The Gathering Storm

Page 280

turning and turning and turning and a pause for unquiet sleep with the muttering of the madman infesting his dreams, and then up again, and again, and again, a hopeless round of labor that has neither beginning nor end, and still the wheel turns under his feet as he walks endlessly and never gets anywhere, the wheel rumbling around and around until he no longer recalls anything except this pit of darkness and the turning of the wheel.
Every time as he drifts off to sleep, the madman plodding in the traces whispers such a tale of blood and fear and anger that images pollute his dreams until all he sees is fire and weeping, although at times he has a momentary flash of surprise that he can see at all, even if only in his dreams.
“No, no, I pray you my lord leave her be she is just young yet an innocent my daughter if it please you she’s never done any ai God the blood no you must look you will look I’ll kill you look at the baby at her face I’m glad he is dead is that what you’ve done to her?”
The water drawn up from the depths to keep dry the shaft below spills endlessly into the ditch where it will flow onward to a pool where the next wheel draws it up to the next level and up and up, and the flood never ends, it just keeps turning and spilling.
“Nay do not you go there I will kill him dead and cut off his balls and why shouldn’t I just look at the blood I hate you my poor child for it won’t bring anyone back kill you kill you kill you.”
He falls because there is no bottom to this pit, it just goes on and on, and one day the pain of the madman reaches his tongue at long last, and a thing stirs there he no longer has a name for.
He speaks, although his voice is rough from disuse.
“Why do you despair?”
A horrible silence follows his words except for the rumble of the wheel and the splash and gurgle of running water and the echoes of the wheels above, whose turning never ceases.
Silence.
“Who are you?” asks the madman, although he does not stop walking the wheel which mutters under the tread of his feet, hard as fate. “What happened to the mute?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have they put a new one down here? Did the mute die? Are you a spy for them, come to wiggle out with my secrets? I know where the treasure is buried, it’s buried with my treasure, my sweet, my innocent. And if I could have killed him who despoiled her I would have but he took what he wished and went his way for he was a lord among men and we are only the dirt he walked on. Did you see the blood?”
“I can’t see. Was harm done to someone you cared for?”
“Don’t mock me!” the madman roars, pounding his fists against wood. The wheel ratchets to a stop. “Don’t mock me! I protected her! All of them! But what could I do, for they had swords and spears and I only my hoe and shovel and them made of wood, nothing to do when they came round God I was helpless I was afraid 1 let them take the girl for fear of what they would do to the rest of us though she wept and clung to me and now I am punished for it, for wasn’t I a coward, didn’t I kill her with my own hands by not fighting them?”
The madman weeps, while above voices shout and there comes the noise of men descending to discover what has happened to the wheel. The one who was once silent rises from the cold pallet of stone where he rests and gropes along the passage. In an odd way he can see the walls, because his body senses the presence of stone so close that he feels its respiration, each breath seeping like the damp through its pores, as slow as ages upon ages. It’s as if the stone wishes to speak to him but its voice can’t quite reach him.
“Hurry,” he says as he feels against his cheek the up-welling of cold from the lowest shaft. He grasps the rim of the still wheel. “You must walk. Or they’ll whip you.”
“What care you for a man with blood on his hands? I am a murderer! I am! I am! I killed him, the one who done it! Not him, but his servant, for I couldn’t touch him! I killed the one who took the leavings when the lord was done. It was all I could do. She was a good girl. She was a good girl. It was all I could do. My firstborn. My treasure.”
But the madman begins walking, weeping and blubbering until words and sobs meld together, for it is a different whip that goads him on.
“Ai, God,” he says as he listens to the roll of the wheel and the disjointed rambling of the madman. “No wonder you grieve. I wish you may find peace.”
No chasm after all.
Stronghand stumbled into a ditch, and his feet slipped on gravel as water purled against his shins. The shock of spring water wrenched him into awareness, and he noticed how still it had become, as if the world held its breath.