Kelven's Riddle: The Mountain at the Middle of the World Read online

  The lasher’s enormous hands and feet were gnarled and clawed with dangerous looking talons and its arms and legs were knotted with muscle, but it was in the character of the face that its cruel nature was revealed. Wide, slatted black eyes stared unblinking from deep hollows in the broad head. The nose was long and hooked like a beak and when it opened its mouth, sharp discolored teeth were exposed. The chin was pointed and was as bald as the top of its head. In one hand it held the multi-thronged whip that gave the species its common name and in the other it held a short straight sword. Aram felt his insides contract and grow cold at the fierce aspect of this terrible servant of the lord of the world.

  There were several overseers with the lasher and one of these, an obscenely fat man with sagging eyes and jowls, stepped out and spoke to the assembled villagers.

  “Every able-bodied male, aged eighteen to thirty will form up here,” he said, and with a wave of his arm he indicated a line running across the front of the square. “All others will move back. Now.”

  The overseer’s sharp command, weighted by the awful presence of the lasher, stimulated immediate obedience. The men of the prescribed ages lined up quickly in front of the group of overseers, Aram and Decius among them. When they had formed up, the lasher went around behind them and moved slowly down the line of men. He stopped behind the fourth man and there was a moment of intense, uncertain silence.

  Then, abruptly and with savage force, the lasher kicked the man forward onto his face. Immediately, an overseer was upon the fallen man, tying his hands behind him. The lasher moved on, stopped again and another man went down, like the first, then another, and so the process continued. Every so often, he would stop to consider a man and, less often, dislodge that man viciously from the line. Aram suddenly realized that it was an act of conscription, a drafting of able-bodied men for some unknown purpose.

  He felt tepid, foul breath wash down over the back of his head as the lasher stopped behind him. Please, God, no, he thought. In just a week or two, maybe less, the wind would come from the south, bringing the smell of salt air and temperatures warm enough that a fleeing man could sleep outdoors on the open ground. Aram desperately wanted to be that man.

  He most certainly did not want to go wherever these conscripts were to be sent. The thing he feared most, right now, was the foiling of his plan to escape. Even if he ultimately lost his life in the marsh, he wanted to make the attempt, to try and live life on his own terms. He wanted to be free.

  As the lasher considered him, there was a long terrible moment when time seemed to stop, a moment of awful certainty in which Aram felt his hopes for escape begin to turn to dust and drift away across the heedless earth. He ceased to breathe and inside the tense silence of his head he heard the distant rhythmic thump of his heart.

  And then, with sudden, sharp force the breath was slammed from his body and he was impelled to the ground. Before he could regain his breath and get to his feet, his hands were bound behind him and his face was pushed into the dirt. As he gasped against the fierce pain in his upper body, he realized with sickening, utter certainty that he would never recover his cache of food from its place in the willow roots by the culvert and escape across the plains into the marsh. There were other plans made for him.

  He looked up but a boot forced his head back to the ground.

  “Stay down if you want to keep your brains inside your skull.” The fat overseer warned him.

  The process of conscription went on, punctuated by grunts of pain as other young men of the village were picked from the lot and kicked to the earth. Then, finally, it was over and there was a long silence followed by the clank of chains. Aram couldn’t see what was happening but he knew instinctively what came next. Moments later, his wrists and ankles were locked into shackles and he was yanked to his feet.

  There were twelve men, all of them young and strong like Aram, the cream of the village, bound together in two groups of six. Without any further explanation or communication of any kind, they were moved through the town to wagons drawn up on the road outside the village. Hitched to each wagon was a pair of oxen. There were eight wagons in all and the rear doors of two of them were open.

  The wagons were shaped like inverted triangles with broad tops and slanted sides that angled inward to a narrow floor that consisted of a single walk board running along the bottom from back to front. The sloping walls were made of thick planks with gaps between them. Six of the gaps, three on each side, were quite wide. There was a pipe running along the top of the wagon’s interior with six secondary conduits extending from it, three off to one side of the wagon and three to the other.

  Before the men were loaded, an overseer went around with a long knife and cut the clothing from their bodies, stripping each man of everything but his boots. Though the day had warmed a bit with the promise of spring, the air was still vicious on Aram’s exposed flesh. It happened that he was the last man loaded into the first of the wagons and he was chained opposite Decius.

  Decius met Aram’s eyes with a look of sheer terror and opened his mouth to speak, but Aram silenced him with a shake of his head. It would not be wise to gain the lasher’s special attention or incur its wrath. The door was closed and a bolt was thrown. Outside, an eerie quiet fell over the village. No one spoke and the villagers stood motionless as the process of loading the men into the other wagon was accomplished.

  The reason for the six wide gaps between the planked sides of the wagons became immediately apparent. Each man was chained to the side in such a way that his legs straddled one of the gaps in the planks. Over the course of a long journey the gaps would allow the men to take care of necessary personal business without the overseers having to loose their prisoners and remove them from the wagons. It was an efficient, if degrading, system.

  When the door was shut, even though it was a bright morning, the wagon’s interior fell into gloom. The angled sides were slatted, but the broad tops were solid and the net result was that no light found its way directly inside. Views of the outside were limited to narrow vertical strips in the planking between the bodies of the men chained opposite.

  Aram stared out though the narrow slats at the only place in his life he’d known as home. Everything had happened so quickly, there had been no time to have any reaction to the turn of events. Now, helpless, being carted away to an unknown destination for unknown reasons, he wished that he’d taken his chances and run for the marsh when he first saw the dust appear over the horizon that morning. Considering that thought at length, however, he knew it to be utterly foolish. As soon as his absence was discovered, the lasher would have run him down with ease and slain him without mercy.

  He would have to endure the unfolding of events and when his destiny was made plain, consider starting over again under new circumstances. Perhaps, and this was likely, they were being transported to another village where there was a need for more workers. It would take time to build up his cache again but maybe, in the new place, there would be a better chance for escape. With luck, it might even be nearer the marsh.

  There was the snapping of whips and shouts from the drivers and with a jolt, the wagon began to move. But not toward the west and the marsh. Instead, they went east. The sun had slid past noontime and was angling westward. The wagons turned away from the declining sun and went toward the place of its rising. As they rolled away, the sounds of sorrow and loss erupted from the village and a single woman’s voice lifted in a mournful wail above the rest. Aram wondered who it was that realized she’d just seen the last of her husband, her brother, or perhaps her son.

  His feet were shackled into stirrups connected to an angled standing board and for a while he was grateful because this allowed him to push with his legs and take some of the stress off his naked upper body. But the constant jouncing of the wagon on the rutted road soon began to bruise his heels and arches even through the thick soles of his boots. He was obliged to alternately rest his feet while his torso was banged against the pla
nks, then shift as much of the punishment as he could to his legs. This routine would soon become an exercise in agony that would last for more than six weeks and extend across eight hundred miles.

  He looked across at Decius. The shorter man was responding to the grim pounding in the same manner. He met Aram’s gaze and gasped.

  “Where are they taking us, Aram?”

  Aram shifted his weight again and answered through gritted teeth. “How would I know? To the east, at least for the moment. They’re probably in need of workers somewhere.”

  The man to Decius’ right, in the middle, a lean, hook-nosed man with large ears who was called Flinneran, looked at Aram with frightened eyes. “Maybe they’re going to kill us.”

  “No.” Aram said shortly. “They would have done that at the village. They need us for something else. Now both of you leave me alone.”

  All through the rest of that miserable first day the wagons went east. Through the slats, Aram watched the shadows cast by the wagon change on the ground as the sun fell away behind them. About an hour before sundown, without warning, a stream of water poured from the conduit in front of his face. It was shockingly cold and before he deduced that it was meant for him to drink, the flow stopped. He’d missed his ration. Fortunately, the day had remained cool, and he didn’t suffer much from the loss of the water.

  But he was hungry. The men were given no food throughout the whole of that afternoon, however, nor was there any indication of when that particular need would be addressed. As the day waned away, and Aram tried vainly to find a way to dilute the punishment to his body, the wagons continued trundling relentlessly eastward.

  Just after sundown while it was still twilight, they stopped on the road. The door at the rear opened and an overseer stepped up onto the walk board. He lengthened the chain on one hand of every man so as to give some freedom of movement and then shoved a small wooden bowl and spoon into the other.

  “Eat it all, boys,” he said. “That’s all you get ‘til tomorrow night. Drop your bowl through the slat when you’re done. Try not to piss on it afterward. And no talking.”

  The stuff in the bowl was salty, cold, and chewy, and tasted of something pungent and raw that Aram had never encountered. It was awful, but since it would keep him alive, he managed to get it down. As soon as the last man’s bowl dropped, the utensils were collected, a short stream of cold water spewed from the pipe and they heard the steps of the overseer walking away. Aram was ready for the water this time. Though his muscles were rigid with cold, he was thirsty, especially after the salty gruel.

  The day was now completely gone and it was clear that the wagons had stopped for the night and that the men would remain chained inside. Realizing this, Aram leaned his head back against the side of the wagon, closed his eyes, and tried to relax.

  The bruising inflicted on his body during the day allowed for nothing but intermittent, fitful sleep, and the bitter chill of the night gnawed at his fingers and toes like a sharp-toothed, hungry dog. Some of the men began to moan in sleepless agony and Aram found it difficult to refrain from joining in the miserable chorus. After a few hours, he was alarmed to realize his fingers and toes were growing numb from the cold. To ward off that danger, he began a regimen of moving all parts of his body throughout the night. As badly as he needed sleep, the insidious cold was a greater danger to his welfare, so he forgot about sleep and concentrated on keeping the most vulnerable parts of his body alive.

  At dawn, the wagons began moving again and again that day they went east. As the sun ascended, the day grew substantially warmer and Aram was ready for the spurt of water from the pipe long before it came. About mid-afternoon, the wagons stopped for a while and there was the sound of activity. When they eventually moved on, once again there arose the mournful cries of loss and anguish. Other wagons had been filled with human cargo. More men had been conscripted for whatever lay ahead.

  Several days went by with more stops at other villages, and all the time the wagons trended generally eastward. In the midst of his increasing misery, which now included daily bouts with thirst because of the warming temperatures, Aram knew that his plan of escaping into the marsh was utterly lost. At least a hundred miles or more of open farmland had been put between him and the Great Marsh. It would be far too great a distance for any escape attempt.

  Partly to distract himself from his agony, he turned his thoughts to the mountains, which in every tale lay to the east. Would their final destination, he wondered, be near enough to the mountains to render those highlands a viable goal for an escape attempt? Or were they only going further out onto the plains where his dream of a flight to freedom would be destroyed by the presence of endless level ground in all directions?

  Fortunately, they weren’t going north toward the capitol where there would be no possibility of escaping into a wild place. But Aram’s relief at that thought was necessarily tempered by the fact that he had no real idea of the true geography of the world. For all he knew they might be heading straight into Manon’s stronghold. Only time would tell whether the stories he’d heard of the world’s cartography bore any resemblance to reality. In the meantime, the wagon train rolled purposefully on with its load of increasingly miserable cargo.

  The days grew warmer, but the nights were still very cold and sickness eventually set in. The insidious mixture of constant exposure to the nighttime chill, the forced immobility, and scant rations of food served in filthy dishes began to take its toll. Every man endured fits of fever, diarrhea, and vomiting. The close air inside the wagon became sickeningly pungent and those that weren’t already ill were induced into that state by the pervasive smell. At suppertime, the overseer kept his face covered with a cloth when he brought in the bowls.

  Decius began to sleep for increasingly long periods of time, hanging unconscious in his chains while his body was beaten mercilessly by the jouncing of the wagon. Ignoring the proscription on talking, Aram would periodically wake him and keep him engaged for as long as possible in pointless conversation. Inevitably, however, Decius would drift off again and as Aram’s own condition worsened, his ability to worry over Decius waned as well.

  The man two places to Aram’s left, at the front of the wagon, seemed to suffer more than the rest. He moaned continuously, and kept few of his meals down. Most mornings found him covered in the regurgitated contents of his stomach. The day came when he was too weak to hold his evening bowl or feed himself. For a time, the overseer tried to feed him, but the terrible conditions persisting inside the wagon forced him to give up the effort.

  One day about the middle of the sixth week after the wagon train left his village, the wagons began to ascend a slight incline and Aram could see through the slats that the ground had become uneven. There were mounds of grassy earth with protrusions of rock, and small hills blotched with patches of brush. Later that day, he began to see scattered trees, and even rougher, rockier ground that angled upward and obscured the sky.

  With a sudden thrill that momentarily neutralized his pain, he realized that they were entering the region of mountains. They gained altitude all that day and the road became rougher as it wound through the corrugations in the hills. When they stopped for the night the wind came down the slopes and it was colder than it had been down on the plains, but the overseers gathered wood and started fires near the wagons to keep the men warm.

  The next morning, before it was fully light, the wagons began to move up the bumpy grade. The sun was still behind the mountains to the east and the air was chill. Aram’s body was stiff from the cold and the unending abuse inflicted by being bounced around in his shackles and against the hard planking. But there was more abuse to come as the oxen strained to pull the wagons up the steep, rutted, rocky road. In the morning twilight, he could hear the drivers cursing their oxen, and the animals grunting and wheezing with exertion. By grinding his teeth and tensing all his muscles against the horrible jolting, Aram barely managed to keep from groaning in pain like some of the
other men. Finally, after about an hour of rugged, painful travel, the track leveled out and they rolled in a nearly straight line along a smoother course.

  When it grew light enough to see through the slats, Aram gazed out upon rolling hills covered in long grass cut by ravines full of trees. Here and there were outcroppings of gray rock. And there were animals. Birds fluttered above the thicketed trees and small furry beasts scurried in the grasses. He could see little from his slatted viewpoint, but the landscape visible through those slats was the most interesting thing he’d seen in his life.

  If there could be any pleasure found in being chained naked to the inside of a stinking wagon and transported to an unknown destination, then the next few days revealed it. For the better part of a week the wagon train traveled over relatively smooth roads through increasingly pleasant country. The days were warm, though the nights were still cold enough to be something of a torment. But there was a marked improvement in the quality of their food. Supper now consisted of ground meal soaked in a kind of sweet milky sauce. If Aram had not been shackled inside the foul, cramped hell of the wagon he would have been delighted by this novel treat.

  His wounds and contusions, imparted to him by the thick planks of the wagon, began to grow callused as the level of abuse slackened and the toughening of his body assuaged some of the misery he’d endured for the last several weeks. He began to feel well enough to ponder the reason for his transport. Judging by the generally unimproved nature of the roads they traveled, they were not getting nearer to any major cities; indeed they seemed to be entering into a wild region. Aram didn’t know what this meant but it planted in him the seeds of hope. Perhaps the long miserable transportation he’d endured would, in the end, be a blessing on his efforts to escape his bonds.

  He was chained on the left or north side of the wagon as it went eastward which meant that his view through the slats was to the south. In that direction the ground rose away from the road in a long slope, punctuated by dry, sandy watercourses. The watercourses appeared to run under the road, which probably meant that there was a sort of valley behind him but he couldn’t turn his head around far enough to verify if such was the case.