The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters:01)(34)

I opened my hands and raised them sharply, and the bat took wing into the lavender darkness. I did not look at Goewin. “How much I have betra





yed to you in one way or another,” I said bleakly.

“Do you?” she pressed.

“I had not dreamed of her in over a year,” I answered in a low voice, “and this summer I have dreamed of almost nothing else.” But I managed to smile at her. “Tonight I intend to dream of snow on the high moors.”





IX


The Copper Mines




I TRIED, I TRIED. But my fortune, with the summer, was at its ebb. To see you again, to part from you again, made me feel I was an unwelcome shadow of yourself lurking at the edges of other people’s lives. Your children seemed to settle easily into their new home, never thinking to connect themselves or me to your disgrace. But I could find no simple way, no quick way back to the even tranquillity of the previous year. When I returned to my room the first night after you had gone, the very disorder of the shelves that hung there seemed to reflect my mood. Beneath scattered bottles the plans for the blocked mine shaft lay unfinished on my desk, and now I found them to be flawed and ridiculous. Heedless of waste, I burned the offending scraps of parchment and threw out the empty vials.

I dreamed of Aksum again and started awake in the dead of night with the obvious solution to the unyielding cave wall. Kidane had once taken me to see the mine where he bought gold; there they had broken the rock in the pits with fire and vinegar, as the Romans had done, shoring the tunnels with arches of stone. I told Cado of this. He teased me for being high-minded, foreign, and old-fashioned, but behind all that he was intrigued with the idea. I knew a little of how it was done, and now Cado and I learned to split stone with fire. We worked together in the open air during moments of leisure. We blistered and burned our hands like children playing a forbidden game, intoxicated with the success of our experiments. One failed attempt made us laugh so drunkenly that neither of us could hold the flint steady to light another flame.

But our growing expertise sobered us, and at last we requested permission from Cadarn to fire the wall of our shaft. We were far enough from the chief mine workings that we would cause no danger beyond our own tunnel. Together with the six men under our leadership we shored our corridor with beams of oak, and began to break down the wall. We worked with slow but visible success; in a week we moved perhaps three feet forward in the tunnel. We came at last to a narrow cleft that bore promise of a cavern beyond, and the walls were streaked thickly with the green and blue of copper ore. After the last spirit-soaked rags had been forced into the dark fault and lit, and after the choking smoke had cleared, we found we had forced a passage wide enough for a man to slip through.

Cado went first, a lantern in his hand. He squeezed through the gap and then seemed to halt just beyond our reach and view, curiously silent and still. “What is it?” I called to him. “Are we through?”

He did not answer at once. When he spoke his voice was firm and low: “Come see, Medraut. The way’s narrow, but I think you can get by.”

It was narrow indeed; Tegfan, who is short but broad-chested, could not follow. But the others came behind me, curious and anxious to witness the proof of our success.

Such proof: utterly unexpected, and weirdly beautiful. The passage we had forced opened not to a cavern or tunnel but to a little natural chamber, with a low ceiling and rounded walls. The walls were infused with thick green streaks of malachite and smooth red clay, almost evenly spaced between fields of pale limestone: and sweeping across the curve of the walls were pictures like nothing I have seen before or since, painted by some human hand countless ages past. The images were of a tall, broad, heavy-antlered deer that dwarfed the awkward figures who appeared to stalk it. Here at the hill’s heart, this strange and savage hunt endured in the darkness of a forgotten time.

“But how did it get here?” I wondered aloud.

“There used to be another passage in,” Cado said, holding up his lantern. “See! The clay’s filled the entrance, not even a gap in the seam. How old can this be!”

I said with conviction, “I must show Lleu.”

“Who patches tile pictures with such love and skill.” Cado laughed. “Send Tegfan to get him. We’ll set up the supports till they get back.”

So it was that within the hour Lleu stood with me and Cado and our workmen in the hidden place under the earth, dark eyes ablaze with torchlight and excitement. He laughed aloud in the sheer pleasure of sharing in this secret beauty; laughed with real joy, though I know he was afraid to be so far from air and light and the open spaces of day. He lingered over each painting, forcing himself to wrench his gaze from one to the next. “This artistry, in such a place!” he exulted. “I couldn’t have dreamed such a thing if I hadn’t seen it.”