Page 9 of The Salt King

What stood on the island in the Flood was not the abbey. It was the black tower that marked the entrance to the mine. The way was framed by mammoth tusks, carved with signs so old that nobody could read them anymore. Salt light breathed from the mouth of the shaft, bright enough to dust Avelyn’s shadow onto the white path. He was sure it had never been like this when he was young. Another rat shot by, leaving a furrow in the snow.

As he passed under the bone archway, a drumbeat ghosted up from the long passage down; then the song.

Bring him oak and bring him silver now,

And carve the black salt crown.

There were songs for moving through the mine and songs for working, songs for cleaning tools, and for the initiation of witches. Some were shanties, made to keep people in time when they were doing dangerous things. Some were hymns. The hymn to the Salt King was what you sang on your way up or down.

He had been prepared to see salt light. But he had not foreseen what it would be to hear a familiar song that had never been recorded, nor heard beyond the place of its first singing. You couldn’t listen to the hymns of the Hreoda on any streaming service. They had never been burned onto a disc, or even etched into the wax of a phonograph. For him, they had been as irretrievable as the years.

Oh, but now . . .

The hymn had many parts, as rich as any requiem sung at a great basilica, but different too. It soared and hollowed, parts straying and coming back, under and over the drums. He ached to sing it. To come down the mine and not sing to the King—it was blasphemy.

He wove his rosary between his fingers and squeezed hard, imprinting Christ into his palm.

He met the miners about halfway down, and stood back against the wall to let them pass. A couple of them noticed he had no light, and looked him over interestedly. By salt light, their eyes shone violet.

The difference between Hreoda and Outsiders was stark. The miners were all much taller than anyone from elsewhere. Age meant seniority, not fragility, and as always, the foreman at the head of the shift was a woman in her seventies, axe swinging easily from one hand. He recognised her. He recognised all of them. They were, like all Hreod mining shifts, one clan—the Hringen, which meant “silver”—and their tattoos all showed Saint Hildegard, because they worked on the series of deep shafts called the Saint’s Way.

There had always been three Hreod mining clans: the Hringen, the Balen, and the Brocken. Well. Two now. There was nobody left of the Brocken except him.

The overstretched-longbow feeling came back, and then slowly loosened again when no one recognised him. He didn’t look Hreod from any distance. He had stopped growing when he left Hreodwater, so he was only five foot seven, and the contact lenses hid his eyes.

At the back, some children were playing a game with handfuls of salt. They would throw it a little way into the air and then catch it in their hands and consult the shapes it made. Sometimes one of them laughed and looked triumphant, sometimes frustrated. He could remember doing that, sort of. It had been important. The shapes the salt made could tell you . . . something. It was like reading tea leaves. He did remember that his grandmother wouldn’t let him go down any deeper than the very shallowest shafts until the salt made the right shapes in his hands, but he couldn’t remember the rules or any of the rest.

It was shocking, how much he didn’t remember. He’d been sixteen when he left. If you were old enough to abscond with a mad Welsh priest, you were old enough to remember ordinary details about your life, but he didn’t.

He was one of the few people who had liked the Covid lockdowns, because now everyone else knew what it was like not to remember things you should have remembered. The lockdowns blurred together, and it was possible to remember individual pieces of any one of them, but wholly impossible to remember consecutive events. Sometimes someone said, God, do you remember the tier system, or, Am I hallucinating or did I have to do some kind of test in a gym car park somewhere . . . ? And you thought: Christ, I do remember that, but I wouldn’t have if nobody had mentioned it, and even if my life depended on it I couldn’t tell you when that was or what was on either side of it. What else is finning around down there in the dark?

That was Hreodwater, for him.

“Don’t worry,” one of the bigger girls said to one of the smaller boys, who was looking miserable about whatever his salt was doing or not doing. “The King has been dreaming strong this last week. I could do it before, but sometimes I can’t now. All I get is the man on the causeway.”

“Who is he?” the little boy asked. “Why is the King dreaming about the man?”

“I don’t know. He might have been here last week or in the time of the mammoth,” the girl said. “You can never tell.”

“Do you think he really is waking?”

“Probably not,” she said philosophically, and then to Avelyn, only half seeing him, “Evening, uncle.” Then she did the first genuine double take he had ever seen a human do.

“Evening,” he said.

The children turned right around to see him go. He pretended not to notice.

It was warm. Salt light was. Not warm enough for him to take his coat off yet, but very much an improvement on the fen outside. Warm, and stronger the deeper he walked. Just when he was beginning to think he’d been walking for longer than he should be, the salt-bright passageway opened out onto a broad platform, and there it was.

He slowed down. When he was little, this had just been where his family worked. He’d come here every day and never looked at it, because it was normal, and anything normal is boring. Distantly he’d thought that everyone grew up in salt mines. He had never seen it. You had to go away and come back again, to see.

The cavern was vast, glittering with salt and lit, for Outsiders, by three titan chandeliers ablaze with candles. For Hreoda . . . the walls breathed salt light.

In the middle of the cavern was a lake. The water was turquoise, and so clear that even from where Avelyn stood, a hundred feet above, he could see the eels under the surface.

On the lake was an island, and on the island was An El. As he started down the long zigzagging stairway that would take him down to the shore, the bells tolled ten. It had taken him nearly two hours to cross the fen and the Flood.

The abbey was a chaotic collection of what looked like lots of smaller buildings stacked and fitted together, some with high, broad windows, some with tiny narrow ones, some walls curving, some straight, some with stairways outside. An enclosed bridge with stained glass windows connected the two towers near the top, spilling coloured shadows onto the roofs below. All of it was built from halite.