Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (32)
Feb. 22nd, 2013 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air (32)
Author:bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: chain-gangs, prisoner abuse
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: Dust in the Air uses Warsverse backstory as a general rule of thumb. All chapters of Dust are posted on both LJ and DW. Dust in the Air does not use material from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). My main reference here is Giles Milton's book White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves. Thanks and/or apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson. So much thanks to my betasnacky, who is a fantastic human being and an amazing beta.
He wakes a little before true dawn, with thin light streaming into the long, low room through the slats of the walls. The others are still asleep, the sound of their snoring echoing through the room around him. Uninterrupted sleep is a rare thing these days; they had worked past dark last night, driven on by the overseers’ whips and the usual exhortations to Tash – though it hasn’t been the overseers waking them at odd hours these past few weeks. The island, always an uneasy place to be, has become restless of late. There is no such thing as a dreamless sleep any longer, or much sleep at all, despite the bone-deep exhaustion that characterizes his life now. Too often the island wakes them – the sound of something, or someone, prowling around the outside of the barracks, heedless of the fence that keeps them confined. Other times there are earthshakes, or the sound of tree branches on a windless night, or water boiling up from what should be solid ground. If he never has to wake up half-drowned in three feet of water again, it will be too soon. Athan had been lucky; a dozen dwarves had drowned, caught between the water and the dreams that Athan can’t remember anymore, but which had tangled his mind like a spider web a fly.
He can’t remember the latest batch of restless dreams – he never does, nor does anyone else that he’s spoken to about them. All that remains are sense-impressions: the taste of old blood, the chill of falling snow, the sound of horns. Even with that haunting him, Athan is tired enough that if he lets himself shut his eyes he would be asleep again within seconds. He probably ought to roll over and go straight back to sleep, snatching another few precious minutes of rest before the Callies come to wake them. Instead he slides his hand inside his sweat-stiff shirt, into the battered leather pouch he wears around his neck.
In theory they aren’t supposed to have possessions, but in practice none of the Callies really care so long as what they keep on their persons isn’t a weapon of some sort. Anything really valuable had been taken when they had been arrested; anything else had been bullied off them by the guards a long time since. Mostly what they keep is personal, worthless to anyone but them. Joar keeps a ring braided from his wife’s hair, Brofi a tiny carved wooden griffin, Orth a set of carved bone prayer beads. Athan has a few extra ties for his hair, scraps of leather instead of the silver clasps he had worn before, and a much worn piece of paper. He slips this out of the pouch and unfolds it carefully, conscious of the beginnings of rips along the fold-lines.
On the paper is an ink-sketch of two young dwarves, still in their teens. They’re grinning, young and careless, their arms slung over each others’ shoulders. Athan can still remember the day that he’d paid one of the artists on the quay in Glasswater to sketch it, five – no, six – years ago now. It had been Lev’s birthday, only a few months before the Calormenes had come. A good day, bright and sunny, with the smell of salt spray from the ocean and grilled mussels from the vendors at the docks heavy in the air. Athan had bought them a cone of popped corn to share, slathered in olive oil and salt, and they’d gotten grease all over their fingers and faces eating it. He can remember the smiles on his nephews’ faces. It seems like a lifetime ago now.
He traces the shapes of his nephews’ faces with the tip of one finger. They’re safe, that’s what he has to hold onto. They’re safe in Archenland with Makepeace Treanor’s family, far safer than they would be in Narnia – if they had even survived, when there is a far greater chance that if he had let them stay with him in Glasswater like they had wanted Merry and Lev would both be dead. Someday Athan will make it off this gods-forsaken island, and then –
His mind stutters to a stop at the thought. It’s almost too much to think about, getting off the nameless isle, getting out of the manacles the Callies keep him in. And even then – even if he does make it off the island, make it back to the mainland, could he do it? Leave Narnia behind for the relative peace of Archenland? Forget the oaths that he had sworn as a knight of Narnia and as sheriff of Glasswater?
None of that matters anymore, part of him mutters treacherously. There is no Narnia anymore. All you have is your blood and bone. Better to be with them than fight for something that has long since ceased to exist.
Not that it’s anything except pipe-dreams. Athan rolls his eyes at the bunk above him. He knows how he could get away from the chain-gang, how he could get away from the Calormenes, knows every way on and off the island. It has been putting it all together that’s the problem – that and not leaving anybody behind. He knows how the Calormenes punish those who remain after an escape, even a failed one.
He traces the shape of one of Merry’s looping braids and thinks, Be safe. Be strong, be safe, wherever you are –
“Awake already?”
Athan looks up as Kivran leans down from the bunk above him, stifling a yawn in his massive fist. His voice is pitched low.
“Can’t sleep.” He takes one last longing look at the sketch and then folds it up again, tucking it back into the pouch.
Kivran’s dark eyes soften. “Your boys are smart, Athan. They’re well. Better than we are, right now.”
“I know.” Athan lets his head fall back against the thin pillow. Sometimes the most terrifying thing about this is that it could be worse. At least he’s still in Narnia, though sometimes the nameless isle doesn’t feel like it. He could be in Calormen right now, and there’s little chance of coming back from that. He could be dead, and there’s no chance of coming back from that. He could be in a dungeon again, waiting to find out if the Tisroc wanted him dead or not.
He runs a much-callused hand over his face, his eyes drawn towards the scars on his wrists. How many manacles has he put on people over the course of his life? Untold numbers. He never thought that he would one day be wearing them himself.
Kivran’s head and shoulders disappear as he leans back into his bunk. Athan sits up, pressing a brief hand to the pouch and hearing the paper crinkle, and sets about doing his best to finger-comb his too-long hair, pulling some of it into narrow braids behind his ears and binding the whole thick mass into a tail at the back of his neck. He runs a hand unhappily over his unkempt beard, crushing a louse between his fingers as one of the creatures skitters over his hand. Gods, what he’d do for a razor or a knife or at least a pair of scissors. Though to be fair, shaving is hardly the first thing he’d do if someone put a knife in his hands, but it’s far up the list.
Some of the others are waking now. Athan can hear Orth muttering litanies to himself, running his prayer beads through his fingers, while his bunkmate Brofi throws an arm over his face and groans.
Right on cue, that damned bell starts tolling outside the barracks. “Aslan’s fucking teeth,” someone mumbles, rolling out of their bed with a thump, followed by a clatter of the three-foot chain they all carry, attached to a ring riveted onto their left ankles. Athan sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and lifting up his own chain to drop it onto the floor. Kivran climbs down from the bunk above him, chain bumping against the rickety ladder until it settles on the floor. He kicks it out of the way as he reaches the bottom, leaning against the ladder as he runs a hand through his bushy golden hair, standing out around his balding head like a lion’s mane.
“Porridge with honey and cinnamon,” Athan says, summoning up a tired grin. “Bannocks with blackberry jam and clotted cream, fried fish and crispy bacon just off the grill –”
Kivran shakes a finger at him. “I can still beat your arse into the ground, Ironstone, don’t forget that,” he says, cracking his knuckles.
“We’ve got the bloody message!” Stigandrr bellows at the locked door, just like he does every morning. “Stop ringing that fucking bell!”
Athan drops his face into his hands. “Gods,” he groans.
Kivran squeezes his shoulder. “Chin up, brother,” he says. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and the island will kill some more Callies today.”
“Fifty-seven of us and twelve of them,” Athan says, rubbing at his eyes. “Do you really want to run the odds on who’s more likely to die?”
Kivran shrugs. The island doesn’t make a distinction between Narnians and Calormenes; she’ll kill them both happily. “With luck,” he says, “them.”
They look at the door as the padlock on the outside is unlocked with a creaky, groaning rattle. The light that comes streaming in is thin and gray, bringing with it a breath of familiar salt air off the ocean. The Calormene overseer, Ismaiy, bangs his swagger stick against the door. “Up!”
“Gods,” Athan says again, another long day of endless, backbreaking labor stretching out before him. It’s still better than some of the alternatives, though. He just keeps telling himself that.
They shuffle out into the square, along with the dwarves kept in the other barracks, and form up into a double line. They don’t need to be told what to do; by now it’s old habit. The Calormenes go down the line, counting and checking the number of Narnian prisoners against the master list to see if anyone has run off or taken sick or died in the night. Athan looks straight ahead, his hands balled into fists at his sides in unpleasant anticipation of what’s to come later. He listens as best he can, wincing when the count comes up short. Ismaiy barges into one of the barracks, barking threats. Athan hears him exclaim in disgust a few seconds later and glances over his shoulder, along with the rest of the dwarves, to see the Calormene emerging from the barrack.
“You and you!” Ismaiy says, pointing at two of the dwarves in the back – Kraka and Orth. “Get them out of here.”
Athan cranes his neck to see, along with most of the others. Kraka and Orth disappear into the dark depths of the barrack and emerge a few minutes later, carrying a limp body between them. They lay it down on the ground, then return, making the journey twice more, until three bodies, looking impossibly small in the morning light, are laid out in front of the building. The head overseer, Zidan, stalks over as Kraka and Orth return to their places in line. He and Ismaiy confer in lowered voices, occasionally looking down at the bodies.
There are rising murmurs from among the dwarves, all of them trying to see what’s happened. Athan is tall for a dwarf; he peers over the heads of his companions, trying to discern who it is that Kraka and Orth had brought out and whether or not they’re breathing. He knows every one of his dwarves, and remembers every dwarf that has been lost since he joined them on the nameless isle. There are more than he’d like in the latter category; most of them aren’t even there because of the Calormenes, just this damned island.
One of the overseers cracks his whip. “Eyes forward, lazy stumps!” he snarls, the insult easy on his lips.
They obey, a few of them sneaking last glances over their shoulders, including Athan. He can’t see any sign that they’re breathing, nor can he tell from this distance who they are. Not from his barrack, at least.
“You lot,” he hears Zidan order eventually, “take them away and bury them with the others.”
Athan closes his eyes, listening to the sound of the designated dwarves shuffling away. King of Summer have mercy, who had it been this time? And how?
Eventually, they’re dismissed to eat. Athan falls into the single-file queue with Kivran in front of him and Orth just behind, muttering, “Who was it?” to the younger dwarf.
“Goss, Markle, and Thorder,” Orth whispers back. Kivran mutters something to the Shadowmaster that’s half-curse and half-prayer, and Athan clenches his fists so tightly that his ragged nails dig into his callused palms. Besides Kivran, Goss and Markle had been the last two dwarves remaining from his company, the band of rebels that had either followed him out of Glasswater or joined him afterwards to do what they could against the Calormenes. Thorder had come from the mining settlements in the Southern Marches, but Athan had liked him well enough.
“How?”
“I couldn’t really tell,” Orth says as they shuffle forward in the queue. “They were all swollen up, like maybe they’d been stung or something.”
“By what?” Athan says, but on this island that’s a fruitless question. Orth just shakes his head, his shoulders drooping.
“Not your fault, lad,” Kivran rumbles. “It’s this bloody island, it is.”
That’s the general tone of the conversation amongst the remainder of the dwarves as they make it to the front, where a pair of ragged fauns are ladling up bowls of bland rice-and-lentil mush flavored with a little onion that manages to be simultaneously half-raw and half-burnt, with a few shreds of overcooked fish falling apart on top. They eat quickly, the hot mush burning the roof of Athan’s mouth, murmuring to each other about these three most recent deaths. The island, some of them say, or the Calormenes. The Calormenes will be the death of them all one of these days, Athan thinks glumly, scraping his spoon around his now-empty bowl to scoop up the last few shreds of onion.
The dwarves that have been dispatched to the island’s too-large graveyard don’t return before they’re ordered back into line. Athan eyes the direction that they had gone regretfully, knowing from past experience that they won’t be able to eat before being sent to the temple site. He drags his gaze forward again as the Calormenes start down the line.
This time he holds his hands out after the initial pass, his eyes averted as an overseer named Noushin snaps manacles around his wrists. There is a foot and a half of heavy chain between them – not enough to keep him from working, oh no, just enough to hobble him and make trouble. Kivran gets the same treatment, and a handful of the other dwarves; they’re all what the Calormenes class as “extremely dangerous” when left free. It might be flattering if it wasn’t such a bloody pain in the arse. He knows that it would be twice as bad in Calormen; they’re treated relatively well here compared to some of the horror stories that he’s heard. Beds to sleep in, a roof over their heads, three meals a day – shackles and hard labor or not, it could be worse. That doesn’t make the situation any better, though.
As he’s standing there, trying not to think about how much his wrists are going to ache this evening from the sheer weight of the metal he’s carrying around, Athan feels it. It’s early in the day yet, barely enough to garner notice, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real – a slight shudder of the ground beneath his feet, not even strong enough to make him stumble. From here he can see the water in the trough outside one of the barracks shiver, ripples vibrating outwards from the center to the wooden walls of the basin. A few leaves drift to the ground from the one tree within the walled confines of the camp.
The Callies don’t notice it, of course, or if they do, they don’t mention it. They never do. Athan doesn’t know whether it’s because they honestly don’t realize what’s happening or because they refuse to acknowledge it. It could be either. It could be both.
The Narnians notice. Athan sees the faun following Noushin and carrying the pile of manacles look nervously up at the sky, his fingers moving in the four-point sign. It’s too much for him, and he drops the manacles with a terrific clatter, chains clanking and sliding across each other as they spill out of his arms. He falls to his knees, trying to scoop them back up, as Noushin turns on him.
“Idiot!” he snarls in Calormene, backhanding the faun across the face.
Athan twitches forward automatically, his fingers opening and closing in useless fists. He stops himself before he does anything stupid, conscious of Kivran’s warning glare from the other end of the line. The shackle on his ankle is good for one thing, at least; it keeps him from doing anything rash.
The faun – he’s been here for weeks now, but Athan still has no idea what his name is – babbles apologies, gathering the chains up. He staggers to his feet, tottering a little from the weight of the chains, and trails after Noushin. If they were in Calormen, Athan knows, they’d be in shackles all the time, but even if they’re prisoners, this isn’t Calormen yet. It’s still Narnia.
The weight of his chains is heavy on his wrists. He knows exactly how far apart he can move his hands, will probably know until the day he dies. When he had been in the dungeons beneath Caspian’s castle, waiting to find out whether he’d live or die, they’d kept him in shackles for more than a month. That had been worse than this – the waiting.
He squeezes his hands into fists. Gods, he wants to see his nephews again. Wants to hear Lev tell terrible jokes and Merry laugh at them, wants to see Merry studying for his entrance exams and Lev with his fiddle case under his arm on his way to lessons, wants to embrace them and never let them go. It can’t end like this. This can’t be the end of his life. There has to be something else. Oaths are all well and good, but to a dwarf, family is everything, and Athan has been separated from his for far too long now. If he gets out of this alive, he’ll find his nephews.
Twelve other Narnians besides Athan and Kivran get the same treatment. Two are murderers. One is a pirate, part of the Black Fleet, though gods alone know how he ended up here. Wavewalker usually comes for his people before that can happen. The others had all come from various rebel groups, like Athan and Kivran had, in contrast to the majority of the prisoners, who are divided more or less evenly between being common criminals and just unlucky. The only ones who deserve this, as far as Athan is concerned, are the murderers and the pirate.
Noushin and the overseers that have been helping him finish up their work. They stand back to frown at the Narnians, their gazes flickering impassibly across the double line of dwarves For all Athan knows, they’re being counted again, in case one of them has thought to wander off while the chains were being put on. Not that he would get far; the camp is fenced in (though admittedly, it isn’t a very strong fence, and Athan knows of at least three places that a dwarf could get through) and more importantly, there are still guards watching them.
They are marched out through the gates of the camp and up to the temple site, the old throne room. The bases of the thrones are still there; the rumor is that the Tisroc and Prince Bahadur want to keep them as is, along with what remains of the ancient walls, as a reminder that Calormen had prevailed where Narnia could not. Athan is just glad that they’re not being forced to rip the old walls down here, the way they are elsewhere on the island, where they’re pillaging the ruins for building material. The bulk of the cella, along with the great statue of Tash that they’ve been promised for months now, has to be imported from Calormen; Bahadur wants a temple that will rival the other great temples of the empire, and no temple of Tash can be made purely out of native stone. The rest of it is being hewn out of quarries elsewhere in Narnia and brought to the island so that Bahadur can have his temple, so that he can defile Narnia’s most sacred space even more than he already has.
Athan is thinking about all this as they pass between the remains of two shattered columns. A third must have once stood between them, because he can still see the base of it, a white circle flat against the much-trodden earth around it. The moment the first dwarf steps inside the old throne room, the earth shudders again, hard enough that some of them stumble. Gravel goes skittering across the cracked marble floor; a bucket left overnight on the scaffolding tips over and falls to the ground with a loud clang, bouncing when it hits. Athan grabs at Kivran’s shoulder to steady himself when the rumbling keeps on going. His gaze is on the scaffolding, which is moving as if in a high wind. If it collapses, they’ll have to rebuild the damned thing again.
The rumbling goes on for what feels like a long time. Athan crouches with the others, glad that he’s a dwarf and better suited for surviving such earthshakes than most humans. It’s a hard thing for a dwarf to lose his balance, given their build – stocky and sturdy and low to the ground. The Calormenes are worse off, human as they are; Athan hears a shout of warning and then a scream of pain. He twists around to see Ismaiy on the ground, clutching his leg and yelling. Athan can smell the blood, can see where the bone has broken through the skin and ripped through cloth. Zidan scrambles over to him, clutching at the ground like it’s his mother’s tit as the earth shakes.
Athan looks away. His eyes are drawn to the bases of the four thrones, to the half-built wall, red Calormene stone piled painstakingly upon the white marble of the nameless isle. He sees the scaffolding shudder, hears it crack, and winces in anticipation in the seconds before it all comes crashing down, the wood breaking on the much-trodden marble floor of the throne room, sending splinters flying. Spider webs of cracks appear in the Calormene bricks, spreading out to encompass the entire thing. Athan grits his teeth, his heart pounding in his chest, and hears Kivran hiss out a curse between his teeth as the new walls come crashing down, showering them all in pale red-and-gold grit. None of it seems to stick to the white marble of the old walls. They never even shudder.
“Gods,” someone mutters – Brofi, Athan thinks. Ismaiy is still screaming, even around the stick Zidan has jammed between his teeth, and Athan wishes that he would stop. He’s hardly the first Calormene to be injured, even killed, by the island; the last time the docks had collapsed they’d taken out two soldiers with them. An overseer had hanged himself the first week that Athan had been here; another had drunk himself into a stupor and stumbled into a stream, where he’d been found drowned the next morning. An earthshake had sent the army officer who had predated the current tarkaan over a cliff and to a broken neck.
If it was just Calormenes the island killed, Athan wouldn’t give a damn. He would welcome every bloody disaster the nameless isle throws at them. Except it isn’t just Calormenes, as what had happened this morning shows. Dwarves die even more often than the Calormenes do; there are more of them to kill, after all, and the odds are against them. Exploding containers of lye, falling stones, poisonous snakes, earthshakes, and sudden floods – the nameless isle doesn’t distinguish between Narnians and Calormenes, as long as there’s someone to kill.
Kivran curses again as the earthquake continues without any sign of stopping. Athan can hear prayer – Orth, of course; he’d been in seminary before all this had started. Some of the others, too. He can also hear something else, a soft whisper across the back of his mind, along the line of his bones.
They are coming.
Athan digs his fingers into the rich dark soil of the nameless isle, bracing himself against the shaking ground, his forehead pressed against the restless earth. The voice is thick with time and age, ancient as the island itself. The words vibrate through him, a deep murmur like thunder on the ocean, like hoofbeats on an empty road. He can barely stand it.
They are coming.
“Do you hear that?” he manages to gasp. It feels like his body isn’t meant to contain this, whatever it is, like he’s being pounded back into the earth some claim the dwarves came from.
Kivran’s fingers dig into his shoulder. “I hear it,” he says. “It’s her. The nameless isle.”
Nameless, they have called it for a thousand years. Nameless, because to name it is still too painful, too real. After Caspian the Seafarer had built his city, naming it had seemed too confusing, and by then the lack-of-name had stuck. But the island does, in its own way, have a name, and Athan names it.
“Cair Paravel,” he says, mouth nearly touching the dark earth of the island, what had once been the seed of all Narnia.
The rumbling shivers, shudders, stammers to nothingness. Athan feels the pressure in his bones ease off, that pounding sense of presence drift away like mist on the wind. He can remember the weight of it, though, the curl of unspoken words around the back of his mind. They are coming.
“Who’s coming?” Brofi whispers into the deafening silence that follows the shake.
Athan passes a hand over his face, scrubbing the earth from his lips. He stands with painstaking care, bracing himself for aftershocks to follow after, but none come in the next few minutes. He can hear Ismaiy sobbing with pain, his voice high and terrible as Zidan and the other Calormenes try and soothe him. Zidan looks up, scowling at the dwarves, and says, “You and you! Make a stretcher. Shaler, go back to the camp, send a bird to the Cair. Ismaiy will have to go back to the fort or the mainland, to a doctor.”
At the sound of his name, Ismaiy groans. Athan feels a small smile play over his lips, a moment’s brutal satisfaction at seeing an enemy laid low, even if it hadn’t been at his hand. Zidan sees the expression; his scowl deepens. “The rest of you clean this up,” he snaps. “I want this area cleared in an hour or you’ll feel my whip at your backs!”
“Bastard,” Joar says, which all of them are thinking. He doesn’t say it loudly enough for the Callies to hear.
One of the other overseers, Mudasser, uncoils his whip and cracks it warningly, the tip flicking at the dirt just behind the feet of the hindmost dwarves. They know its bite far too well – all of them bear its scars – and even Athan scurries to do Zidan’s bidding, padding with callus-toughened bare feet over aged and cracked marble strewn with shattered stone, dragging their chains behind them. They clean up the broken pieces of the scaffold, putting the worst aside to use as firewood, keeping what might be salvaged. The walls had been head-height to a minotaur; there is a lot of fallen stone to clear, some of it in large chunks. A surprising amount are full-size bricks, only a little banged about by the fall; those they can reuse when they rebuild. These are big enough that it takes two dwarves to carry each one. Before long sweat is running down Athan’s face and back, his thick ponytail sticking to his neck, loose strands of hair in his eyes and mouth. The shackles on his wrists and ankle seem like an insurmountable weight as he and Brofi haul a block the approximate size of a large dog over to the stack they have made of salvageable stone. All the time the Caloremene overseers prowl around them, shouting curses half in Narnian and half in Calormene, cracking their whips when they think the work is going to slowly. Once Athan stops for a heartbeat to wipe the sweat from his brow with his tattered sleeve, the manacles threatening to drag his arm back down, and feels a sharp sting on his cheek, followed by the liquid heat of fresh blood. He turns to see Mudasser glaring at him, yelling something obscene and insulting in Calormene that Athan can’t bring his tired mind to translate. He wipes the blood away on his dirty sleeve and goes back to work.
That doesn’t really help, though. Athan feels the blood running down his face for what feels like the next few hours, gathering in his beard, sliding down his collarbone to stain his already-stained shirt even further. His sweat runs into the open wound, making it sting and itch, and he doesn’t dare the bite of the whip again to take a few minutes to do something about it. Not that there is much he could do. Eventually it stops bleeding, congealed and stiff when he works his jaw, spitting aside some of the grit that has gathered on his teeth and lips.
They stop when the sun is high in the sky. They’ve cleared most of the rubble away, just gravel and grit remaining now. At some point the dwarves that had been dispatched to the graveyard had joined them, though Athan can’t remember seeing them arrive. He looks around them for a familiar face, wondering if it’s worth the effort to see if any of them know more about what had killed their fellows this morning. It’s more likely than not that none of them had been paying attention; they bury more of their own than any of them would like.
Athan rubs a hand over his beard while they wait for the fauns to bring their noon meal to them, wincing at the crackle of dried blood that follows. He touches his fingers gingerly to the cut, tracing its length. Hardly the first scar he’ll have gotten from the Callies, or the worst. Likely not the last, either. He’s lucky that it isn’t worse; he’s seen what a whip can do to flesh up close.
Kivran sidles up beside him, his balding head caked with reddish dust, the same dust dug in beneath his bitten fingernails. “You all right?”
Athan wipes the flakes of dried blood off onto his trousers. “It’s just a scratch,” he says, his voice hoarse. They had allowed Orth to bring around a bucket of lukewarm water for them to drink from, but that had been a few hours ago now, and Athan’s throat is dry and caked with dust. He thinks longingly of frothing ale newly drawn from the tap at the Broken Shield, thinks of iced tea sweet with honey and fragrant with rose water, thinks of snowmelt fresh from a mountain stream.
Kivran squeezes his arm encouragingly, then wipes the sweat from his tattooed brow. They squat in the much-trampled dirt by a pile of marble blocks salvaged from elsewhere in the island and eat more of the lentil-and-rice mush from breakfast, now even more burnt than it had been then. There’s water, at least, carried up from one of the island’s many streams by Orth and Frosi, the two youngest dwarves in the chain-gang. Athan’s glad to see that they haven’t been drowned in the process, given the mood that the island seems to be in today.
From here they have a decent enough view of the dock on the beach below. Athan watches it the way he always does, trying to discern if there’s any rhyme or reason to when new boats arrive. He punches Kivran’s shoulder as a sleek, small felucca from the mainland drops anchor, disgorging several Calormene soldiers he doesn’t recognize, Bennat Haer, the temple’s chief architect, and beiha Haer’s assistant, a pretty faun woman called Shand. Zidan goes down to meet them, along with Iravan Tarkaan, the army officer in command of the island’s small complement of soldiers. Athan and Kivran watch as Haer is presumably told about the damage to the temple, since the discussion disintegrates into Haer waving his arms in frantic panic and shouting at Zidan and Iravan while his assistant tries to calm him down.
“That’s one unhappy Callie,” Brofi observes, his spoon barely pausing as he shovels lentil mush into his mouth.
“Well, wouldn’t you be?” says Joar. He owns – had owned – a pub, but before that he’d been a builder for most of his life. Kraka, who had been a construction manager before he’d managed to upset the Calormenes, mumbles agreement as he drinks, water spilling into his beard.
Eventually Haer abandons Zidan and Iravan to stomp up the path from the docks, his assistant following gamely after him. They have to dodge the soldiers carrying the injured Ismaiy down from the Callies’ headquarters, doing a sort of elaborate dance of avoidance on the narrow path up the steep hill. Brofi snorts softly, watching.
Eventually Ismaiy is loaded onto the felucca. One of the newly-arrived Calormene soldiers hands a message-case to Zidan, which he opens and scans. Athan feels a chill of foreboding run down his spine when he sees the chief overseer smile, then turn and go back up the path.
He hastily eats the remainder of his mush, scraping his splintery wooden spoon around the bowl to get every last grain. Well, it’s filling, at least; Athan can barely remember the taste of good food, the kind his housekeeper Shaldis used to make. He splashes some water onto the cuff of his battered shirt, scrubbing at the blood caked on his face and in his beard.
Some of the other dwarves had suffered worse treatment. Frosi is sporting a fresh black eye, while Stigandrr – who is, admittedly, half-mad already – has dried blood and fresh whip-marks on his bare legs, his face bloodied. Those that haven’t been beaten or whipped so far this morning already look exhausted, the reddish grime from the site caking hands and faces, smeared with tracks of sweat or blood. There’s a sameness to them distinct from their species, a weariness of both soul and body that shines out of tired dwarven eyes. Some of them have been in Calormene hands for years already, freedom nothing but a dim memory.
Athan scrubs at the cut on his face, wincing as he reopens it. He looks down at the fresh blood on his fingers, bright against the dirt rubbed so deep into his skin he can’t imagine it ever coming out. Blood and bone, he thinks, and, Merry and Lev. His family is an old one and a proud one, but besides him and his nephews, there is no one left except distant third- and fourth- cousins he hasn’t spoken to in years. He and the boys are the last of the Ironstones of Glasswater.
He presses his hand to the pouch beneath his shirt, hearing the old paper crackle. Let them be all right. Let them be safe.
“Ironstone!”
Athan looks up. Zidan beckons to him imperiously with his swagger stick, holding the message he had gotten from the mainland in the other hand. Athan gets slowly to his feet, every muscle screaming in protest, and makes his way over to the overseer, chain dragging in the dirt behind him. He can barely lift the foot it’s attached to.
Zidan looks at him as if Athan is something he’d prefer to wipe off the bottom of his shoe, never mind that Athan is a knight of Narnia and sheriff of the largest shire in the country. Or had been, at least. Better blood than a common thug any day, which is all that Zidan really is. Even in Calormen, there is no honor or nobility in being a slave-overseer. Athan can trace his own bloodline back to the clans of the Golden Age; Zidan probably doesn’t even know his own father.
Athan stands back and looks up at him; Zidan steps closer, forcing Athan to tilt his head even further back. At this rate he’ll have a crick in his neck to go with the one in his back.
Zidan stares at him for a moment, his expression challenging. When Athan doesn’t speak, he looks disappointed and taps a finger against the paper. “The shipping season begins in a few days,” he says. “Therefore, tomorrow you will be transferred to Cair Paravel to await transport to Tashbaan for trial.”
Athan’s breath catches in his throat. Tashbaan is a death sentence. “Trial for what?” he makes himself say.
“Treasonable action against troops of the Tisroc (may he live forever),” says Zidan, glancing down at the paper. “Among other charges.” He grins nastily. “I would tell you to pack your things, but –”
“I see,” Athan snaps. “Anyone else or am I just lucky?”
“There is no one else from this island,” says Zidan. “Perhaps some of our disturbances will cease with your departure.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Athan says. He spits to the side, already anticipating the blow Zidan strikes with his swagger stick, turning his face to soften it. Unfortunately he turns the wrong way and the metal capped end of the stick comes down on his already cut cheek, making him hiss pain between his teeth. He can feel the wound open again, blood hot against his chin.
“Is that all?” he grits out.
“You can return to work now,” Zidan says, a smile dancing around his lips.
Athan waits until he’s turned his back this time to spit into the dirt behind his feet, then trudges back to the others, all of whom are watching him. It’s Kivran who asks the hard question.
“What is it?”
“I’m being shipped to Tashbaan for trial,” Athan says shortly, sitting back down and trying to ignore the way his hands seem to be shaking slightly.
There’s a round of curses from the listening dwarves. Orth mutters a short prayer, fingers moving in the four-point sign. Even Kivran looks stunned.
“When?” Brofi asks, throat working beneath his beard as he swallows nervously. “And – this one is important – are they letting you bring legal representation?”
That startles a laugh out of some of them, though Athan can’t make himself do more than force a smile. Brofi had been a family lawyer before all this had started – in fact, he had been the one to make sure that Athan was able to keep his nephews when the commune had sued for custody. He had been very good.
Athan waits for the nervous laughter to cease before he replies. “Zidan said I’m being transferred back to Cair Paravel tomorrow.” His hands are still trembling. He looks down at them, willing them to still. Suddenly it’s all too much, too fast. He had thought he had more time.
Kivran’s chains clank as he grips Athan’s forearm. “Then we get you off the island tonight,” he says.
Athan looks up at him in surprise, his gaze flickering automatically around to make sure none of the Callies or the dwarves who aren’t in on the plan are listening. “We aren’t ready.”
“We’ll make do,” Kivran says. “Unless you want to go to Tashbaan.”
“No,” Athan says. He shuts his eyes, lets himself breathe for a moment, tries to force the edges of panic away. Merry and Lev, he thinks. He has to do this for his boys. He presses his shaking fingers to the pouch beneath his shirt, feels the paper crinkle inside.
“All right,” he says, opening his eyes. He glances around again, taking in the group of dwarves around him. No one he doesn’t trust with his life. No Callies. No traitors. “We do it tonight. All of us. No one gets left behind.”
“No one gets left behind,” Kivran agrees. His hand is still on Athan’s forearm, his grip as strong as steel, the tattoos on his knuckles barely visible beneath the grime rubbed into his skin. He meets Athan’s eyes and nods once, his gaze steady.
“Get back to work, you lazy maggots!” one of the overseers – Mujtaba – bellows, cracking his whip.
They get to their feet as quickly as they can, chains rattling and dragging dully across the dirt and marble as they make their way back to the construction site. Delay will win them the sting of the whip. Athan presses his fingers gingerly to the open cut on his face, wincing, then wipes the blood off on the hem of his already filthy shirt.
With the site cleared of the rubble from this morning’s earthshake, they can start building the foundations of the temple again. The unskilled dwarves are set to the dangerous task of making lime mortar, while Athan, Brofi, and Kivran join a dozen others in carrying the huge marble rounds that have been liberated from elsewhere on the island over to the temple site, placing them as directed by a junior builder. Athan is vaguely aware of Bennat Haer scuttling around, emitting occasional cries of distress; he doesn’t have the energy to spare to take notice of the chief architect. Once Haer stops them with a yell of “no, no, no!” while Athan and Brofi are involved in wrestling one massive marble round on top of another, the mortar already laid and drying rapidly.
“It’s in the wrong place!” says Haer. “Take it down, take it down now! It has to go half a foot that way.” He points.
“Are you serious?” Brofi says, then ducks a blow from an overseer’s swagger stick as Noushin comes over to see what all the fuss is about.
“Yes, it has to be there or the ceiling will collapse!” Haer is actually wringing his hands. “Obviously,” he adds in a scathing voice, then turns on the junior builder who had told them where to put the column, his voice rising in rapid, fluent Calormene. His assistant just waits patiently at his side, rolling her eyes slightly.
“Move it,” Noushin says, stroking his swagger stick warningly.
Athan and Brofi move it. It takes them far too long, and in the meantime one of the rounds nearly falls on Brofi’s feet and Athan gets his wrist-chains briefly caught between both rounds, which necessitates Joar and Stigandrr coming over to help Brofi lift the top round long enough that Athan can free himself. By then the mortar has started to set, of course, and they have to get more. The scent of lime is so harsh in Athan’s nose that he can’t even smell his own blood anymore.
He’s vaguely aware when Haer takes off down the hill, shouting incoherently with his assistant hurrying after him, but doesn’t pay any attention to it. Athan can’t think past the exhaustion, past the burn in his arms and legs and back and the cut on his face which keeps reopening, blood running into his beard and clotting there. His arms are shaking, his hands slick with sweat so that when he and Brofi try and lift another round his fingers slide right off it. Brofi isn’t any better off.
As the day drags on, the sun sinks slowly into the west. Athan watches their shadows lengthen, tries not to think about the shadows he’s seeing that don’t seem to be attached to any of the dwarves or Calormenes – no centaurs or Talking Beasts here, and those shadows are unmistakable, even if some of the others that he suspects are satyrs or men could just be a trick of the light. He’s not foolish enough to stop working again, but he keeps looking over his shoulder towards the remains of the great hall, watching the shadow of a lioness or some other great cat come stalking up its length. The day, already too warm for this time of year, feels suddenly a little colder.
It isn’t the first time this has happened. Athan has seen these shimmers of dreams and history all over the island, and more than that – he has heard laughter echoing through nonexistent hallways, heard the creak of ropes and wood from a harbor that had been destroyed centuries before his birth, smelled the rich, savory scents of food he has never even dreamed of and the familiar tang of armor polish and steel.
He knows that this time he isn’t the only one seeing these shadows, because despite his exhaustion he’s aware of Brofi turning his head too quickly, Kivran looking up into thin air, Stigandrr stepping politely out of the way of the shadow of a centaur. Even the Callies seem to be noticing it for once; they’ve gone uncharacteristically quiet, their hands tight on their whip handles and swagger sticks. Athan can’t imagine what they see, but he suspects that they probably aren’t certain either.
He takes advantage of their momentary laxity to stand still for a moment, wiping the sweat from his brow. Just a moment, no longer, and then Athan turns back to his work, wishing for the sweet clarity of the anvil. Knight or not, he’s still a dwarf, trained at the forge as soon as he could walk. He is an Ironstone of Glasswater; he wants a hammer in his hand and metal to work. Not this.
Brofi looks at him wearily over their next round of marble, dark hair falling lankly around his face. He’s a far cry from the dapper lawyer he had been in Glasswater, the bane of every scorned husband and father in the shire. Athan has never asked how he had ended up in a slave-chain on the nameless isle; he hadn’t been with them when Athan had been forced to flee the city for the deep woods of the southern marches with Kivran and a few other friends. It’s Brofi’s story to tell, if he ever wants to.
He and Brofi settle the marble round they’re carrying onto its base, pushing and shoving it into place and trying to keep their fingers out of the mortar. Athan knows from experience that it burns to the touch; he’s seen too many dwarves, and a few especially unlucky Calormene overseers, killed or maimed while making the mortar. He wipes sweat-slick hands across his trousers as they turn back towards the pile, trying to ignore the shadow of a faun with a flowing scarf trotting past them. The marble beneath its feet seems to shimmer with each step, for a brief instant clean and white and unmarked before reverting back to its original griminess. Athan raises his chained hands, weary, and passes them across his eyes, shoving a few loose strands of hair out of his face.
This time, there’s a warning before the next earthshake comes.
Athan feels it vibrate up through the soles of his bare feet, along the line of his bones and the curve of his spine, curling around the back of his skull. Thieves, the island snarls, like a lioness’s warning growl before she roars. The earth shudders beneath him, sending Athan stumbling sideways against the base of the newly placed column. Crack us open and break us to pieces and rob us, rot and die here with your plunder. Filthy, dirty, nasty thieves!
Athan yells, clasping both hands to his ears. He isn’t the only one; he sees Brofi doing the same and one of the Callie overseers dropping to his knees, mouth open in a cry that Athan can’t hear through the sound of the earth screaming in his head. He can’t begin to comprehend all of it; his mind shatters on the idea, like weak iron caught between hammer and anvil. But he hears enough.
Crack stone and break rock, melt gold and burn wood, come to rob us even of our bones. Thieves, filthy, dirty, stinking thieves, stay forever!
Athan screams again, dropping to his knees, as if getting any closer to the earth will help him. The voice pounds at the inside of his skull, trying to batter its way into the open air; Athan feels like he’s holding his head together. Even through the thick haze before his eyes he sees drops of blood fall from his nose, leaking out between his fingers from his ears, to stain the grimy marble floor red.
The next shake is worse than the one that came before. There hasn’t been enough of the new construction placed to fall, but Athan feels like the world is coming apart around him, like the earth might open up and swallow him whole. The island screams inside his head, words that he isn’t capable of understanding, and more blood drips to the floor. Athan thinks his head might explode.
Break us and take us, make us nothing more than dead stone, will they? he hears, the words suddenly intelligible again. We are of the Deep Magic. We endure!
At this Athan can’t do anything except scream, and scream, and scream, until the world goes red and then black around him.
He comes back to himself slowly, blinking rapidly as he looks up at a tall white vault of a ceiling. The rising sun shines through stained glass at the eastern end of the throne room, illuminating the four perfect thrones that stand empty before him. Athan pushes himself up on an elbow, taking in the red and gold banners that hang between the columns. The throne room is whole and true and perfect; the marble beneath him is whole and pure, and the columns lining the hall and circling the dais seem to reach up to the heavens. Everything he has ever read, every story he’s ever been told, every painting he’s ever seen, has shown the great hall of Cair Paravel as white marble, but there is color here that he never expected – gold as a lion’s coat, and pink as a maiden’s blush, and blue like a naiad’s laughing eyes. It is like something out of a faerie story – impossibly beautiful.
Athan stares around in wonder, his mouth falling open. Some of his exhaustion seems to fade away, the years falling off him as he gets to his feet – without difficulty, without his chains weighting him down. He raises his hands and gazes at his unmarked wrists in wonder, looks down to find himself clad in unfamiliar finery, silks and leathers like nothing he’s ever worn even in his best days. He touches a hand to his beard, finds it neatly clipped and braided in unknown patterns, lets his hand fall to the sword at his waist. It’s archaic, the kind of blade he’s seen in museums or in the university, but he can tell just from touching the hilt that it’s as good as any sword he has ever carried, if not better.
He grips the hilt, reassured by the feel of it beneath his palm, and feels the earth shudder beneath his booted feet. He looks down, sees a single drop of blood splash down onto the polished marble floor, and then another and another. Athan raises a hand to his nose, looks at his red-stained fingers.
“No,” he says out loud, and at the sound of his voice the hall around him flickers like a dying flame. Athan blinks rapidly, willing it to remain, but it’s flashing in and out of existence now, intercut with the too-familiar ruins of the temple site. “Oh no.”
He shuts his eyes, trying to hold onto the image, but the quiet peace of the throne room is gone, replaced by the harsh breathing and sobbing of the chain-gang and the overseers. Athan opens his eyes to find himself on his feet, back in his ragged clothes and chains, with blood all down his front. His head aches like he’s laid it down on an anvil and had it struck with a hammer a few times.
“Kings and Queens of Summer shield us from Eternal Winter,” he whispers, the words rasping in his dry throat.
Brofi, slumped against the half-built column, looks up at the sound of his voice. There’s blood drying in his moustaches. “I saw –” he begins, but can’t seem to voice the words.
Athan nods, feeling old and creaky. His hands feel too stiff to grasp a sword hilt, should one ever come to him again. “I did too,” he says.
The shadows lie quiet across the temple site now, dwarves and Calormenes alike picking themselves up off the ground. All of them appear equally ill-used, the Calormenes perhaps a little less so – no blood on them that Athan can spot. Bennat Haer, looking shaken, offers his assistant a hand up. The faun woman, sitting on the ground in a puddle of dull purple skirts, takes it; even from here Athan can see the fear on her face, the fresh blood spattered on her blouse. She had heard it too.
He spies Joar and Orth leaning worriedly over a dwarf that he can’t make out and feels his heart jump, worry giving him a little energy before one of the overseers goes stalking over to see what the trouble is. An injury, Athan guesses, and winces when several other dwarves are called over to lift the fallen round away. It’s Kraka, Athan realizes, straightening up to get a better view, and his friend’s leg is mangled and crushed from being caught beneath the heavy marble. Joar and Orth help him away; he appears to be in too much shock even to scream. It’s a miracle that he was the only one that Athan can see who has been badly injured in all this, though he spots fresh cuts and bruises on most of the other dwarves, whose faces are as bloodied as his.
Athan lets his head drop, looking down so that he doesn’t need to see the pain on the faces of his friends, and leans against the column besides Brofi. Impossibly, amongst all the madness he is grateful for the chance to rest his tired bones. It’s fading away, the memory of that bright, beautiful hall, and Athan tries to hold onto it before it leaves him entirely. He can remember the island’s scream all too clearly.
Zidan cracks his whip, though the sound of it is weaker than it should be. “Back to work!” he snarls, his accent very strong now. “It was just an earthshake; there is nothing to be concerned with.”
“Is he mad?” Brofi mutters, pushing himself away from the column with difficulty. He stumbles a little as he takes his first wavering step towards the pile of marble rounds.
Athan follows him slowly and reluctantly, trying to wipe the blood from his face, away from his ears, but he’s too tired and the chains on his wrists are too heavy for him to lift his hands that high. He and Brofi make their way to the pile, as the other dwarves slowly return to work under the crack of the Calormene whips.
All of it – the island, the earthshake, the great hall, everything – takes on a dreamlike quality as Athan and Brofi haul and place one marble round after another. This time the earthshake had left no physical mark on the temple site; Athan would think that he had imagined the sound of the island screaming her fury if it wasn’t for the blood still caked in his hair and beard. He feels as if he’s been here forever, as if this some fresh hell to replace the eternal winter that all Narnians fear more than death itself. The passing hours blur into each other as the sun sinks lower and lower in the west, the shadows growing longer but at least this time firmly attached to their casters.
Night will bring some respite, if the Callies don’t keep them working too long past eventide. Athan is too exhausted to think properly, but the idea that he might soon be free of this chases its way around his mind like a mouse in a jar. The island isn’t so far from the mainland, not really, and there are ways to get through the fence around the camp. If the island has spent her fury for the day, if she sits quiet until the morn, then all should be well. By this time tomorrow they might be free men again. And Athan can find his boys.
“Merry and Lev,” he mumbles to himself.
Brofi looks up at him over the edge of the round they’re trying to line up on its base. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” Athan says as they finally get the round in place and start back towards the pile. Their shadows stretch out before them, the day passing into the Shadowmaster’s realm, and the thought is more comforting than Athan expects. The King of Evening looks ever well on deeds done in the dark hours of the night.
“Stop lazing about!” Mujtaba shouts, apparently deciding they aren’t moving quickly enough for his taste. His whip kicks up a spray of gravel near their bare feet, and Brofi shoots him a look of utter loathing. Athan doesn’t think he could move any faster if his life depended on it.
He glares back at Mujtaba, who’s coiling his whip back up, preparing to crack it again. Once upon a time he might have shouted back at the man, offered some kind of insult, but now he’s just too tired to bother and risk a flogging. He and Brofi shuffle on towards the pile, dragging their ankle-chains behind them.
Beiha Haer’s voice rises behind them, asking his assistant some question that she answers too softly for Athan to make out. He and Brofi poke around at the pile, trying to decide which round will be the least trouble to get out. Athan’s gaze settles on one with a thin bluish streak running through its center. He has a flash of memory, of tall columns limned with gold rising towards the white vault of an arched ceiling, and then it’s gone again, leaving him peering down at the pile of marble rounds.
“This one,” he says to Brofi, prodding it with his unchained foot. His friend nods.
They wrestle the round out of a pile that doesn’t seem to have thinned at all since noon. “On three?” Athan rasps once they’ve freed it from the herd. Brofi nods, and they squat down, fitting their fingers into the available crevices so they can lift it. “One – two –”
Before he can finish, a woman’s scream rises behind him. Athan turns, his hands slipping away from the marble round, heedless of the weight of the chains on his wrists, and all he can see is the bright scarlet of blood on white marble.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: chain-gangs, prisoner abuse
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: Dust in the Air uses Warsverse backstory as a general rule of thumb. All chapters of Dust are posted on both LJ and DW. Dust in the Air does not use material from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). My main reference here is Giles Milton's book White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves. Thanks and/or apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson. So much thanks to my beta
snacky, who is a fantastic human being and an amazing beta.He wakes a little before true dawn, with thin light streaming into the long, low room through the slats of the walls. The others are still asleep, the sound of their snoring echoing through the room around him. Uninterrupted sleep is a rare thing these days; they had worked past dark last night, driven on by the overseers’ whips and the usual exhortations to Tash – though it hasn’t been the overseers waking them at odd hours these past few weeks. The island, always an uneasy place to be, has become restless of late. There is no such thing as a dreamless sleep any longer, or much sleep at all, despite the bone-deep exhaustion that characterizes his life now. Too often the island wakes them – the sound of something, or someone, prowling around the outside of the barracks, heedless of the fence that keeps them confined. Other times there are earthshakes, or the sound of tree branches on a windless night, or water boiling up from what should be solid ground. If he never has to wake up half-drowned in three feet of water again, it will be too soon. Athan had been lucky; a dozen dwarves had drowned, caught between the water and the dreams that Athan can’t remember anymore, but which had tangled his mind like a spider web a fly.
He can’t remember the latest batch of restless dreams – he never does, nor does anyone else that he’s spoken to about them. All that remains are sense-impressions: the taste of old blood, the chill of falling snow, the sound of horns. Even with that haunting him, Athan is tired enough that if he lets himself shut his eyes he would be asleep again within seconds. He probably ought to roll over and go straight back to sleep, snatching another few precious minutes of rest before the Callies come to wake them. Instead he slides his hand inside his sweat-stiff shirt, into the battered leather pouch he wears around his neck.
In theory they aren’t supposed to have possessions, but in practice none of the Callies really care so long as what they keep on their persons isn’t a weapon of some sort. Anything really valuable had been taken when they had been arrested; anything else had been bullied off them by the guards a long time since. Mostly what they keep is personal, worthless to anyone but them. Joar keeps a ring braided from his wife’s hair, Brofi a tiny carved wooden griffin, Orth a set of carved bone prayer beads. Athan has a few extra ties for his hair, scraps of leather instead of the silver clasps he had worn before, and a much worn piece of paper. He slips this out of the pouch and unfolds it carefully, conscious of the beginnings of rips along the fold-lines.
On the paper is an ink-sketch of two young dwarves, still in their teens. They’re grinning, young and careless, their arms slung over each others’ shoulders. Athan can still remember the day that he’d paid one of the artists on the quay in Glasswater to sketch it, five – no, six – years ago now. It had been Lev’s birthday, only a few months before the Calormenes had come. A good day, bright and sunny, with the smell of salt spray from the ocean and grilled mussels from the vendors at the docks heavy in the air. Athan had bought them a cone of popped corn to share, slathered in olive oil and salt, and they’d gotten grease all over their fingers and faces eating it. He can remember the smiles on his nephews’ faces. It seems like a lifetime ago now.
He traces the shapes of his nephews’ faces with the tip of one finger. They’re safe, that’s what he has to hold onto. They’re safe in Archenland with Makepeace Treanor’s family, far safer than they would be in Narnia – if they had even survived, when there is a far greater chance that if he had let them stay with him in Glasswater like they had wanted Merry and Lev would both be dead. Someday Athan will make it off this gods-forsaken island, and then –
His mind stutters to a stop at the thought. It’s almost too much to think about, getting off the nameless isle, getting out of the manacles the Callies keep him in. And even then – even if he does make it off the island, make it back to the mainland, could he do it? Leave Narnia behind for the relative peace of Archenland? Forget the oaths that he had sworn as a knight of Narnia and as sheriff of Glasswater?
None of that matters anymore, part of him mutters treacherously. There is no Narnia anymore. All you have is your blood and bone. Better to be with them than fight for something that has long since ceased to exist.
Not that it’s anything except pipe-dreams. Athan rolls his eyes at the bunk above him. He knows how he could get away from the chain-gang, how he could get away from the Calormenes, knows every way on and off the island. It has been putting it all together that’s the problem – that and not leaving anybody behind. He knows how the Calormenes punish those who remain after an escape, even a failed one.
He traces the shape of one of Merry’s looping braids and thinks, Be safe. Be strong, be safe, wherever you are –
“Awake already?”
Athan looks up as Kivran leans down from the bunk above him, stifling a yawn in his massive fist. His voice is pitched low.
“Can’t sleep.” He takes one last longing look at the sketch and then folds it up again, tucking it back into the pouch.
Kivran’s dark eyes soften. “Your boys are smart, Athan. They’re well. Better than we are, right now.”
“I know.” Athan lets his head fall back against the thin pillow. Sometimes the most terrifying thing about this is that it could be worse. At least he’s still in Narnia, though sometimes the nameless isle doesn’t feel like it. He could be in Calormen right now, and there’s little chance of coming back from that. He could be dead, and there’s no chance of coming back from that. He could be in a dungeon again, waiting to find out if the Tisroc wanted him dead or not.
He runs a much-callused hand over his face, his eyes drawn towards the scars on his wrists. How many manacles has he put on people over the course of his life? Untold numbers. He never thought that he would one day be wearing them himself.
Kivran’s head and shoulders disappear as he leans back into his bunk. Athan sits up, pressing a brief hand to the pouch and hearing the paper crinkle, and sets about doing his best to finger-comb his too-long hair, pulling some of it into narrow braids behind his ears and binding the whole thick mass into a tail at the back of his neck. He runs a hand unhappily over his unkempt beard, crushing a louse between his fingers as one of the creatures skitters over his hand. Gods, what he’d do for a razor or a knife or at least a pair of scissors. Though to be fair, shaving is hardly the first thing he’d do if someone put a knife in his hands, but it’s far up the list.
Some of the others are waking now. Athan can hear Orth muttering litanies to himself, running his prayer beads through his fingers, while his bunkmate Brofi throws an arm over his face and groans.
Right on cue, that damned bell starts tolling outside the barracks. “Aslan’s fucking teeth,” someone mumbles, rolling out of their bed with a thump, followed by a clatter of the three-foot chain they all carry, attached to a ring riveted onto their left ankles. Athan sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and lifting up his own chain to drop it onto the floor. Kivran climbs down from the bunk above him, chain bumping against the rickety ladder until it settles on the floor. He kicks it out of the way as he reaches the bottom, leaning against the ladder as he runs a hand through his bushy golden hair, standing out around his balding head like a lion’s mane.
“Porridge with honey and cinnamon,” Athan says, summoning up a tired grin. “Bannocks with blackberry jam and clotted cream, fried fish and crispy bacon just off the grill –”
Kivran shakes a finger at him. “I can still beat your arse into the ground, Ironstone, don’t forget that,” he says, cracking his knuckles.
“We’ve got the bloody message!” Stigandrr bellows at the locked door, just like he does every morning. “Stop ringing that fucking bell!”
Athan drops his face into his hands. “Gods,” he groans.
Kivran squeezes his shoulder. “Chin up, brother,” he says. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and the island will kill some more Callies today.”
“Fifty-seven of us and twelve of them,” Athan says, rubbing at his eyes. “Do you really want to run the odds on who’s more likely to die?”
Kivran shrugs. The island doesn’t make a distinction between Narnians and Calormenes; she’ll kill them both happily. “With luck,” he says, “them.”
They look at the door as the padlock on the outside is unlocked with a creaky, groaning rattle. The light that comes streaming in is thin and gray, bringing with it a breath of familiar salt air off the ocean. The Calormene overseer, Ismaiy, bangs his swagger stick against the door. “Up!”
“Gods,” Athan says again, another long day of endless, backbreaking labor stretching out before him. It’s still better than some of the alternatives, though. He just keeps telling himself that.
They shuffle out into the square, along with the dwarves kept in the other barracks, and form up into a double line. They don’t need to be told what to do; by now it’s old habit. The Calormenes go down the line, counting and checking the number of Narnian prisoners against the master list to see if anyone has run off or taken sick or died in the night. Athan looks straight ahead, his hands balled into fists at his sides in unpleasant anticipation of what’s to come later. He listens as best he can, wincing when the count comes up short. Ismaiy barges into one of the barracks, barking threats. Athan hears him exclaim in disgust a few seconds later and glances over his shoulder, along with the rest of the dwarves, to see the Calormene emerging from the barrack.
“You and you!” Ismaiy says, pointing at two of the dwarves in the back – Kraka and Orth. “Get them out of here.”
Athan cranes his neck to see, along with most of the others. Kraka and Orth disappear into the dark depths of the barrack and emerge a few minutes later, carrying a limp body between them. They lay it down on the ground, then return, making the journey twice more, until three bodies, looking impossibly small in the morning light, are laid out in front of the building. The head overseer, Zidan, stalks over as Kraka and Orth return to their places in line. He and Ismaiy confer in lowered voices, occasionally looking down at the bodies.
There are rising murmurs from among the dwarves, all of them trying to see what’s happened. Athan is tall for a dwarf; he peers over the heads of his companions, trying to discern who it is that Kraka and Orth had brought out and whether or not they’re breathing. He knows every one of his dwarves, and remembers every dwarf that has been lost since he joined them on the nameless isle. There are more than he’d like in the latter category; most of them aren’t even there because of the Calormenes, just this damned island.
One of the overseers cracks his whip. “Eyes forward, lazy stumps!” he snarls, the insult easy on his lips.
They obey, a few of them sneaking last glances over their shoulders, including Athan. He can’t see any sign that they’re breathing, nor can he tell from this distance who they are. Not from his barrack, at least.
“You lot,” he hears Zidan order eventually, “take them away and bury them with the others.”
Athan closes his eyes, listening to the sound of the designated dwarves shuffling away. King of Summer have mercy, who had it been this time? And how?
Eventually, they’re dismissed to eat. Athan falls into the single-file queue with Kivran in front of him and Orth just behind, muttering, “Who was it?” to the younger dwarf.
“Goss, Markle, and Thorder,” Orth whispers back. Kivran mutters something to the Shadowmaster that’s half-curse and half-prayer, and Athan clenches his fists so tightly that his ragged nails dig into his callused palms. Besides Kivran, Goss and Markle had been the last two dwarves remaining from his company, the band of rebels that had either followed him out of Glasswater or joined him afterwards to do what they could against the Calormenes. Thorder had come from the mining settlements in the Southern Marches, but Athan had liked him well enough.
“How?”
“I couldn’t really tell,” Orth says as they shuffle forward in the queue. “They were all swollen up, like maybe they’d been stung or something.”
“By what?” Athan says, but on this island that’s a fruitless question. Orth just shakes his head, his shoulders drooping.
“Not your fault, lad,” Kivran rumbles. “It’s this bloody island, it is.”
That’s the general tone of the conversation amongst the remainder of the dwarves as they make it to the front, where a pair of ragged fauns are ladling up bowls of bland rice-and-lentil mush flavored with a little onion that manages to be simultaneously half-raw and half-burnt, with a few shreds of overcooked fish falling apart on top. They eat quickly, the hot mush burning the roof of Athan’s mouth, murmuring to each other about these three most recent deaths. The island, some of them say, or the Calormenes. The Calormenes will be the death of them all one of these days, Athan thinks glumly, scraping his spoon around his now-empty bowl to scoop up the last few shreds of onion.
The dwarves that have been dispatched to the island’s too-large graveyard don’t return before they’re ordered back into line. Athan eyes the direction that they had gone regretfully, knowing from past experience that they won’t be able to eat before being sent to the temple site. He drags his gaze forward again as the Calormenes start down the line.
This time he holds his hands out after the initial pass, his eyes averted as an overseer named Noushin snaps manacles around his wrists. There is a foot and a half of heavy chain between them – not enough to keep him from working, oh no, just enough to hobble him and make trouble. Kivran gets the same treatment, and a handful of the other dwarves; they’re all what the Calormenes class as “extremely dangerous” when left free. It might be flattering if it wasn’t such a bloody pain in the arse. He knows that it would be twice as bad in Calormen; they’re treated relatively well here compared to some of the horror stories that he’s heard. Beds to sleep in, a roof over their heads, three meals a day – shackles and hard labor or not, it could be worse. That doesn’t make the situation any better, though.
As he’s standing there, trying not to think about how much his wrists are going to ache this evening from the sheer weight of the metal he’s carrying around, Athan feels it. It’s early in the day yet, barely enough to garner notice, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real – a slight shudder of the ground beneath his feet, not even strong enough to make him stumble. From here he can see the water in the trough outside one of the barracks shiver, ripples vibrating outwards from the center to the wooden walls of the basin. A few leaves drift to the ground from the one tree within the walled confines of the camp.
The Callies don’t notice it, of course, or if they do, they don’t mention it. They never do. Athan doesn’t know whether it’s because they honestly don’t realize what’s happening or because they refuse to acknowledge it. It could be either. It could be both.
The Narnians notice. Athan sees the faun following Noushin and carrying the pile of manacles look nervously up at the sky, his fingers moving in the four-point sign. It’s too much for him, and he drops the manacles with a terrific clatter, chains clanking and sliding across each other as they spill out of his arms. He falls to his knees, trying to scoop them back up, as Noushin turns on him.
“Idiot!” he snarls in Calormene, backhanding the faun across the face.
Athan twitches forward automatically, his fingers opening and closing in useless fists. He stops himself before he does anything stupid, conscious of Kivran’s warning glare from the other end of the line. The shackle on his ankle is good for one thing, at least; it keeps him from doing anything rash.
The faun – he’s been here for weeks now, but Athan still has no idea what his name is – babbles apologies, gathering the chains up. He staggers to his feet, tottering a little from the weight of the chains, and trails after Noushin. If they were in Calormen, Athan knows, they’d be in shackles all the time, but even if they’re prisoners, this isn’t Calormen yet. It’s still Narnia.
The weight of his chains is heavy on his wrists. He knows exactly how far apart he can move his hands, will probably know until the day he dies. When he had been in the dungeons beneath Caspian’s castle, waiting to find out whether he’d live or die, they’d kept him in shackles for more than a month. That had been worse than this – the waiting.
He squeezes his hands into fists. Gods, he wants to see his nephews again. Wants to hear Lev tell terrible jokes and Merry laugh at them, wants to see Merry studying for his entrance exams and Lev with his fiddle case under his arm on his way to lessons, wants to embrace them and never let them go. It can’t end like this. This can’t be the end of his life. There has to be something else. Oaths are all well and good, but to a dwarf, family is everything, and Athan has been separated from his for far too long now. If he gets out of this alive, he’ll find his nephews.
Twelve other Narnians besides Athan and Kivran get the same treatment. Two are murderers. One is a pirate, part of the Black Fleet, though gods alone know how he ended up here. Wavewalker usually comes for his people before that can happen. The others had all come from various rebel groups, like Athan and Kivran had, in contrast to the majority of the prisoners, who are divided more or less evenly between being common criminals and just unlucky. The only ones who deserve this, as far as Athan is concerned, are the murderers and the pirate.
Noushin and the overseers that have been helping him finish up their work. They stand back to frown at the Narnians, their gazes flickering impassibly across the double line of dwarves For all Athan knows, they’re being counted again, in case one of them has thought to wander off while the chains were being put on. Not that he would get far; the camp is fenced in (though admittedly, it isn’t a very strong fence, and Athan knows of at least three places that a dwarf could get through) and more importantly, there are still guards watching them.
They are marched out through the gates of the camp and up to the temple site, the old throne room. The bases of the thrones are still there; the rumor is that the Tisroc and Prince Bahadur want to keep them as is, along with what remains of the ancient walls, as a reminder that Calormen had prevailed where Narnia could not. Athan is just glad that they’re not being forced to rip the old walls down here, the way they are elsewhere on the island, where they’re pillaging the ruins for building material. The bulk of the cella, along with the great statue of Tash that they’ve been promised for months now, has to be imported from Calormen; Bahadur wants a temple that will rival the other great temples of the empire, and no temple of Tash can be made purely out of native stone. The rest of it is being hewn out of quarries elsewhere in Narnia and brought to the island so that Bahadur can have his temple, so that he can defile Narnia’s most sacred space even more than he already has.
Athan is thinking about all this as they pass between the remains of two shattered columns. A third must have once stood between them, because he can still see the base of it, a white circle flat against the much-trodden earth around it. The moment the first dwarf steps inside the old throne room, the earth shudders again, hard enough that some of them stumble. Gravel goes skittering across the cracked marble floor; a bucket left overnight on the scaffolding tips over and falls to the ground with a loud clang, bouncing when it hits. Athan grabs at Kivran’s shoulder to steady himself when the rumbling keeps on going. His gaze is on the scaffolding, which is moving as if in a high wind. If it collapses, they’ll have to rebuild the damned thing again.
The rumbling goes on for what feels like a long time. Athan crouches with the others, glad that he’s a dwarf and better suited for surviving such earthshakes than most humans. It’s a hard thing for a dwarf to lose his balance, given their build – stocky and sturdy and low to the ground. The Calormenes are worse off, human as they are; Athan hears a shout of warning and then a scream of pain. He twists around to see Ismaiy on the ground, clutching his leg and yelling. Athan can smell the blood, can see where the bone has broken through the skin and ripped through cloth. Zidan scrambles over to him, clutching at the ground like it’s his mother’s tit as the earth shakes.
Athan looks away. His eyes are drawn to the bases of the four thrones, to the half-built wall, red Calormene stone piled painstakingly upon the white marble of the nameless isle. He sees the scaffolding shudder, hears it crack, and winces in anticipation in the seconds before it all comes crashing down, the wood breaking on the much-trodden marble floor of the throne room, sending splinters flying. Spider webs of cracks appear in the Calormene bricks, spreading out to encompass the entire thing. Athan grits his teeth, his heart pounding in his chest, and hears Kivran hiss out a curse between his teeth as the new walls come crashing down, showering them all in pale red-and-gold grit. None of it seems to stick to the white marble of the old walls. They never even shudder.
“Gods,” someone mutters – Brofi, Athan thinks. Ismaiy is still screaming, even around the stick Zidan has jammed between his teeth, and Athan wishes that he would stop. He’s hardly the first Calormene to be injured, even killed, by the island; the last time the docks had collapsed they’d taken out two soldiers with them. An overseer had hanged himself the first week that Athan had been here; another had drunk himself into a stupor and stumbled into a stream, where he’d been found drowned the next morning. An earthshake had sent the army officer who had predated the current tarkaan over a cliff and to a broken neck.
If it was just Calormenes the island killed, Athan wouldn’t give a damn. He would welcome every bloody disaster the nameless isle throws at them. Except it isn’t just Calormenes, as what had happened this morning shows. Dwarves die even more often than the Calormenes do; there are more of them to kill, after all, and the odds are against them. Exploding containers of lye, falling stones, poisonous snakes, earthshakes, and sudden floods – the nameless isle doesn’t distinguish between Narnians and Calormenes, as long as there’s someone to kill.
Kivran curses again as the earthquake continues without any sign of stopping. Athan can hear prayer – Orth, of course; he’d been in seminary before all this had started. Some of the others, too. He can also hear something else, a soft whisper across the back of his mind, along the line of his bones.
They are coming.
Athan digs his fingers into the rich dark soil of the nameless isle, bracing himself against the shaking ground, his forehead pressed against the restless earth. The voice is thick with time and age, ancient as the island itself. The words vibrate through him, a deep murmur like thunder on the ocean, like hoofbeats on an empty road. He can barely stand it.
They are coming.
“Do you hear that?” he manages to gasp. It feels like his body isn’t meant to contain this, whatever it is, like he’s being pounded back into the earth some claim the dwarves came from.
Kivran’s fingers dig into his shoulder. “I hear it,” he says. “It’s her. The nameless isle.”
Nameless, they have called it for a thousand years. Nameless, because to name it is still too painful, too real. After Caspian the Seafarer had built his city, naming it had seemed too confusing, and by then the lack-of-name had stuck. But the island does, in its own way, have a name, and Athan names it.
“Cair Paravel,” he says, mouth nearly touching the dark earth of the island, what had once been the seed of all Narnia.
The rumbling shivers, shudders, stammers to nothingness. Athan feels the pressure in his bones ease off, that pounding sense of presence drift away like mist on the wind. He can remember the weight of it, though, the curl of unspoken words around the back of his mind. They are coming.
“Who’s coming?” Brofi whispers into the deafening silence that follows the shake.
Athan passes a hand over his face, scrubbing the earth from his lips. He stands with painstaking care, bracing himself for aftershocks to follow after, but none come in the next few minutes. He can hear Ismaiy sobbing with pain, his voice high and terrible as Zidan and the other Calormenes try and soothe him. Zidan looks up, scowling at the dwarves, and says, “You and you! Make a stretcher. Shaler, go back to the camp, send a bird to the Cair. Ismaiy will have to go back to the fort or the mainland, to a doctor.”
At the sound of his name, Ismaiy groans. Athan feels a small smile play over his lips, a moment’s brutal satisfaction at seeing an enemy laid low, even if it hadn’t been at his hand. Zidan sees the expression; his scowl deepens. “The rest of you clean this up,” he snaps. “I want this area cleared in an hour or you’ll feel my whip at your backs!”
“Bastard,” Joar says, which all of them are thinking. He doesn’t say it loudly enough for the Callies to hear.
One of the other overseers, Mudasser, uncoils his whip and cracks it warningly, the tip flicking at the dirt just behind the feet of the hindmost dwarves. They know its bite far too well – all of them bear its scars – and even Athan scurries to do Zidan’s bidding, padding with callus-toughened bare feet over aged and cracked marble strewn with shattered stone, dragging their chains behind them. They clean up the broken pieces of the scaffold, putting the worst aside to use as firewood, keeping what might be salvaged. The walls had been head-height to a minotaur; there is a lot of fallen stone to clear, some of it in large chunks. A surprising amount are full-size bricks, only a little banged about by the fall; those they can reuse when they rebuild. These are big enough that it takes two dwarves to carry each one. Before long sweat is running down Athan’s face and back, his thick ponytail sticking to his neck, loose strands of hair in his eyes and mouth. The shackles on his wrists and ankle seem like an insurmountable weight as he and Brofi haul a block the approximate size of a large dog over to the stack they have made of salvageable stone. All the time the Caloremene overseers prowl around them, shouting curses half in Narnian and half in Calormene, cracking their whips when they think the work is going to slowly. Once Athan stops for a heartbeat to wipe the sweat from his brow with his tattered sleeve, the manacles threatening to drag his arm back down, and feels a sharp sting on his cheek, followed by the liquid heat of fresh blood. He turns to see Mudasser glaring at him, yelling something obscene and insulting in Calormene that Athan can’t bring his tired mind to translate. He wipes the blood away on his dirty sleeve and goes back to work.
That doesn’t really help, though. Athan feels the blood running down his face for what feels like the next few hours, gathering in his beard, sliding down his collarbone to stain his already-stained shirt even further. His sweat runs into the open wound, making it sting and itch, and he doesn’t dare the bite of the whip again to take a few minutes to do something about it. Not that there is much he could do. Eventually it stops bleeding, congealed and stiff when he works his jaw, spitting aside some of the grit that has gathered on his teeth and lips.
They stop when the sun is high in the sky. They’ve cleared most of the rubble away, just gravel and grit remaining now. At some point the dwarves that had been dispatched to the graveyard had joined them, though Athan can’t remember seeing them arrive. He looks around them for a familiar face, wondering if it’s worth the effort to see if any of them know more about what had killed their fellows this morning. It’s more likely than not that none of them had been paying attention; they bury more of their own than any of them would like.
Athan rubs a hand over his beard while they wait for the fauns to bring their noon meal to them, wincing at the crackle of dried blood that follows. He touches his fingers gingerly to the cut, tracing its length. Hardly the first scar he’ll have gotten from the Callies, or the worst. Likely not the last, either. He’s lucky that it isn’t worse; he’s seen what a whip can do to flesh up close.
Kivran sidles up beside him, his balding head caked with reddish dust, the same dust dug in beneath his bitten fingernails. “You all right?”
Athan wipes the flakes of dried blood off onto his trousers. “It’s just a scratch,” he says, his voice hoarse. They had allowed Orth to bring around a bucket of lukewarm water for them to drink from, but that had been a few hours ago now, and Athan’s throat is dry and caked with dust. He thinks longingly of frothing ale newly drawn from the tap at the Broken Shield, thinks of iced tea sweet with honey and fragrant with rose water, thinks of snowmelt fresh from a mountain stream.
Kivran squeezes his arm encouragingly, then wipes the sweat from his tattooed brow. They squat in the much-trampled dirt by a pile of marble blocks salvaged from elsewhere in the island and eat more of the lentil-and-rice mush from breakfast, now even more burnt than it had been then. There’s water, at least, carried up from one of the island’s many streams by Orth and Frosi, the two youngest dwarves in the chain-gang. Athan’s glad to see that they haven’t been drowned in the process, given the mood that the island seems to be in today.
From here they have a decent enough view of the dock on the beach below. Athan watches it the way he always does, trying to discern if there’s any rhyme or reason to when new boats arrive. He punches Kivran’s shoulder as a sleek, small felucca from the mainland drops anchor, disgorging several Calormene soldiers he doesn’t recognize, Bennat Haer, the temple’s chief architect, and beiha Haer’s assistant, a pretty faun woman called Shand. Zidan goes down to meet them, along with Iravan Tarkaan, the army officer in command of the island’s small complement of soldiers. Athan and Kivran watch as Haer is presumably told about the damage to the temple, since the discussion disintegrates into Haer waving his arms in frantic panic and shouting at Zidan and Iravan while his assistant tries to calm him down.
“That’s one unhappy Callie,” Brofi observes, his spoon barely pausing as he shovels lentil mush into his mouth.
“Well, wouldn’t you be?” says Joar. He owns – had owned – a pub, but before that he’d been a builder for most of his life. Kraka, who had been a construction manager before he’d managed to upset the Calormenes, mumbles agreement as he drinks, water spilling into his beard.
Eventually Haer abandons Zidan and Iravan to stomp up the path from the docks, his assistant following gamely after him. They have to dodge the soldiers carrying the injured Ismaiy down from the Callies’ headquarters, doing a sort of elaborate dance of avoidance on the narrow path up the steep hill. Brofi snorts softly, watching.
Eventually Ismaiy is loaded onto the felucca. One of the newly-arrived Calormene soldiers hands a message-case to Zidan, which he opens and scans. Athan feels a chill of foreboding run down his spine when he sees the chief overseer smile, then turn and go back up the path.
He hastily eats the remainder of his mush, scraping his splintery wooden spoon around the bowl to get every last grain. Well, it’s filling, at least; Athan can barely remember the taste of good food, the kind his housekeeper Shaldis used to make. He splashes some water onto the cuff of his battered shirt, scrubbing at the blood caked on his face and in his beard.
Some of the other dwarves had suffered worse treatment. Frosi is sporting a fresh black eye, while Stigandrr – who is, admittedly, half-mad already – has dried blood and fresh whip-marks on his bare legs, his face bloodied. Those that haven’t been beaten or whipped so far this morning already look exhausted, the reddish grime from the site caking hands and faces, smeared with tracks of sweat or blood. There’s a sameness to them distinct from their species, a weariness of both soul and body that shines out of tired dwarven eyes. Some of them have been in Calormene hands for years already, freedom nothing but a dim memory.
Athan scrubs at the cut on his face, wincing as he reopens it. He looks down at the fresh blood on his fingers, bright against the dirt rubbed so deep into his skin he can’t imagine it ever coming out. Blood and bone, he thinks, and, Merry and Lev. His family is an old one and a proud one, but besides him and his nephews, there is no one left except distant third- and fourth- cousins he hasn’t spoken to in years. He and the boys are the last of the Ironstones of Glasswater.
He presses his hand to the pouch beneath his shirt, hearing the old paper crackle. Let them be all right. Let them be safe.
“Ironstone!”
Athan looks up. Zidan beckons to him imperiously with his swagger stick, holding the message he had gotten from the mainland in the other hand. Athan gets slowly to his feet, every muscle screaming in protest, and makes his way over to the overseer, chain dragging in the dirt behind him. He can barely lift the foot it’s attached to.
Zidan looks at him as if Athan is something he’d prefer to wipe off the bottom of his shoe, never mind that Athan is a knight of Narnia and sheriff of the largest shire in the country. Or had been, at least. Better blood than a common thug any day, which is all that Zidan really is. Even in Calormen, there is no honor or nobility in being a slave-overseer. Athan can trace his own bloodline back to the clans of the Golden Age; Zidan probably doesn’t even know his own father.
Athan stands back and looks up at him; Zidan steps closer, forcing Athan to tilt his head even further back. At this rate he’ll have a crick in his neck to go with the one in his back.
Zidan stares at him for a moment, his expression challenging. When Athan doesn’t speak, he looks disappointed and taps a finger against the paper. “The shipping season begins in a few days,” he says. “Therefore, tomorrow you will be transferred to Cair Paravel to await transport to Tashbaan for trial.”
Athan’s breath catches in his throat. Tashbaan is a death sentence. “Trial for what?” he makes himself say.
“Treasonable action against troops of the Tisroc (may he live forever),” says Zidan, glancing down at the paper. “Among other charges.” He grins nastily. “I would tell you to pack your things, but –”
“I see,” Athan snaps. “Anyone else or am I just lucky?”
“There is no one else from this island,” says Zidan. “Perhaps some of our disturbances will cease with your departure.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Athan says. He spits to the side, already anticipating the blow Zidan strikes with his swagger stick, turning his face to soften it. Unfortunately he turns the wrong way and the metal capped end of the stick comes down on his already cut cheek, making him hiss pain between his teeth. He can feel the wound open again, blood hot against his chin.
“Is that all?” he grits out.
“You can return to work now,” Zidan says, a smile dancing around his lips.
Athan waits until he’s turned his back this time to spit into the dirt behind his feet, then trudges back to the others, all of whom are watching him. It’s Kivran who asks the hard question.
“What is it?”
“I’m being shipped to Tashbaan for trial,” Athan says shortly, sitting back down and trying to ignore the way his hands seem to be shaking slightly.
There’s a round of curses from the listening dwarves. Orth mutters a short prayer, fingers moving in the four-point sign. Even Kivran looks stunned.
“When?” Brofi asks, throat working beneath his beard as he swallows nervously. “And – this one is important – are they letting you bring legal representation?”
That startles a laugh out of some of them, though Athan can’t make himself do more than force a smile. Brofi had been a family lawyer before all this had started – in fact, he had been the one to make sure that Athan was able to keep his nephews when the commune had sued for custody. He had been very good.
Athan waits for the nervous laughter to cease before he replies. “Zidan said I’m being transferred back to Cair Paravel tomorrow.” His hands are still trembling. He looks down at them, willing them to still. Suddenly it’s all too much, too fast. He had thought he had more time.
Kivran’s chains clank as he grips Athan’s forearm. “Then we get you off the island tonight,” he says.
Athan looks up at him in surprise, his gaze flickering automatically around to make sure none of the Callies or the dwarves who aren’t in on the plan are listening. “We aren’t ready.”
“We’ll make do,” Kivran says. “Unless you want to go to Tashbaan.”
“No,” Athan says. He shuts his eyes, lets himself breathe for a moment, tries to force the edges of panic away. Merry and Lev, he thinks. He has to do this for his boys. He presses his shaking fingers to the pouch beneath his shirt, feels the paper crinkle inside.
“All right,” he says, opening his eyes. He glances around again, taking in the group of dwarves around him. No one he doesn’t trust with his life. No Callies. No traitors. “We do it tonight. All of us. No one gets left behind.”
“No one gets left behind,” Kivran agrees. His hand is still on Athan’s forearm, his grip as strong as steel, the tattoos on his knuckles barely visible beneath the grime rubbed into his skin. He meets Athan’s eyes and nods once, his gaze steady.
“Get back to work, you lazy maggots!” one of the overseers – Mujtaba – bellows, cracking his whip.
They get to their feet as quickly as they can, chains rattling and dragging dully across the dirt and marble as they make their way back to the construction site. Delay will win them the sting of the whip. Athan presses his fingers gingerly to the open cut on his face, wincing, then wipes the blood off on the hem of his already filthy shirt.
With the site cleared of the rubble from this morning’s earthshake, they can start building the foundations of the temple again. The unskilled dwarves are set to the dangerous task of making lime mortar, while Athan, Brofi, and Kivran join a dozen others in carrying the huge marble rounds that have been liberated from elsewhere on the island over to the temple site, placing them as directed by a junior builder. Athan is vaguely aware of Bennat Haer scuttling around, emitting occasional cries of distress; he doesn’t have the energy to spare to take notice of the chief architect. Once Haer stops them with a yell of “no, no, no!” while Athan and Brofi are involved in wrestling one massive marble round on top of another, the mortar already laid and drying rapidly.
“It’s in the wrong place!” says Haer. “Take it down, take it down now! It has to go half a foot that way.” He points.
“Are you serious?” Brofi says, then ducks a blow from an overseer’s swagger stick as Noushin comes over to see what all the fuss is about.
“Yes, it has to be there or the ceiling will collapse!” Haer is actually wringing his hands. “Obviously,” he adds in a scathing voice, then turns on the junior builder who had told them where to put the column, his voice rising in rapid, fluent Calormene. His assistant just waits patiently at his side, rolling her eyes slightly.
“Move it,” Noushin says, stroking his swagger stick warningly.
Athan and Brofi move it. It takes them far too long, and in the meantime one of the rounds nearly falls on Brofi’s feet and Athan gets his wrist-chains briefly caught between both rounds, which necessitates Joar and Stigandrr coming over to help Brofi lift the top round long enough that Athan can free himself. By then the mortar has started to set, of course, and they have to get more. The scent of lime is so harsh in Athan’s nose that he can’t even smell his own blood anymore.
He’s vaguely aware when Haer takes off down the hill, shouting incoherently with his assistant hurrying after him, but doesn’t pay any attention to it. Athan can’t think past the exhaustion, past the burn in his arms and legs and back and the cut on his face which keeps reopening, blood running into his beard and clotting there. His arms are shaking, his hands slick with sweat so that when he and Brofi try and lift another round his fingers slide right off it. Brofi isn’t any better off.
As the day drags on, the sun sinks slowly into the west. Athan watches their shadows lengthen, tries not to think about the shadows he’s seeing that don’t seem to be attached to any of the dwarves or Calormenes – no centaurs or Talking Beasts here, and those shadows are unmistakable, even if some of the others that he suspects are satyrs or men could just be a trick of the light. He’s not foolish enough to stop working again, but he keeps looking over his shoulder towards the remains of the great hall, watching the shadow of a lioness or some other great cat come stalking up its length. The day, already too warm for this time of year, feels suddenly a little colder.
It isn’t the first time this has happened. Athan has seen these shimmers of dreams and history all over the island, and more than that – he has heard laughter echoing through nonexistent hallways, heard the creak of ropes and wood from a harbor that had been destroyed centuries before his birth, smelled the rich, savory scents of food he has never even dreamed of and the familiar tang of armor polish and steel.
He knows that this time he isn’t the only one seeing these shadows, because despite his exhaustion he’s aware of Brofi turning his head too quickly, Kivran looking up into thin air, Stigandrr stepping politely out of the way of the shadow of a centaur. Even the Callies seem to be noticing it for once; they’ve gone uncharacteristically quiet, their hands tight on their whip handles and swagger sticks. Athan can’t imagine what they see, but he suspects that they probably aren’t certain either.
He takes advantage of their momentary laxity to stand still for a moment, wiping the sweat from his brow. Just a moment, no longer, and then Athan turns back to his work, wishing for the sweet clarity of the anvil. Knight or not, he’s still a dwarf, trained at the forge as soon as he could walk. He is an Ironstone of Glasswater; he wants a hammer in his hand and metal to work. Not this.
Brofi looks at him wearily over their next round of marble, dark hair falling lankly around his face. He’s a far cry from the dapper lawyer he had been in Glasswater, the bane of every scorned husband and father in the shire. Athan has never asked how he had ended up in a slave-chain on the nameless isle; he hadn’t been with them when Athan had been forced to flee the city for the deep woods of the southern marches with Kivran and a few other friends. It’s Brofi’s story to tell, if he ever wants to.
He and Brofi settle the marble round they’re carrying onto its base, pushing and shoving it into place and trying to keep their fingers out of the mortar. Athan knows from experience that it burns to the touch; he’s seen too many dwarves, and a few especially unlucky Calormene overseers, killed or maimed while making the mortar. He wipes sweat-slick hands across his trousers as they turn back towards the pile, trying to ignore the shadow of a faun with a flowing scarf trotting past them. The marble beneath its feet seems to shimmer with each step, for a brief instant clean and white and unmarked before reverting back to its original griminess. Athan raises his chained hands, weary, and passes them across his eyes, shoving a few loose strands of hair out of his face.
This time, there’s a warning before the next earthshake comes.
Athan feels it vibrate up through the soles of his bare feet, along the line of his bones and the curve of his spine, curling around the back of his skull. Thieves, the island snarls, like a lioness’s warning growl before she roars. The earth shudders beneath him, sending Athan stumbling sideways against the base of the newly placed column. Crack us open and break us to pieces and rob us, rot and die here with your plunder. Filthy, dirty, nasty thieves!
Athan yells, clasping both hands to his ears. He isn’t the only one; he sees Brofi doing the same and one of the Callie overseers dropping to his knees, mouth open in a cry that Athan can’t hear through the sound of the earth screaming in his head. He can’t begin to comprehend all of it; his mind shatters on the idea, like weak iron caught between hammer and anvil. But he hears enough.
Crack stone and break rock, melt gold and burn wood, come to rob us even of our bones. Thieves, filthy, dirty, stinking thieves, stay forever!
Athan screams again, dropping to his knees, as if getting any closer to the earth will help him. The voice pounds at the inside of his skull, trying to batter its way into the open air; Athan feels like he’s holding his head together. Even through the thick haze before his eyes he sees drops of blood fall from his nose, leaking out between his fingers from his ears, to stain the grimy marble floor red.
The next shake is worse than the one that came before. There hasn’t been enough of the new construction placed to fall, but Athan feels like the world is coming apart around him, like the earth might open up and swallow him whole. The island screams inside his head, words that he isn’t capable of understanding, and more blood drips to the floor. Athan thinks his head might explode.
Break us and take us, make us nothing more than dead stone, will they? he hears, the words suddenly intelligible again. We are of the Deep Magic. We endure!
At this Athan can’t do anything except scream, and scream, and scream, until the world goes red and then black around him.
He comes back to himself slowly, blinking rapidly as he looks up at a tall white vault of a ceiling. The rising sun shines through stained glass at the eastern end of the throne room, illuminating the four perfect thrones that stand empty before him. Athan pushes himself up on an elbow, taking in the red and gold banners that hang between the columns. The throne room is whole and true and perfect; the marble beneath him is whole and pure, and the columns lining the hall and circling the dais seem to reach up to the heavens. Everything he has ever read, every story he’s ever been told, every painting he’s ever seen, has shown the great hall of Cair Paravel as white marble, but there is color here that he never expected – gold as a lion’s coat, and pink as a maiden’s blush, and blue like a naiad’s laughing eyes. It is like something out of a faerie story – impossibly beautiful.
Athan stares around in wonder, his mouth falling open. Some of his exhaustion seems to fade away, the years falling off him as he gets to his feet – without difficulty, without his chains weighting him down. He raises his hands and gazes at his unmarked wrists in wonder, looks down to find himself clad in unfamiliar finery, silks and leathers like nothing he’s ever worn even in his best days. He touches a hand to his beard, finds it neatly clipped and braided in unknown patterns, lets his hand fall to the sword at his waist. It’s archaic, the kind of blade he’s seen in museums or in the university, but he can tell just from touching the hilt that it’s as good as any sword he has ever carried, if not better.
He grips the hilt, reassured by the feel of it beneath his palm, and feels the earth shudder beneath his booted feet. He looks down, sees a single drop of blood splash down onto the polished marble floor, and then another and another. Athan raises a hand to his nose, looks at his red-stained fingers.
“No,” he says out loud, and at the sound of his voice the hall around him flickers like a dying flame. Athan blinks rapidly, willing it to remain, but it’s flashing in and out of existence now, intercut with the too-familiar ruins of the temple site. “Oh no.”
He shuts his eyes, trying to hold onto the image, but the quiet peace of the throne room is gone, replaced by the harsh breathing and sobbing of the chain-gang and the overseers. Athan opens his eyes to find himself on his feet, back in his ragged clothes and chains, with blood all down his front. His head aches like he’s laid it down on an anvil and had it struck with a hammer a few times.
“Kings and Queens of Summer shield us from Eternal Winter,” he whispers, the words rasping in his dry throat.
Brofi, slumped against the half-built column, looks up at the sound of his voice. There’s blood drying in his moustaches. “I saw –” he begins, but can’t seem to voice the words.
Athan nods, feeling old and creaky. His hands feel too stiff to grasp a sword hilt, should one ever come to him again. “I did too,” he says.
The shadows lie quiet across the temple site now, dwarves and Calormenes alike picking themselves up off the ground. All of them appear equally ill-used, the Calormenes perhaps a little less so – no blood on them that Athan can spot. Bennat Haer, looking shaken, offers his assistant a hand up. The faun woman, sitting on the ground in a puddle of dull purple skirts, takes it; even from here Athan can see the fear on her face, the fresh blood spattered on her blouse. She had heard it too.
He spies Joar and Orth leaning worriedly over a dwarf that he can’t make out and feels his heart jump, worry giving him a little energy before one of the overseers goes stalking over to see what the trouble is. An injury, Athan guesses, and winces when several other dwarves are called over to lift the fallen round away. It’s Kraka, Athan realizes, straightening up to get a better view, and his friend’s leg is mangled and crushed from being caught beneath the heavy marble. Joar and Orth help him away; he appears to be in too much shock even to scream. It’s a miracle that he was the only one that Athan can see who has been badly injured in all this, though he spots fresh cuts and bruises on most of the other dwarves, whose faces are as bloodied as his.
Athan lets his head drop, looking down so that he doesn’t need to see the pain on the faces of his friends, and leans against the column besides Brofi. Impossibly, amongst all the madness he is grateful for the chance to rest his tired bones. It’s fading away, the memory of that bright, beautiful hall, and Athan tries to hold onto it before it leaves him entirely. He can remember the island’s scream all too clearly.
Zidan cracks his whip, though the sound of it is weaker than it should be. “Back to work!” he snarls, his accent very strong now. “It was just an earthshake; there is nothing to be concerned with.”
“Is he mad?” Brofi mutters, pushing himself away from the column with difficulty. He stumbles a little as he takes his first wavering step towards the pile of marble rounds.
Athan follows him slowly and reluctantly, trying to wipe the blood from his face, away from his ears, but he’s too tired and the chains on his wrists are too heavy for him to lift his hands that high. He and Brofi make their way to the pile, as the other dwarves slowly return to work under the crack of the Calormene whips.
All of it – the island, the earthshake, the great hall, everything – takes on a dreamlike quality as Athan and Brofi haul and place one marble round after another. This time the earthshake had left no physical mark on the temple site; Athan would think that he had imagined the sound of the island screaming her fury if it wasn’t for the blood still caked in his hair and beard. He feels as if he’s been here forever, as if this some fresh hell to replace the eternal winter that all Narnians fear more than death itself. The passing hours blur into each other as the sun sinks lower and lower in the west, the shadows growing longer but at least this time firmly attached to their casters.
Night will bring some respite, if the Callies don’t keep them working too long past eventide. Athan is too exhausted to think properly, but the idea that he might soon be free of this chases its way around his mind like a mouse in a jar. The island isn’t so far from the mainland, not really, and there are ways to get through the fence around the camp. If the island has spent her fury for the day, if she sits quiet until the morn, then all should be well. By this time tomorrow they might be free men again. And Athan can find his boys.
“Merry and Lev,” he mumbles to himself.
Brofi looks up at him over the edge of the round they’re trying to line up on its base. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” Athan says as they finally get the round in place and start back towards the pile. Their shadows stretch out before them, the day passing into the Shadowmaster’s realm, and the thought is more comforting than Athan expects. The King of Evening looks ever well on deeds done in the dark hours of the night.
“Stop lazing about!” Mujtaba shouts, apparently deciding they aren’t moving quickly enough for his taste. His whip kicks up a spray of gravel near their bare feet, and Brofi shoots him a look of utter loathing. Athan doesn’t think he could move any faster if his life depended on it.
He glares back at Mujtaba, who’s coiling his whip back up, preparing to crack it again. Once upon a time he might have shouted back at the man, offered some kind of insult, but now he’s just too tired to bother and risk a flogging. He and Brofi shuffle on towards the pile, dragging their ankle-chains behind them.
Beiha Haer’s voice rises behind them, asking his assistant some question that she answers too softly for Athan to make out. He and Brofi poke around at the pile, trying to decide which round will be the least trouble to get out. Athan’s gaze settles on one with a thin bluish streak running through its center. He has a flash of memory, of tall columns limned with gold rising towards the white vault of an arched ceiling, and then it’s gone again, leaving him peering down at the pile of marble rounds.
“This one,” he says to Brofi, prodding it with his unchained foot. His friend nods.
They wrestle the round out of a pile that doesn’t seem to have thinned at all since noon. “On three?” Athan rasps once they’ve freed it from the herd. Brofi nods, and they squat down, fitting their fingers into the available crevices so they can lift it. “One – two –”
Before he can finish, a woman’s scream rises behind him. Athan turns, his hands slipping away from the marble round, heedless of the weight of the chains on his wrists, and all he can see is the bright scarlet of blood on white marble.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-23 02:09 am (UTC)I feel so bad for all the members of the chain-gang, and it isn't even fair for them that the Cair is so indiscriminate about who she wants to kill on any given day. If only she could kill all the Calormenes first, hah. Though seriously, I doubt this temple of Tash will ever even be built seeing how often the island just destroys anything built on her.
That vision of Cair Paravel, whole and untarnished, was beautiful. I'm glad that they all had a glimpse of it even if it was probably very spooky. And I LOVE how the shadows of the dead can be seen wandering around the old throne room (did I spy Tumnus there?).
I'm sure there's something poetic about the Dwarves thinking and praying to the King of Evening, and not realizing Edmund is actually there with them (assuming this chapter takes place in the same time as Elizar and Ed standing in the treasure chamber). Now I wonder if the Cair's words that They are coming are referring to the Pevensies.
And you're being evil again by leaving us with another cliffhanger!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 01:43 pm (UTC)The Cair is...odd. The reasons why, and how, become more clear in the following chapters, but suffice it to say that the Calormenes have been trying to build the Temple of Tash there for the better part of three years and it hasn't really gone well at all.
(And yep! That was Tumnus. I thought I should at least have a nod to a canon character in this chapter of OCs, heh.)
This chapter overlaps with both the previous chapter and the upcoming chapter; when Bennat Haer and his assistant run off is just after Edmund and Elizar's arrival on the island.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-23 04:07 pm (UTC)Another thing I love about this chapter is the dual terror that builds: the fear of the nameless isle, which grows CONSIDERABLY over the course of the chapter, paired with Athan's terror about what is going to happen to him, his knowledge that his situation could be worse, and then it does gets worse, on both levels.
Let me go back to Athan too, because what you've really captured well is the sheer and utter exhaustion that hard, back-breaking, physical labor brings about, and how that can break a person, both physically and mentally. I love that the dwarves are all so tough, and that one of the first things you introduced was that they all have something to hold on to, something that reminds them of the lives they previously led, and the something that gives them hope. Athan's hope in the face of his despair, and his holding on to his nephews, and especially, his feelings of "family above all," make him a perfect addition to Dust.
You know that I love how creepy Cair Paravel is! The almost-murder spree! The voices in their heads! The visions! The damage and destruction, and the creative ways of killing! And yet, we understand why and how the Cair came to this.
I have to stop because I am so excited for what's coming next and I don't want to spoil anything!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 02:13 pm (UTC)Heh, with every new character I introduce, I increasingly realize I have a theme about family running through Dust...
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-23 07:20 pm (UTC)This chapter is, as promised, fantastically creepy, and I love both the castle and the shadows of the dead. I do feel sorry for the Narnians on the chain gang, unrecognized as friend rather than foe -- although as they are the ones doing the actual picking at bones, I see the Cair's point. Speaking of Cair, the part where Athan whispers her name was just brilliant!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 02:28 pm (UTC)I'm so glad that Athan works for you! I really wanted to get the sense of what the chain-gang was going through across -- both the physical aspects and the mental/emotional ones. Which aren't helped by being trapped on Murder Island, of course. And 'fantastically creepy' is my raison d'etre, ehehehehehe.