CHAPTER 27
Hreodwater, England
I thought I heard the lady say
Silk and silver, silver lads I’ll pay . . .
The shanty was floating up from further down the tunnel.
The rest of the Hringen shift must have been close now.
That was a working song, for the pit faces.
Avelyn could hear that from the rhythm, but it was different to the Brocken songs.
All the mining clans had their own. He missed singing theirs.
They were fun. Mining shanties were usually four-fifths foul abuse aimed at the foreman or the lady of the clan, in the way that really meant everyone would happily die for her.
The path took them out of the tunnel, and into . . .
“Oh, my God,” he said in English.
Lady Hringen looked pleased, or he thought she did, from the way she was standing. “I do love it when people see it for the first time,” she said to Ras.
Ras squeezed Avelyn’s shoulders to remind him to keep walking.
There was a forest.
The cavern was as high and broad as the one that enclosed the abbey and its lake.
Vast columns of salt held it up, and right across it .
. . oaks. The same brilliant white oaks that stood across the courtyards up at An El, their acorns scattered like pearls, the leaves flickering silvery with the warm thermals billowing through from other, deeper cave systems. Above it all, the salt light rioted: some unknown, unstudied particles supercharged into an incredible torrent, tinting the trees amber and violet.
The air looked like mother-of-pearl cast in three dimensions.
Awestruck, Avelyn took a photograph, then picked up a twig with a leaf and an acorn still attached to it so he had proof.
The acorn was opally, shimmering with colours in the whiteness.
What would they find if they put one of these leaves under a microscope?
A strange kind of chlorophyll that hammered salt light, instead of sunlight, into energy?
Ras was looking at the camera, so Avelyn showed him the picture.
“What is it made from?”
“Paper and plastic.”
Ras tapped him in the chest, silver gauntlet clinking on the silver cuirass, to tell him where he would need to keep the photographs. “Shield them, or they’ll tarnish.”
Avelyn did as he was told.
They were passing into the shade of the trees.
It was warm now, too warm for the leather mining gear.
Summer. Avelyn tilted his head back, letting the light seep through him where it could reach between the silver plating.
The cold that had got into his marrow yesterday was finally starting to thaw, and he didn’t feel so fragile with it now.
The ras was as strong as the salt light aurora.
Somewhere down in the vaults of his mind, he could hear music in it—or not hear. Perceive. It wasn’t hearing.
Lady Hringen was watching him, making sure he was going to keep walking. There was a deep attentiveness to it. She was looking at him, not being generally polite to a younger man from another clan.
That was what he had liked about her, years ago.
He thought of that meeting, held in Clan Brocken’s salt-glittering hall.
His uncles had been there, his grandmother, Lady Hringen’s retainers.
The conversation had been ostensibly with him, but really it had been with his grandmother.
They had talked about mining rights and shipping, loans, bonds.
He could remember Lady Hringen giving him an apologetic half smile across the table, one that had made him feel unbelievably grown up: Sorry it’s all so dull.
She had been so much older, so mysterious because of that gulf of years that separated them.
And yet here she was, caring whether he was bored or not, as if he mattered.
On the way out, she’d asked him what he liked to do, and he’d told her with teenage eagerness about the icon-painting he did for the abbey.
She had done grand work of pretending to be interested.
Later his grandmother had said, “Caer Halen, Avelyn, you couldn’t have said archery like a normal person? ”
But Lady Hringen had made the offer anyway, as if she had quite liked the idea of someone who didn’t say archery.
“Why didn’t you come to me, after the accident?” she asked him suddenly. “You could have. You should have. I was expecting you.”
She was right: it was what he should have done, and he had known it.
He almost had. The whole idea had filled him with dread, the exhausting ritual of asking a Witan lady for sanctuary, being married without his uncles to give him away, plunged into a new clan with no advice and no one on his side . . .
If he had gone, though, he would have had a family, and a household, and a clan—not just a little room at the back of the Jesuit Curia, a god who didn’t talk to him, and a half-father who still suffered because of him.
If he had gone, he would have met Jericho years ago. Maybe they would even be real friends now, and Avelyn would be able to feel the way he should have, not this maggot-coloured, affection-starved craving. He wouldn’t be so hungry.
Yes, and what if the moon were made of salt?
“My whole clan died,” Avelyn said. “I knew what everyone would say. They’d say the King had cursed me, and that if I married, my new clan would be cursed too.”
“They did say that, but you would have been welcome anyway.”
He looked sideways at her. “I know, my lady. But whenever anything went wrong . . . I think I would have been a little less welcome.”
He heard her sigh even through the mask.
The salt light flared, and they all had to put a hand over their eyes, even with the masks.
“That one was strong,” Ras murmured. “I don’t think it’s going to be safe for much further.”
“Let’s see,” Lady Hringen said, but as they passed it, she patted a support pillar as though she was reassuring herself that whatever else was going on, at least the ceiling wouldn’t collapse.
Avelyn slowed down.
Pegged against the pillar, exactly at eye level, where each one was built with a deliberately flawed, glassy base about the height of a person, was a sledgehammer.
The hammers were so big he would struggle to lift one even now, but his grandmother had lifted it.
For him, she would be frozen forever in the moment she swung it.
She had been a Valkyrie, but not like the ones in the paintings.
Somehow those artists had only ever been able to imagine the young ones, the ensigns who were barely grown up; not the general, grey and mighty as a winter oak.
He hadn’t seen the hammer strike the support pillar. He’d already been running.
He pushed his hand into his pocket, didn’t find the rosary, and clenched his fist.
“Mind like a rock,” Lady Hringen said to him.
“Oh,” Ras said suddenly. “My lady.”
Something huge was moving among the trees. When Avelyn looked that way, he saw a flicker of what might have been antlers in the shadows.
“Ah,” Ras said, and put his hand out and set it to the side of Avelyn’s eye like a blinker. Avelyn twitched back, annoyed. “Don’t look at them. You’ll make them real.”
Cross-cultural patience could only get you so far. “What?”
“The King’s dreams,” Lady Hringen said, and it struck Avelyn as exactly the way that experienced divers spoke about sharks. “Come on, gentlemen. Eyes on the road. Mind like a rock. Sing to the King, and nothing else. This is dangerous now.”
“Why is it dangerous?” Avelyn said. Could you have an aneurysm from nothing but frustration?
If he looked in Jericho’s medical records, would there be a long history of Outside scientists and scholars who had literally popped after being exposed to too much Hreod Thinking and a cover-up so that people like Lady Hringen could continue to get away with it and intone non sequiturs at decades of victims yet to come?
Give me strength.
The King heard. Another salt light flare blasted across the forest, even brighter than the last, and it saved him from having to dredge up a reply. However malignant the King was, it was nice to have a brief alliance.
Thank you, Avelyn thought wryly, and the ras hugged him tight before it slithered off again.
Lady Hringen’s whole posture stiffened. “No,” she said. “No further. Ras, go and get them back.” She meant the miners on shift now. Avelyn could see them: they were working on a glacier of salt at the edge of the oak forest. “We’re going back above.”
As though it was fire and not light arcing across the cavern roof, Ras nodded tightly and ran ahead to fetch the other miners.
“My lady,” Avelyn began. As spectacular as it was, the salt light looked no more dangerous than the other aurora, the one in the north, and they were coated in silver: it wasn’t doing them any damage through all that. “Why is it—”
“Get that ready,” Lady Hringen said about the silver camera.
She drew him to the middle of the path, away from the shade of the trees, so they were standing in the full light of the storm.
“We’re going to wait for the next flare, and I’ll show you what your Witan in the southeast needs to see.
I said don’t look at them!” she added, hard, when a crack came through the trees right behind Avelyn and he twisted around.
She smacked him in the head, hard enough to make him see green blotches.
He swung back, incredulous.
“Concentrate,” she snapped. She took a scrap of cloth out of her pocket.
It was just part of an old tea towel that someone had used to dry paintbrushes.
It still had the label on: it was one of those own-brand ones from an Outside supermarket.
She was watching the salt light above them.
It was strengthening again. “All right. Make it see.”