Stone spring

73

It was the sky burial platform that Arga noticed first, the morning she and Novu arrived at the Pretani quarry.

Hollow, the smooth, smiling Pretani who always accompanied the stone deliveries to Etxelur, walked with them. He wore a necklace made of flint flakes – good Etxelur flint.

And one of the worker types followed them. A slim man, wearing worn, dusty skins, he looked uncomfortable, his face oddly grey, slack, as if he wasn’t quite alive. He was young, however, younger than Arga herself, she guessed.

The quarry was extraordinary. It was a patch of high open moorland that had been flayed of its turf and soil and peat, stripped down to the rocky bone. You could see where whole chunks of sandstone had been prised out of the ground. And all across this strange dug-up landscape, and even in deep pits cut into the ground, people worked, a few men, more women, many children. Coated in dust the same yellow-brown colour as the rock, some splashed with vivid blood from small wounds, they all looked the same: skinny and silent. But none of them were the dark, heavy-set Pretani; you could see that at a glance.

And on the sky-burial platforms that lined the bank of the nearby river, bodies had been heaped up. Most of them were children. Beyond the platforms the endless green of the oak forest rolled away.

The whole place made Arga deeply uncomfortable. Novu, short, stocky, his dark eyes gleaming, seemed fascinated.

It had been cruel of Ana, but typical of her, to send Novu away from Etxelur on this expedition to Pretani so soon after she had forced him to give up his lover Jurgi. It was one of her habits to distract possible enemies, just by getting them out of the way for a while. Arga was no enemy to Ana; she imagined she had been sent with Novu simply because Ana needed someone else from her inner circle to go with him.

But if it had been up to Arga they wouldn’t be involved with the Pretani at all, no matter how good their stone was. And they certainly wouldn’t be considering getting tied even more closely to them, as Hollow said he had brought them here to suggest.

Hollow, as they walked, was showing Novu the tools the slaves used to dig out their rock. ‘Picks and shovels of antler, as you see. Red deer, and only the strongest, healthiest young males. This itself is brought to us by a web of trade…’ His Etxelur tongue was smooth and fluent. He noticed Arga looking at the burial platform. ‘People die here, as they do everywhere,’ he said gently. ‘Especially the children. At least these slaves die knowing they have achieved something with their lives – contributing to the building of Etxelur.’

Novu said, ‘So tell me how you organise these people.’

Hollow gestured. ‘You can see the basics. We split them half and half, roughly. The less useful half works to feed the more useful half that labours in the quarry. We use a mix of adults and children in the pits, more men than women, actually, for we need the brute strength of the bucks. And the cubs are useful for getting into the narrow spaces when we’re first opening up the seams.’ He made a wriggling gesture with his hands. ‘In they squirm, like your Great Eel herself, True!’ The man did not react. ‘We change them over every so often to let minor wounds heal, that kind of thing.

‘We let them sleep down in the caves because that way you need less houses on the surface. But that does have its disadvantages. We had a collapse the other night, that’s why there are so many bodies on the slaves’ platforms. They built them themselves. You understand we Pretani hang our dead in the trees…’

Slaves. Before coming on this trip Arga had only seen the stone arrive with its Pretani handlers on the boats off the shore of Etxelur. She had never thought about where it came from, who must be digging it up. She looked at the silent man walking with them. ‘Who are these people?’

‘They call themselves the People of the Great Eel. But there are no eels here,’ Hollow said with a grin. ‘Step back now, True.’ He said it softly, but it was enough to make True drop back hastily and lower his head.

Novu said, ‘There are some slaves in Jericho, more elsewhere. It all makes sense, Arga.’ He gestured at the quarry. ‘Look how much gets done!’

‘And that,’ Hollow said easily, ‘is what I want to talk to you about.’ He led them on, walking slowly around the site. ‘I visit Etxelur often – you know that. I admire your great works, the dykes, the reservoirs. But the work goes so slowly! I know how difficult that is for you, Novu, for so much of it is your vision. And I know how anxious Ana is becoming, as her years slip away like grains of sand.’

‘It’s true, it’s true.’

Arga was disturbed how much this man knew about them. He wasn’t like most Pretani, who were so obsessed with their own blood-drenched honour rituals they barely noticed other people at all. Hollow knew their hungers and their fears, as a hunter knew the habits of a stalked deer.

‘And,’ Hollow said, ‘I think, Novu, you are starting to see the solution. Just look around.’

‘Yes,’ Novu said, intent. ‘Not the quarry – you mean the people.’

‘Exactly. Imagine if you owned people as we own these Eel folk. Imagine how quickly the work would progress. No more arguments about who does what and when. No more relying on neighbours, their loyalty secured by the flimsy bonds of an annual Giving. With workers like this you could do what you liked, as fast as you liked – or as fast as your workers were capable of, and that would be for you to determine, not them. It’s not just stone I’m offering you now, Novu – it’s people. And through people all your other problems will be solved.’

‘What people?’ Arga snapped. ‘These? If we take away your Eel folk, who will dig the stone for you?’

‘Oh, we wouldn’t give you this lot. We’ve trained them up for this work, and half of them are worn out anyhow. No, we’d round up fresh meat. Our world-forest is full of it. We’d hand them over broken in spirit but healthy in body.’

Novu frowned. ‘We’d have to discuss terms.’

‘Of course.’

‘But you’ll do the deal, won’t you?’ Arga said. Since he had lost Jurgi, Novu had become even more obsessive about pursuing his great projects – as perhaps Ana, cunning, had intended all along. She hissed, ‘But we don’t know what the Pretani really want. How much flint can they need?’

But Novu did not respond, and Hollow led him away, around one of the pits. Hollow was gesturing, describing more aspects of the work. None of the toiling Eel folk looked up.