Garth worked for a few more minutes, sending Cavor’s flesh as much encouragement as he could, then he stood back, exhausted.
Cavor sighed, then turned his head to look at his arm. He jumped in surprise. It looked almost healed.
“I will rub this unguent into the tattoo, sire.” Joseph reached for a jar from the table. “And then bind your arm for you. Garth and I will examine you again in the morning—if it suits your majesty—before we leave for the Veins. Then we can see you again in some weeks’ time.”
“I will rise with the dawn if that is your wish, Joseph,” Cavor said dryly. “Now, come and dine with me.” He grinned at Garth. “I’m sure one of the courtier’s daughters will be only too pleased to serve your fine son.”
Garth blushed, and then silently cursed his stained cheeks as both men laughed.
THREE
THE VEINS
The Veins lay three days’ ride north-east of Ruen, and Joseph and Garth left the next morning after they had attended Cavor. The king was patently grateful at the relief they had dealt him, and again pleaded with Joseph to reconsider his decision to remain in Narbon. But Joseph had been firm, if polite. Narbon was his home, and there he would stay.
Once they had left the city well behind them and their horses were jogging along cheerfully enough in the morning sunshine, Garth turned to his father.
“Where did you come from, father? I know you were not born in Narbon.”
Joseph grinned a little ruefully to himself. These questions had been almost sixteen years coming. “From Ruen itself, lad.”
Garth turned in the saddle for a last glimpse of the city. “Ruen? Why leave?”
His father shrugged. “Time for a change, Garth. Why? Don’t you like Narbon?”
Garth swivelled and surveyed the almost empty road before them. This north east road led to the small town of Myrna, and the Veins just beyond it. No-one travelled this road unless they had business at the Veins, and few wanted to have anything do with the place.
“I was just curious, father.” He paused. “How did Cavor know of you?”
“My father—and then myself for some years—treated the old king and his family.”
“What?” Joseph couldn’t have surprised his son more if he had tried. “You knew Prince Maximilian!”
As with most Escatorians, Garth was fascinated by the tragic tale of the lost prince.
Joseph’s face softened “Yes. I knew him well. When he disappeared, life changed. The palace and city was so sad, so grey, that I decided that Nona and I would make a life elsewhere. We moved to Narbon, and there you were born some five months later.”
But Garth did not want to hear of Narbon. He wiped his too long hair out of his eyes with an abrupt motion of his hand. Why hadn’t his father mentioned this beforehand? “Tell me of Maximilian!”
“He was too young to be lost the way he was,” Joseph snapped, “and Escator did not deserve to lose his line. Cavor is a good and fair king, but the ancient line…”
“I’m sorry,” Garth apologised, thinking he had annoyed his father with his over-enthusiastic questioning.
“No, lad,” Joseph said softly, and leaned across the distance between them, patting his son briefly on the shoulder. “‘Tis I who should apologise. I so rarely speak of Maximilian because his loss still hurts. He was like a younger brother to me. With him gone, and with both the king and queen—nay, the entire city—in mourning, I decided to move south.”
He shrugged, and laughed shortly. “Whatever curse hit the royal palace with Maximilian’s disappearance still lingers. Cavor remains childless, and no-one knows what will happen when he dies.”
For a long time they rode in silence, the only sound the soft beat of their horses’ hooves as they thudded into the packed dirt of the roadway. On the west side of the road stretched grazing lands as far as the coast, but on the eastern side ranged the royal forests. It was there that Maximilian had been lost.
My age, thought Garth, or only a year or two younger. What must it have been like, to wander lost and afraid through the forests until you died from exposure or starvation, or until a bear grasped you in his hungry claws? As hard for a prince as for a physician’s son, he thought.
Ahead, a distant movement caught his eye. It was an empty cart, massive, drawn by a team of ten great horses. On its tray was bolted a huge iron cage. Even from a distance Garth could hear the faint clink of chains.
“Father?”
Joseph’s face was drawn. “A prison transport, Garth. No doubt returning from the Veins for its next load of prisoners from Ruen’s gaols.”
Garth’s stomach turned over as the cart drew closer. A foul stench and a swarm of fat flies clung to it in a fertile cloud of pestilence. As it rumbled past, its driver shouting a cheerful greeting, Garth could see that the chains and irons littering its filthy floor were smeared with dried blood. For the first time he had an intimation of what awaited him down the shafts of the Veins.
“How long do they have to work down there, father?”
Joseph’s dark eyes were haunted. “For as long as it takes them to die, Garth. If a man is sentenced to the Veins, then it is a lifetime sentence.”
“That seems…cruel.”
“Gloam is Escator’s main export, Garth. Without it we’d be a poor nation indeed. But as no free man will work the Veins, so the condemned are sent there to labour out their lives.”
He looked back to the road before them, which was once again empty. “Few survive longer than two or three years. They are never allowed to the surface. Not even in death. There are great abandoned shafts within the Veins that reach into the bowels of the earth itself. They tip the dead bodies down there.”
Late in the afternoon of the third day they approached Myrna. The small town existed only to service the Veins, and it was a dank and cheerless place. The streets were almost deserted; only a few wives and children of the guards walked from shop to shop, and their posture was sloped and poor, as if the confines of the Veins somehow communicated itself to them through their husbands and fathers, or perhaps through the very atmosphere itself. This close to the coast the air was damp, and even spring seemed not to have made an impression on the cold air. The buildings, whether stone or wood, were uniformly dark and sooty, and it was not hard to see why. Black, sticky dust lay all about.
The early cold twilight made the town even more depressing and unwelcoming.
“Get used to it, Garth,” Joseph said as he watched his son try and brush away the thin layer of gloam dust that had accumulated on his cloak over the past few minutes. “You will eat, breathe and drink gloam dust for the next few weeks.”
Already sickened, Garth could do nothing but nod.
Joseph had spent three weeks a year for the past twenty years here, and he knew where to go. Fifteen minutes’ ride past the town, close to the Veins themselves, lay a small outcrop of buildings almost lost in the rapidly fading light. At the first of them Joseph pulled his horse to a halt and dismounted.
“Stay here, Garth. I’m just going to report to the overseer of the Veins. We won’t go down until the morning. Tonight, at least, we’ll sleep well.”
He disappeared into the building, and Garth took the time to take a deep breath—something he instantly regretted—and look about. To the west lay the Veins, and just beyond them stretched the long and lonely coastline of the Widowmaker Sea. Gloam was usually to be found along the sea coasts, and Garth had heard that in places the Veins stretched for half a league under the floor of the sea itself.
But between the coast and this depressing group of buildings lay the Veins themselves. Great black mounds reared into the darkening sky, disappearing into a thick clinging mist that was rolling in from the glassy grey sea, and Garth had to squint to make out the grotesque and shadowed humps. Piles of gloam, probably, waiting to be shipped down the coast where it could be transported to Ruen and even Narbon. Garth had often seen the dust-encrusted gloam ships unload at his hometown’s wharves, although previously he had never thought very much about where they came from.
Interspersed among the great mounds of gloam were the iron workings supporting the machinery that drove the carts and lifts of the Veins. As he watched, Garth could just discern great wheels and cogs churning among the fog, and hear chains sliding down, down, down. Something crashed, and he jumped, but it was only a cart tipping its load of gloam onto a growing pile of the rock before sliding back underneath the earth once more.