people who luxuriated atop the flesh and blood of the dying. Just as he had tonight.

  With angry, impatient movements, she tucked away her writing implements and, with them, her wandering, preposterous thoughts. Whatever admiration she had for him was a stupid dream born of desolation. He had saved her and the others. It was nothing more than that. Nothing at all.

  * * *

  The first clang of the dawn bell woke her where she slept on a mat in the surgery. She listened for Lord Agalar to see if he was awake yet. From behind the screens came only silence, not even the rustling of a person shifting on their bed.

  She wrapped cloth over the fresh growth of hair on her scalp; shaving the heads of prisoners was standard practice at the mine. Then she joined her companions for their daily trek to work.

  The trudge to shaft five was the same every day. It was situated in a ravine that dropped in stair-step terraces, surrounded by crumbling cliffs. The main shaft leading down into the gallery where the veins were located was a wide cleft. Many of the prisoners were already at work pounding rock that had been hauled to the surface yesterday. The rock had to be broken down into smaller pieces and then ground until it could be sifted for gold nuggets and gold dust.

  Bettany led her companions to a second narrower opening. There had been a rockfall deep in the gallery a month ago, before she and the others had arrived. Because they had just hit a strong vein of gold, Lord Eorgas had ordered that a secondary tunnel be cut to reach the vein through more stable rock. Deep in the ground, men were already at work: a hint of smoke, the faint clatter of distant pickaxes and thump of sledgehammers.

  As she did every morning, she kissed each of the household on the cheek before they entered the darkness to haul rock. Montu-en went last. She had told him it was his duty to keep an eye on the rest when she’d realized acting as their “guard” gave him the strength to go on each day.

  Only when the darkness had swallowed all sight of the boy did she turn away. The guards posted at the shaft were staring at her as they always did, but none spoke. They feared Agalar, called him a wizard; no one wanted to come under the care of an angry man with a scalpel. Also they feared the fire curse more than ever because Agalar had lectured the barracks that it took months for the disease to wear off and that it was dreadfully contagious until then.

  “Beauty!”

  Agalar was hurrying down toward her, accompanied by Ash, who had a hand resting along his twin swords, looking ominously like a person waiting for a fight to break out.

  The expression on Agalar’s face caught a hook in Bettany’s heart. A tremor of foreboding.

  “What is it?”

  “Come with me.”

  They started walking back toward the settlement. The sun hadn’t cleared the high cliffs yet so it was still cool. He didn’t speak as they climbed out of the ravine.

  “What is it?” she repeated.

  The familiar crease of worry wrinkled his forehead. Ash’s lips were pressed together in an uncharacteristic frown, and he, normally so friendly, wouldn’t look Bettany in the eye.

  “Go on ahead,” Agalar said to Ash, and the man exhaled sharply and lengthened his stride as if grateful to be released.

  “It’s something I won’t like, isn’t it?”

  His footsteps thudded along. His jaw was tight, his glare directed not at her but at the mine watchtower rising in the distance, marking the southern edge of the settlement and the road that led south through desert hills to Akheres Oasis.

  “You’re leaving, all of you, aren’t you?”

  He halted so abruptly that she took three steps before she realized he had stopped. Sunlight shining into his face made him narrow his eyes as he glared at her.

  “What makes you say so?”

  “I’ve never understood why you came to this forsaken place. With a group of Shipwrights who act more like adventurers than a doctor’s entourage and two guards who act more like thuggish jailors. I know you say you are touring the Three Seas to gain experience in treating different categories of disease and injury. But why stay so long here? Haven’t you already proven you can amputate a limb and nurse a worker through a crushed foot? Are the mines really of so much interest to you?”

  “You have to make a choice, Beauty.” His tone was bleak, severe. “Remain here without my protection, or come with me.”

  “You can take us with you?”

  “No. Just you.”

  It was as if the earth dropped out from under her: a rumble in her ears, her heart pounding, her knees giving way as the full impact of his words hit her. Her vision blurred with tears, and she swayed.

  He steadied her but released her just as quickly. “Beauty…”

  “No! You can’t abandon them here. I can’t. Take us all with you, I beg you.”

  “It’s not my choice to make.”

  The frail hope unfurling in her chest was torn to pieces. His admiration had never been real, just a mirage seen in the heat haze of the desert. She should never have allowed her dreams of catastrophe and furious death to be replaced by a hazy mist through which she glimpsed a smile and a pair of deft hands.

  In the distance a drum pounded once, twice, then sped up as if it were following the shaking of her whole body, the racing of her heart.

  “There’s been an accident.” He listened to the story pounded on the drum. “One of the tunnels has collapsed!”

  She took off back the way they’d come.

  “Beauty!” he called after her but she ignored him.

  Dread numbed her heart as she ran. Nothing mattered but that it not be shaft five. Yet the thread of dust rose into the air down by where she had left the others. It mustn’t be. It couldn’t be.

  The guards were missing from the main shaft entrance amid a swirling haze of dust and grit. Were those frantic shouts and screams sounding from deep within the earth? She plunged down the ravine to the rescue shaft and almost tripped over a small person lying prone on the ground, body shuddering with racking coughs. Dropping to her knees, she rolled him onto his side to see what she feared: Mon
tu-en with a streak of blood down his cheek and his face and front coated with the dust.

  “How badly are you hurt?” she cried.

  Then Agalar was there, kneeling beside the boy. “Are you injured?”

  “I’m all right.” The words triggered another spasm of coughing.

  Bettany jumped to her feet. “Where are the others? Did they get out?”

  The boy cringed. “I don’t know. I was at the end of the line when the dust hit us.”

  She scrambled for the tunnel’s mouth.

  “Beauty! Don’t go in—”

  She ignored his order and kept going. He was just like all the other people who walked atop the earth thinking the ground was solid because for them it was rock. He was like her father, kind enough when it suited him but in the end caring only about his own ambition.

  Dust and grit choked the air, stinging her eyes, coating her lips and nostrils. Weird sounds chased down the tunnel: a shout, a wail, a crack of rock splintering and the crash and thud of it falling. The noise blurred as she plunged forward, slumped so her head wouldn’t hit the ceiling. How far had her people gotten? There was a little turnout ahead, a carved-out cleft supported by brick pillars, where the rock-hauling baskets were stowed every night. When she reached the cleft she patted around and found nothing; they’d already taken the baskets and gone in.

  She shut her eyes as a sick wave of fury engulfed her. Let the whole world burn. Let it burn. Let it burn. She had failed them. She hated herself for her ridiculous daydreams when she could have been with them, shepherding them, protecting them, dying with them.

  The crushing weight of rock above terrified her. It could all fall in with no warning. Weeping with fear, she forged forward into the darkness. The ceiling sloped lower and lower until she bent almost double; it wasn’t worth cutting a rescue tunnel to be spacious when all it needed was to be clear. A pair of planks were set across a narrow vertical shaft that plunged down to a level below and up to a faint glimpse of sky far above. Air stirred around her. Just past this ventilation shaft the tunnel cut to the right. Snatches of words spoken in Efean drifted like grit to her ears.

  “I can’t move.”

  “Don’t shift the rock or more will fall.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “Who’s there?” she called as softly as she could.

  “Doma?” The voice belonged to the head laundress, Efsu.

  “Yes. Yes!” She crawled forward. When her hand touched an arm, fingers grasped her immediately.

  “Thank the Mother,” whispered Efsu. “I feared no one would come.”

  “What happened?” To think of any of her companions dead beneath the rubble made her nauseated.

  “Some kind of collapse up ahead. I’ve not heard a single sound of life from beyond the rubble.” Efsu broke off into a fit of coughing. It was hard to breathe this far in; the deeper ventilation shafts must have collapsed as well. “I always have one of the children go at each end of the line because their ears are sharper. Amisi warned us to retreat, and we had started moving back. But her leg got caught in the rubble.”

  “I feel so dizzy,” said Siditi, the other laundress.

  “All of the rest of you get out,” ordered Bettany.

  Rock cracked so close by that she could taste the change in the air pressure. Fear made her light-headed. She pressed against the wall as the others crawled past her. Down this deep, the entrance seemed to lie an impossible lifetime away. One of the women was retching and another talking nonsense about a bird marrying the sun.

  When they were all past, she crawled forward and found Amisi, breathing hard, seated upright with her legs out in front of her.

  “It pinches, Doma,” she said in a voice made thin with pain. “I’m going to throw up.”

  Bettany felt around, careful not to put weight on any of the rubble. Often she had to pause to balance herself as more waves of dizziness swept through her. The girl’s lower left leg and foot were buried under a pile of smaller rocks weighted down by a heavier slab. The cave-in had happened somewhere farther on but its force had spilled debris forward. The rocks that trapped Amisi were the end point of the collapse’s momentum.

  A new voice floated out of the darkness. “Don’t any of you go all the way out. Hide in the cleft until I return. Don’t move from there or speak. Just lie as quietly as if you were dead.”

  The next thing she knew, Agalar pressed up beside her. She couldn’t see him but she knew it was him by the lingering scent of the lemon balm he washed in. His sun-heated hand grasped hers. The pressure of his fingers on her skin distracted her so much she forgot to be afraid.

  She whispered, “You’re crushing my hand.”

  He muttered words under his breath in a language she didn’t know but released her hand. At once the terrible darkness and fear settled more heavily than before, until he nudged her with a shoulder and handed her a strip of wet linen.

  “Tie this around your mouth and nose. Are you dizzy? Nauseated?”

  “Yes.”

  “The collapse must have released a pocket of poison air. We have to get out—”

  “I’m not leaving without Amisi.”

  “Of course we aren’t.” As she tied the damp cloth around her face she heard rocks scraping against each other as he pulled apart the pile atop Amisi’s leg. The moisture soothed her face and made her feel a little less dizzy.

  “Beauty, when I say ‘pull,’ yank her out even if she cries.”

  She wrapped her arms around the girl’s torso. Amisi’s head lolled to one side; she had passed out, and Bettany too felt herself sliding as the dizziness spread from behind her eyes to numb her cheeks and nose.

  “Pull!”

  She dragged the girl back and back and back with no thought except escape. This was all of life: that they not be crushed, mangled, suffocated. She was feeling more and more woozy but as long as she kept moving she wasn’t dead.

  She hauled Amisi around the corner. Efsu was waiting by the plank bridge over the shaft.

  “Where is the doctor?” asked Efsu. “I’ll take the girl.”

  “Go quickly. The air is bad.”

  He wasn’t behind her. He hadn’t come. She crawled frantically back to where she’d left him. From deeper into the tunnel came the grind of rocks sliding as fragile piles of debris began to give way.

  Agalar.

  She knew better than to shout; in such closed spaces, loud noises could trigger more spasms in the unstable rock. Scrambling around the corner, she slammed into him. He lay utterly still.

  “Please don’t be dead,” she whispered, pressing a hand against his cheek.

  She hooked her arms under his armpits and dragged him backward, no longer thinking, just hauling with all the strength that was left to her. Back around the corner she pulled him. Just as she reached the planks and the vertical shaft, he jolted, eyes flying open.

  “Hurry!” she scolded, finding relief in anger.

  Without replying, he followed her over the planks.

  Once safe on the other side, he pulled down his linen mask and took in gulps of air.

  “I have an idea.” His voice had a ragged edge to it, like he’d been inhaling smoke. “What if I say your companions died in the collapse? Killed by the poisoned air? They can play dead and their bodies be taken to Akheres Oasis and the burial ground. Then they’ll be free and no one will look for them.”

  His words stunned her. How could such a deliverance even be possible?

  From outside rose shouting. “Lord Agalar! We have to go in after him!”

  “He said not to follow him! Wait for him to return! Wait!” That was Ash, pitching his voice so it would carry into the tunnel as a warning that they needed to move fast.

  “Such a chance will not come again,” he added. “No one will know. That’s why I told your people to stay in the cleft.”

  Her sister Jes would have said to take the leap when there is an opening. If Bettany did not take it, they would die slowly an
d miserably and horribly day by day in the mines, as their bodies wasted away and their courage was trampled and their hearts bled dry of all that sustained them.

  “Why would you risk this for us? What would you demand in return?”

  He spoke in a voice softened by a hesitancy she’d never before heard from him. “Tell me your name. Your real name.”

  She had no one but her eleven companions to whom she was beholden, not since the day her father had abandoned her family and her mother and sisters had been taken away, leaving her to be hauled away into slavery. No one else who would help. A parched desert and an agonizing death was all the future that awaited her if she could not believe in this one man’s integrity.

  But he answered himself. “No, don’t tell me. I’ll help you because your companions deserve freedom and here’s a chance to take it. You need give me nothing.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he began walking toward the entrance, but she got hold of his arm and tugged him to a stop. It was still too dark to see much but she felt how rigidly he held himself, as if he was expecting to be struck and wasn’t sure he didn’t deserve it.

  “Bettany,” she said. “My name is Bettany.”

  5

  Guards had gathered as Agalar emerged from the tunnel. He spoke on a tide of adrenaline that made him giddy with his own audacity.

  “The major collapse isn’t the worst of it. There’s been an influx of poison air. People not caught under the rubble could be dead. All workers must be pulled out of shaft five immediately. My people will handle this tunnel while the rest of you go help at the main shaft. Use wet linen as masks. Take rope so anyone who faints can be dragged out. Bring carts down the road. There will be many dead.”

  Everyone was staring at him as if his excitement was unseemly. Let them think he was merely agitated. He had to pull this off. Nothing was more important, not even the mission that he had actually come here for—to steal gold.

  She’d told him her name. She trusted him.

  “Move! Be quick about it!” His shout was broken by a spasm of coughing from the dust that had gotten into his lungs.