“Don’t the angels care?”
“Yes, they do! No matter what nonsense you’ve heard, the angels do care about the ants! They try to keep watch. A big army will have chariots hovering around it like sheepdogs, but it may be spread over a huge tract of terrain, and there are never enough angels.”
He sighed again. “And sometimes the sheep catch the dogs.”
Before I could ask what nonsense I was supposed to have heard, someone shouted a warning. Orange scrambled to his feet, telling me to do the same. Sleepers were hastily kicked awake, and the whole paddock of slaves lined up at attention as a party of ants approached. And then we were divided into gangs and marched off.
And I was shown what my father’s hymns and prayers had never succeeded in explaining to me when I was a child—what Hell was.
—2—
THAT FIRST DESCENT INTO THE PIT was worse than anything I had yet endured at the hands of my captors. I was assigned to a gang of five other men and a woman, under the supervision of a weedy, tufty-faced youth. He sent the others off to their labors and looked me over contemptuously. Then he gave me a list of the punishments he could inflict on me if he chose: confinement in total darkness, clawing, mutilation, lingering death. Him I could have broken in half with my bare hands, but he had his panther at his side, so I cringed and groveled and promised to be a good slave.
At the mouth of the mine we met the other shift coming out. I was told to choose a man of about my size and take his gear. Thus I found myself pulling on a stinking leather smock, stiff with old sweat and dirt, shabby and patched and abrasive. It barely reached my knees. The rest of my equipment consisted of a metal helmet, a pick, a canteen, and a candle. The ants, I noted, also wore iron-toed boots and heavy breeches. I would have settled for the breeches. I was ordered into the tunnel.
We were close to High Summer, and there were always fifty or more living beings in those workings, not counting cats, yet the dusty air was bitterly cold. I had never known cold before in my life. I had seen darkness in the waters beneath the seafolk’s grove, but this darkness had a weight and solidity all its own. The tunnel sloped gently, going on and on, relentlessly deeper, branching often. The faint flicker from my light showed rough wet walls pressing in on either hand. Ahead of me was thick, heavy blackness, into which I must force my unwilling body.
Worst of all, though, as I stumbled and scurried ahead of my sneering guard and his four-pawed enforcer, was the sense of being buried, of the mountain peak squeezing in on me. I had been reared under the limitless sky of the grasslands. This living burial was in itself a torment more terrifying than almost anything I could have imagined. The cold and the smell of rock and the darkness knotted my insides in spasms of fear.
Eventually we took a smaller branch, then another, and came at last to a dead end. The ceiling was so low I had to crouch, and the whole cramped space was visible, even in the faint glimmer of my tiny candle and the ant’s lantern. I was puzzled by a steady clinking, for I could not see where it came from, and it echoed mysteriously all around.
“The one.” The kid pointed at a row of small holes around the cave at floor level, looking barely larger than miniroo burrows. I hesitated, nauseated by the weight of mountain above me. The boy gestured and the panther sank on its haunches, snarling. Quickly I lay down with my clutter of equipment and began to wriggle in.
And wriggle…and wriggle… The walls spread out, but the ceiling stayed right above my head. The floor was cold and wet and abrasive against my legs. Water dripped continually. I could hear that I was being followed, and I was pathetically grateful for the company.
At last the journey ended, the two of us lying side by side on our bellies, facing a vein of crumbling black rock that was obviously worth much more than I was. If I tried to raise my head to look at it properly, my helmet struck the roof. The tunnel was wide enough that I could have just touched both sides by stretching out my arms, but floor and ceiling sloped sharply to the left. I was hard against one wall, the kid almost leaning on me. Two battered buckets were there, waiting for us.
“You fill ten buckets.” The contemptuous voice was at my ear. “The black stuff. None of the white—that’s dross. Like you. As you fill each one, you shout for another, and the woman will bring it.”
“Yes, master.” And the echoes whispered, master, master.
“You stop and come out when the candle dies. If you haven’t done ten, you’ll be encouraged to do better next time.”
“I’ll try, master.”
“You’d better, slag. Look back.”
I twisted awkwardly around and saw two eyes glowing in the faint flicker of the lantern.
“Sliver will be checking on you,” my driver said. “He can see you even without light, and you won’t hear him coming.”
“I’ll work hard, master!”
“Yes, you will. If I don’t hear that pick going, I’ll send in Sliver.” He gestured with one hand. A big padded foot stroked the back of my bare calf. I squealed and the boy laughed.
“Next time he won’t have his claws sheathed.” He took his lantern and began to scramble away, then thought of a last warning. “Work forward, not sideways. If the cut gets too wide, the roof will fall.”
“I’ll remember, master.”
“This one’s too wide already.” He departed with a clatter and scratch of boots, leaving me in a silence broken only by the clink of my pick and the harsh breathing of a man working as hard as terror could drive him.
How long? I don’t know how long I was a slave for the ants.
I survived, and perhaps nothing in my long life is quite so strange as that. Many seafolk were brought in after me; obviously the ants had expected the great migration. All they had needed to do was set a trap by the first fresh water. Seafolk came easy.
Seafolk went easy, also. Those gentle people made very poor slaves. Strangers to violence, they just lay down and died.
The third or fourth batch after mine included Whistler, one of the boys from my own tribe. He brought nightmare news of women giving birth in coracles as they were towed through the madness of the Great Canyon. Several had died most horribly, including Sparkle. I spoke but once with Whistler, for after his second shift he tried to run away. I was lucky to be underground at the time.
His news should have killed me faster than the panthers killed him. I had been very fond of Sparkle—indeed, I would have sworn that I had loved her as much as man could love woman, for I had not then learned what true love is. Her death seemed to mark her as just one more victim in the wake of disaster I trailed—my parents, Violet, Pebble, Sparkle. Anyone I ever cared for died, it seemed.
And her death was entirely my fault. Even in the worst parts of the canyon there had been quiet pools where a boat could have lingered. Had I not been so stupid as to let myself be caught by the ants I would have been there, in that canyon hell. A little common sense and Sparkle would have lived. Even young Whistler said that much, and I believe it still.
I was a seaman—I should have lain down and faded away, as so many of them did. Even if I could escape from the ants’ nest, where would I go, what would I gain? My tribe was already lost on the vast South Ocean. I had no family there anyway, for not one child was recognized as mine. The ant who caught me had thrown away my angel tokens, but I had long since lost any desire to be an angel. Sparkle’s death was as much the fault of Brown-yellow-white as it was mine, and the prisoner Orange was no hero to admire. The angels had failed to save the herdfolk, they had destroyed my idyllic life in the grove—or so I thought—and they apparently could do nothing about these monstrous slave-owning ants. I hated and despised angels. I had no wish to be an angel. I had no wish to live at all.