Dariel decided to retrace his route and find something to use as a fishing rod. As he began to turn, a swell in the waves smashed against the stone beneath him. It sent up a flume of water that smacked him under the chin and against the chest and lifted him off his feet. For a moment the water billowed and fizzed all around him. His legs and arms lashed out in all directions. He clawed for purchase on the ledge, using his fingers and feet and eventually wedging his torso between two stones. For a moment he lay there breathing in frantic gasps. He could have vanished beneath the waves. No one would have guessed what had happened to him. He would simply have disappeared.
The thought of all of this racked him with sobs. He did not return to that spot, nor did he mention the event to anyone. As much as it had scared him-as much, really as all his subterranean ramblings sent his blood pumping and his hands tingling, and as much as the ghostly breath in the corridors rippled and flexed the hairs on his neck, making them stand and sway like long grass pressed by a shifting wind-he still loved his time in these secret places. He did not wish to give up his adventures, as he knew he would have to the minute anybody found out.
Anybody, that is, from within the world of the upper palace. Those beings of the light were only a portion of the population of the palace. He found several points other than his playroom where the unused passageways connected to others still in use. This world was just as interesting to explore. In the subterranean community of laborers, the unseen society of servants and engineers, cooks and technicians through whose efforts the palace functioned, there Dariel was well known and much liked. Likewise, it was at the elbows of these employees that he found the most joy he had yet experienced in the company of adults-with the exception of his father, whom he adored. It took them some time to get used to him and to get beyond their fears that something might happen to the boy and that they would be punished for it. Indeed, some of them never warmed to him. He suspected they argued about him when he was not there. But in others he found fast friends. He rode in the donkey-drawn carts that a man named Cevil used to bring supplies from the lower storerooms up into the palace. He stood among the full hips of the sweets bakers, stealing one after another of the sugary teacakes that were his favorite. He sat at the knees of the aged former palace workers who lived in frugal retirement in a network of caves, old men and women invisible to royal society.
He spent whole days awed by the labors of the fire feeders who worked in the sweltering, blackened catacomb-like chambers below the kitchens. The ovens that the royal cooks used were fed by a series of gigantic furnaces, from which networks of pipes stretched up and through the ceiling in such a confusion that the boy never made sense of them, no matter how many questions he asked. The feeding room was a brooding kiln of a cave. It was caked with soot and floating coal dust; peopled by blackened men who were often naked down to the waist and streaked by sweat, with bulging forearms and shoulders, bloodshot eyes, and yellowed teeth. The room was open on one side, not for the splendid view of the sea stretching off to the west but to provide some relief from the heat of the ovens and to facilitate the arrival of new loads of coal from Senival, which came in on barges from the Mainland.
It was here that Dariel ventured the morning of the Aushenian banquet. He approached, hearing the commotion from some distance away, smelling the soot in the air, growing warmer with each bend in the carved granite of the corridor. When he stepped out of the corridor, the heat of the ovens hit him in a roar, as if he had stepped into the mouth of some living beast. For a few moments the scenes of men lit by glowing red embers had a horrific look to it. Once he spotted a particular figure, though, Dariel moved toward him.
Val claimed to be a Candovian. He also claimed to have been a raider in his youth, a sort of pirate of the Gray Slopes. Dariel took his claims with a grain of salt. Val seemed such a part of the stone and earth of Acacia itself that Dariel could not imagine that he originated anywhere else. What was never in question, however, was his stunning physical presence. He had an upper body of such girth that the first time Dariel spied him-moving about with hulking grace before the stoves, backlit and highlighted by the fiery glow-he had clutched his chest with one hand, sure that he had stumbled on the giants that fuel the world’s volcanoes.
He still shuddered on seeing him now. Val yelled out a cursing order to someone and then stooped to get a grip around a chunk of coal as large as a small child. That was when he spotted Dariel. He straightened to his full height and wiped an enormous hand across his mouth, brushing away the profanity he had just uttered. “Young prince, what are you up to?” he asked, stepping nearer and dropping to one knee. “There’s a banquet tonight. Don’t you know that? Your father is honoring the Aushenian prince. It’s not a good time for distraction down here. Or is that why you’ve come-to try and get old Val in trouble?”
As ever, Dariel was struck with shyness on meeting this large man, even as he was drawn to him and loved something about how small he felt before his bulk. He answered as he often did, with a bashful smile and a mumbled declaration of innocence.
The man set his hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave him a playful shake. “Come on,” he said, rising back to his feet with some effort, “it’s time for my break anyway. Let’s get some air.”
Together the two retreated from the furnaces. Dariel walked behind Val, who cut a swath through the throng of workers. Shovels flinging coal, carts creaking past behind ornery donkeys, men swaying and cursing with the effort of their work: the movement was all around him, but as long as Dariel stayed close to Val, he knew he was safe. He stumbled occasionally on the rough contours of the floor and once bumped into Val’s legs when he paused to let a cart past. The man’s hand dropped down from a height and blanketed his shoulder, a momentary touch, and then they moved on again.
The sky was heavy with clouds, layer upon layer of them, but still, stepping out of the cavern and into the winter morning was blinding. The swift change was an overload of his senses, from dark to light in a few paces, hot to cold. They emerged as if from a fissure in a volcano, an exhaling fumarole of foul breath, greeted by the shock of salt-tinged air. They ascended a staircase cut into the stone and then walked along a sloping ramp from which openings led into the ovens that the lower furnaces fed.
Dariel stepped into the mess hall in time to watch Karan, the woman who doled out the laborer’s rations, straighten from a stooped position. She had just set a tray of hard biscuits into the slotted holder on which they cooled. The momentary sight of her swaying breasts froze him in his tracks; he flushed with an embarrassment he did not understand, one that pulsed in him when she glanced at him and seemed to read his thoughts better than he did himself. Her eyes passed on to Val. She perched her fists on her hips, which bulged out from under the constriction of her apron, and eyed the man with disapproving eyes. “You’re a bit of a sight,” she said. “Coming in here without so much as splashing water on your face.”
Young as he was, Dariel knew that he-not the foreman-was the target of her displeasure. She had never trusted him in the way Val did, Dariel thought, although why or how he could cause her harm escaped him. And he sensed that regardless of the cold tone she used with Val, she actually liked him, something that seemed to embarrass her enough that she wished to hide it.
“If I had a reason to care for my appearance, you can be sure that I would, woman,” Val said, “but I’m here for some biscuits and a bit of tea. Is that too much to ask? I didn’t know I had to clean up for a biscuit and a bit of tea.” He shot a glance at Dariel, asking for a little commiseration, and then he used one hand to swipe most of the biscuits off one tray and into his other fist.