Page 110 of The Salt King

“I . . . no, but . . . what?” said Avelyn, lost.

“The mine, An El, the miners’ songs,” Jericho said. He sounded spacey, as though he had let go of something he had been worrying about because it had already happened and there was nothing left he could do. “It’s all to one purpose, yes? To keep the King asleep. Down in the deep, the King sleeps, and dreams; it’s the first thing Hreod children are taught. That he exists: and that he’s asleep. Every time a mining shift goes down, they sing it. Generation after generation. But Hreoda know too much, they see his dreams in the deep and they know what the images are in the salt, they know this place and their own history, they know he can wake, so what’s necessary? An El, the firewall for emergencies, so that if Hreod belief isn’t enough to keep him asleep, there’s a monastery full of people who believe in no other god but their own.” He sounded exhausted. “While there are humans in Hreodwater, the King sleeps, even if he’s trying to wake. Trying is bad enough, that can kill Outsiders at An El, but to actually wake, the light that would bring—it’s all been built for that to be impossible. Unless . . . unless, someone goes down to wake him.”

“It’s a prison. You—have to let him out,” Avelyn said slowly. “I wonder how you make him go back in.”

“We need to do it. He will help. He always has.”

They had argued enough already. Without really meaning to, Avelyn pulled his rosary out and wound it around his hand, digging his nails into the cross. “Are we really talking about setting loose a demon so that it fights angels for us?”

“I’m talking about setting loose something that shows every sign of wanting to protect people here, against things that kill people by the tens of thousands,” Jericho said wearily. He pulled out his cigarettes. He didn’t bother with the lighter and just conjured fire into the palm of his hand. And then, because he was still himself: “Want one?”

“Thanks.” Avelyn swallowed. “That’s a good trick, with the . . . How did you do it?”

“I didn’t,” Jericho said. “I just stopped believing there’s no such thing as Hell and let you take over for a second.”

They sat in silence. Avelyn noticed wretchedly that the tobacco was beautiful. Jericho was watching the smoke, his head resting back against the wall.

“The salt light is like fog here,” Avelyn said at last. In here, there was a layer of it just above them, about three feet off the floor and three feet from the ceiling. Lower than the courtyard, he thought pointlessly, and then just as pointlessly: it has something to do with surface area. The enormous curtain walls of the castle kept it twelve feet away. A smallish room; three feet. Jericho; inches. “It’s everywhere. That’s why those things can’t find him. I think it’s camouflage. I think . . . we need to walk around until we can find somewhere brighter. The King should be wherever it’s brightest.”

Jericho nodded once. They both looked at the room’s interior door, small and arched, leading . . . somewhere, deeper into the castle.

Avelyn had to sit for a few seconds with the weight of what they were about to do crouching in his head like an anvil. Finally, he stood up, and held his hands out to help Jericho up too. “Jericho . . . did you say Saint Hildegard left records? Have you read them?”

“Yes.”

“What does she say?”

41

East Anglia

1067

It wasn’t often that anyone complained to the abbey that people weren’t turning to salt. Hildegard had puzzled over the message all the way to Hreodwater. It was surely, surely that somebody had turned to salt: or, she had thought so. But when she reached the fen and the Flood after the long ride from Lincoln, and a man rowed out to fetch her after she lit the beacon fire on its little stone pillar at the water’s edge, he only nodded mournfully when she said she was here about the salt problem.

“Yes,” he said, “An El, we think he must be sick. He did nothing to the chevaliers. They came through and took the salt mine right from us, and nothing. Sorry about the pigs,” he added.

It was a kind of English she hadn’t heard before. It had other, older words in it. The nearest she knew was the way the shepherds counted—that was Celtic counting—but this was more . . . more. She could understand, or at least, she could guess.

“An El?” she repeated, not sure if it was an obvious thing he was just pronouncing differently. She might have been able to concentrate better if the back of the boat hadn’t been full of happy pigs. One of them came to snuffle at the pockets of her cloak. She stroked its ears. She’d always liked pigs; and she was inclined to like a man who took his for outings.

The man pointed just past the rocky island that, she understood from the map, was Hreodwater. There was a littler island next to it, linked by a wooden causeway. It was a way off, but she could see what might have been standing stones around it. “An El,” he repeated. “Hregs Halen. I don’t know English for this. But he didn’t come this time.”

She couldn’t tell if he was talking about a person, or a thing. “I see,” she lied, and hoped things would become clear if she shut up and listened. She had come to these islands five years ago from Byzantium, and initially she had panicked, because there seemed to be nearly as many languages as there were people, and not a single one of them was normal Greek, but what you soon learned was that in any given situation, most people were probably only trying to say one of five things to you, and none of the five things was wildly unexpected. An El would be a standing stone, or an old curse.

“When was last time?” she asked instead.

He pointed to the stones again. “The Northmen. The Roman soldiers before then, but you can’t see them until you go down the mine.” He looked upset. “But this time—the chevaliers, they just stormed through, they killed Beortnoth, and now they say the mine is theirs. Nothing happened to them.”

“What should have happened?”

“He turns them to salt,” he said seriously.

She wondered if that was true. She had passed salt stones on the way here. And out in these wilds, so far from any real civilisation . . . who knew what old magic still stalked the marshes.

She was tired. It was a long way from Whitby, and the weather was bitter, and her bad leg was hurting. She had thought Northumbria was cold, but Hreodwater was worse. The mist, which tasted of salt, seemed to seep into everything. She wanted to ask if was possible to sit down for a while, but she could already see it wouldn’t be. The ferryman didn’t only seem drawn and weary; he looked frightened.

The town was rich. She could see why the French had come. The buildings were stone, the windows glazed with jewel-coloured crystal, and the people she saw were dressed as well as any courtier in Byzantium. They all looked strange. Britain had all sorts in it—Northmen, Celts, Saxons, now the French, not to mention church people from across Europe and Africa, doing the gradual work of bringing this isolated, rainy little island into the broader economy and faith of the rest of the world, but she had never seen people like the Hreoda before.