The High Keep

Ravenwood Excerpt
Elyas and Tamlan had lived in the same part of Northern Isarea, but they hadn’t met until the Agyr ‘introduced’ them to each other. Taken from their homeland and sold, the men labour for one of Vingrom’s quarry-masters. The pay is non-existent. The gruelling work can break you, body and spirit. But places like Vingrom can make as well as break: men once strangers can quickly become friends. Brothers, even.

High on a shelf cut into the sheer crag face, Elyas adjusted his stance. Teeth bared, he readied himself for another swing of the long-handled hammer. He did try to keep his jaw relaxed to give his back teeth and throbbing head a rest, but before long it would always be clamped vice-like once more.

It wasn’t as if his face was wielding the stout length of wood with it’s heavy head of iron. His arms and back were doing most of the work, but his face could not help contributing. It insisted on cheering on his beleagured body, his flagging limbs, with a ghastly grimmace. After all, his face was part of him, and the job in hand called for every part, every sinew. It summoned the whole of him, from the throbbing soles of his ill-clad feet to his sun-baked, rain-soaked, wind-beaten scalp. The greedy labour seized him each day and wedded him to the hammer—or some other pitiless implement—in an all-consuming, loveless partnership.

Taking in a sharp breath and releasing it as the hammer came arcing over his head, Elyas aimed another blow. His target was the head of an iron peg, protruding from between two wooden wedges jammed into a fissure in the rock. The peg top was not all that small—about half the palm of his hand—but it was almost the end of the day and weariness steals precision as sure as too much ale. The great iron hammer head glanced off the crown of the peg and a spark leapt. The blow diverted with little loss of force to the lip of the fissure. Splinters of stone flew. A razor-edged fragment struck Elyas’ cheek.

The young man straightened up, his lower back protesting like it belonged to someone with four times as many years under their belt. He cursed the peg, the rock and most of all the sledgehammer. A man or woman can have a kind of love for the tools of their trade, an affection of sorts, for the faithful objects that enable their owner to earn a living or maintain their home. But Elyas did not own the hammer, and the long hours using it put no coins in his hand, only calluses.

Elyas rubbed at his eyes; they felt full of dust and grit.

“Here, don’t rub at em, use water.” Tamlan, the other man on the outcrop with Elyas, moved to stand beside him, holding forth an unstoppered leather flask. Elyas put a cupped hand to it as his fellow slave poured a splash of water.

“You alright? Another inch or so and we’d have been callin you Eyeless Elyas.”

A stifled laugh escaped Elyas as he soothed his eyes with the tepid water. He pressed the back of a hand against his stinging cheek. A smudge of blood left it’s mark.

Tamlan crouched to examine the peg and it’s wooden splints. He tapped them a bit with his own hammer; a stubby one-handed type. Satisfied their positioning was still good, he stood up, turning his attention back on his work-party ally. “What’s so interesting about your hand, lad? Come on, have another go at it, before they take notice.” The older man looked down from their high position. He gazed around, checking on the whereabouts of their taskmasters.

“Looks like a rabbit,” said Elyas. He presented the back of his hand. What do you see, Tam?

“Rabbit? “ A corner of the older man’s mouth and his left eye pinched tight as he scrutinised the smudge of blood. “No… I don’t see a rabbit. Whatever it is, it’ll change. Your cut’s still running a bit.”

“Not if I use this hand.” Elyas pressed at his cheek firmly, this time using the back of his left hand. He looked at the resulting bloodstain.

Tamlan was getting impatient. He was as keen as Elyas for jests and jibes, friendly insults and idle talk. It helped them get through the days, reminded them that their bleak and mirthless situation was not all there was to the world. But you had to pick your time, and you had to keep watchful. Elyas was being a little too carefree.

“What, you got a pair of rabbits now, have you?”

Elyas ceased looking at his hands and instead used them to heft up the hammer, resting the long handle on a shoulder. He set his stance for another swing at the iron peg.

“It’s a reasonable effort at a flower. A rose, I think,” said Elyas.

Tamlan moved back to where he’d been setting more wedges and pegs in the long crack in the rock shelf they were trying to exploit. “Ah beautiful, that. A little rabbit and a rose. Maybe you should have them scratched in. Get them gone over with a thornhead scriber and woodsoot and you’ll be able to show em to your children’s children.”

Elyas gave his fellow rock-breaker a lopsided grin. Tam’s remark had been a deliberate invocation: a summoning up of an imagined future for Elyas. Many of their fellow stone quarriers thought it better to never talk—even think—that way. Tormenting yourself with hopes and dreams could only make coping with the here-and-now harder. Most of those among the captives set to work at Vingrom started out determined to hold onto their hope. Almost all lost the fight eventually. The passing of time and unchanging circumstances formed a highly effective alliance, to relentlessly nurture the soul-sapping phantom that stalked each slave at the quarry: resignation.

Vingrom’s stubbornly resilient faction of hopers was small indeed, but Elyas intended to keep himself in their dwindling ranks until his last breath. Elyas and Tamlan had true mettle. But he and Tam had been bought to the quarrying settlement just four months ago, and they had yet to endure a winter there.

The sharp crack of iron on iron assaulted their ears once again.

“Good hit. Keep em like that and we can get this one done before day’s end, maybe,” remarked Tamlan.

Elyas was about to make some jibe about his compatriot’s enthusiasm for Agros’ relentless building schemes, but he espied a familiar taskmaster forty feet below, thumb tucked in his belt and face turned up towards the shelf the two men were working. Ever looking for an excuse to punish his charges, that one.

The young man swept the hammer up and over again, his lower back screeching in protest, breath a hissing whistle through teeth clenched once more. He thought of the taskmaster’s head as he struck the top of the iron stake.

 

The stockade that Elyas and Tamlan were assigned to lay at the west side of the outpost of Vingrom. Until recently there had been little more than an encampment. A cluster of small dwellings made from upright poles and animal hide coverings—Agyran Ghota lodges—had sheltered the first occupiers of Vingrom, before it had even been given that name. The camp had huddled in the middle of a shallow depression in the land, glowered down upon by the crag-riddled hills that had drawn the High Chieftain’s stonemasters to this remote corner of Agros.

Now less than two years later the place had it’s name and the Ghota lodges were gone, replaced by large, heavy-timbered huts. Elyas was one of almost three hundred souls living behind the tall palisades of Vingrom’s four almost identical stockades. If you could call it living.

The hut that had been Elyas’ quarters for the last months was a sturdy low-slung building that accommodated twenty men. Remnants of bark still clung to it’s thick logs, cracked in places like a dried-up riverbed. The big hut squatted glumly under it’s sod roof. At least that is how it seemed to Elyas, in it’s present situation. Put it elsewhere—exchange the looming grey hills for woodland and meadows, the trampled, dusty ground for a garden leading to a glinting stream—and it could be a pleasant dwelling. Provided some windows were put in to replace the handful of pitiful slots it had in its thick walls.