Still munching his bread, Luterin crossed to the outer wall and lifted the heavy links of chain. They seemed to sweat in his hands. He dropped them. The chain fell back into its narrow alcove. It consisted of ten links, each link representing a small year.
He stood there without movement, his gaze locked on the length of chain. Beside the horror of his deed, another horror was growing, the horror of imprisonment. By these ten-link chains, the Great Wheel was to be moved through space.
He had not yet taken his turn with the chains. He had no notion how long he had lain in a delirium, while words winged like birds through his head. He recalled only the shrill noise of trumpets from the monks somewhere above the Wheel, and then the lurching horizontal movements of the Wheel itself, which continued for half a day.
Contemplating the outer wall frightened Luterin. The time would come when he would feel differently. That wall was the only changing element of his environment. Its markings formed a map of the journey; by those excoriations, a practised prisoner could chart his way through time and granite.
The inner walls, the permanent walls of the cell, had been elaborately-incised by previous occupants. Portraits of saints and drawings of genital organs testified to the mixed occupancy of the cell. Poems were engraved here, calendars, confessions, calculations, diagrams. Not an inch had been spared. The walls preserved fossils of spirits long dead. They were palimpsests of suffering and hope.
Revolutionary slogans could be read. One was cut on top of an earnest prayer to a god called Akha. Many of the earliest markings were obliterated by later ones, as one generation obliterates another. Some of the early inscriptions, though faint, were legible and delicately formed. Some were in ornate scripts which had disappeared from the world.
In one of the faintest, most elaborate scripts, Luterin read the basic details of the Wheel itself. These were figures which had a power over all who were incarcerated here.
The Wheel might more properly be described as a ring, revolving about a great central finger of granite.
The height of the Wheel was a uniform 6.6 metres, or twelve times 55, the northern latitude of the Wheel itself. Counting its base, its thickness was 13.19 metres, 1319 being the year of Freyr-set, or Myrkwyr, at latitude 55°N, dating the years from the nadir year of apastron. The diameter of the Wheel was 1825 metres, the number of small years in one Great Year. And 1825 was the number of cells set in the outer circumference of the Wheel.
Close to this numeration, and allowed to remain intact, was an intricately engraved figure. It represented the Wheel in its correct dimensions, set in the rock. Above it was the cavern, large enough to permit the monks from the monastery to walk on top of the Wheel and drop supplies to the prisoners below. Entry to the cavern could be gained only through Bambekk Monastery, which perched on the hillsides of Mount Kharnabhar, above the buried Wheel.
Whoever had incised the figure on the granite had evidently been well informed. The river that ran below the Wheel, assisting its revolutions, was also depicted. Other schematic lines carried a connection from the heart of the Wheel out to Freyr and Batalix and to the constellations of the ten houses of the zodiac—the Bat, Wutra’s Ox, the Boulder, the Night Wound, the Golden Ship, and the others.
“Abro Hakmo Astab!” Luterin exclaimed, uttering the forbidden oath for the first time. He hated these supposed connections. They lied. There were no connections. There was only himself, embedded in rock, no better than a gossie. He flung himself down on the bunk.
He used the oath again. As one of the damned, he was permitted it.
The dimmer the vision, the louder the noises. Luterin presumed that the other occupants of the Wheel slept when it was not moving. He lay awake, gazing vacantly about the dull box he inhabited.
His water supply ran down into a trough near the foot of his bunk. Its drips and splashes were close, and as regular as the tick of clocks.
Deeper in tone were the flows of water beneath the mobile floor. These were lazy noises, like a continuous drunken monologue. Luterin found them soothing.
Other watery noises, drips and plops, coming more distantly, reminded him of the outside world of nature, of freedom, of the hunt. He could imagine himself wandering free in the caspiarn forests. But that illusion could not be sustained. Ever and again he saw his father’s face in its final agony. The brooks, waterfalls, torrents, disappeared from his mind’s eye, to be replaced by blood.
His lethargy was pierced only when he opened his daily woven bundle of food, and found a message in it.
He carried the scrap of paper over to the blue flame in the outer wall and peered at it. Someone had written in small script, “All is well here. Love.”
There was no signature, not even an initial. His mother? Toress Lahl? Insil? One of his friends?
The very anonymity of the message was an encouragement. There was someone outside who thought well of him and who could—at least on one occasion—communicate with him.
That day, when the priests’ trumpets sounded, he leaped up and seized hold of the chain hanging in its alcove in the outer wall. Bracing his feet against the partition wall, he heaved on the chain. His cell moved—the Wheel moved.
Another heave, and the movement was less reluctant this time. A few centimetres were gained.
“Pull, you biwackers!” he shouted.
The encouraging bugles sounded at intervals for twelve and a half hours, then fell silent as long. By the end of a day’s work, Luterin had advanced himself by some 119 centimetres, almost half the width of his cell. The flame which lit his cell was close to the dividing wall. By the end of another day’s work, it would be eclipsed—would be in the following cell—and a new one would be revealed.
A mass of 1284551.137 tons had to be shifted: that was the burden which holiness had placed on the incumbents of the Wheel. It appeared to be merely a physical labour. But, as the days were to pass, Luterin would find himself regarding it more and more as a spiritual task; while more and more it became apparent to him that there were indeed connections out from his heart, and from the Wheel, to Freyr and Batalix and to the far constellations. The perception would come that the Wheel contained not merely hardship but—as legend claimed—the beginnings of wisdom.
“Pull!” he shouted again. “Pull, you saints and sinners.”
From then on, he became fanatical, leaping up eagerly from his bunk as soon as the awaited bugle blew. He cursed those who, in his imagination, did not rise as swiftly to the task as he did. He cursed those who would not labour at their chains at all, as he had once done. It was beyond his understanding why the work periods were not longer.
At night—but here only night existed—Luterin lay down to sleep with a head full of the image of that great slow-grinding Wheel, crushing men’s lives away like a grindstone. The Wheel moved every day, as it had done since the great Architects had established it.
It revolved about a harsh irony. The captives, nested like maggots each in separate cells on the perimeter of the Wheel, were forced to propel themselves into the heart of the granite mountain. Only by submitting to that cruel journey, by actively collaborating in it, was it possible to emerge. Only by that collaboration was it possible to effect the revolution of the Wheel which meant freedom. Only by plunging deep into the entrails of the mountain was it possible to issue forth a free man.
“Pull, pull!” shouted Luterin, straining every muscle. He thought of the 1824 others, captive each in his separate cell, each bound to pull if ever they were to escape.
He knew not what crises prevailed in the outside world. He knew not what sequence of events he had precipitated. He knew not who lived or died. Increasingly, as the tenners went by, his mind was filled with loathing for those other prisoners—some perhaps sick or even dead— who did not pull with a whole heart. He felt that he alone was bearing the weight of rock on his sinews, he alone heaving the Wheel through its firmament of granite towards the light.