Page 111 of The Salt King

They were . . . healthy. Even in great cities, especially in great cities, there were beggars, and people with sicknesses and injuries, and limbs that had formed differently to the usual way. In Britain, because it had never been fit for human habitation anyway, everyone was pale and washed-out in the way normal people were only if they were right on the edge of dying of plague. But nobody here looked ill. Nobody stooped, or trembled; nobody limped, or went carefully over the steep ways in the rocky town. They were tall, as well, and much darker than Saxons, more like the ancient images of the hunters who had been in these lands in the time of the ice and drawn themselves onto the walls of the caves beside the great tusked beasts they had followed here, and . . .

And they all had the same eyes. Violet.

She shifted her grip on her staff, trying to transfer her weight less painfully. She was struggling with the steep steps. This place hadn’t been made for anyone like her. Clearly you walked well here, or you didn’t go anywhere.

At the top of the hill was a kind of palace, ancient and low-slung but with a miraculous dome that looked like it was made of glass. This, said the ferryman, was where the Witan sat. They were gathering now. She was grateful for the little wait, inside by a fire. Someone gave her some hot wine, and after the chill of the fen, it was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

“Are you injured, sister?” one of the guards asked her, polite and worried. “Do you need to see a witch?”

Witch: physician, it must have meant. The two were the same in plenty of heathen places.

“No, no, I’ve had this since I was a child,” she explained.

He blinked as though the idea of a childhood injury lasting into a person’s forties was as outlandish as seeing a giraffe lope across the fen.

She had half thought she had misunderstood the ferryman, but what the Hreod ealdormen had to say was the same. There was—something—they called An El, and it usually protected Hreodwater, but this time, it hadn’t. The French knights had come, and taken the mine, which was the town’s only source of wealth, killed the witches, and nothing had happened to those riders at all, and everyone was baffled. The person who told most of the story was . . . Hildegard couldn’t tell what she had used to be. Perhaps she had been the jarl, subservient to York; or perhaps the queen.

Now, though, the French had explained that she was a regional secretary who must report to a new baron from France thank you, and if she didn’t like it, they were happy to burn down Hreodwater just like they’d burned down half the towns in England.

Hildegard started to feel more and more uncomfortable, because nothing like this had happened to her before. She had never been completely unable to tell if she was talking to ordinary people who were worried about something real, or people from such an isolated place that their stories were real to them and they were mourning the breaking of a legend that everyone had believed was true history. The language was making it impossible to tell whether the queen was educated or not, whether she was the kind of person who travelled, who understood the world beyond the fen, or the kind who would see the edge of the flood as the edge of everything.

There was an empty chair next to her, and she had a haunted look. Those two things together made Hildegard suspect the French had also requisitioned the heir.

“Sister,” the perhaps-queen said at last. “You are not from England?”

“Constantinople. It’s . . .” Unbelievably far away, if your whole life was a tiny island in a salt marsh. “In the east.”

“Like Saint George,” someone murmured, and to her surprise, there were approving nods.

“Strong magic comes from there,” the lady said, very carefully, and clearly trying to choose words she was sure Hildegard would know. “We are pleased you came, but—we can understand it is hard to know if we are mad in the way of tiny places, or if we speak true.”

Hildegard had hoped it wasn’t written all over her face, but she had one of those faces that was a fully illuminated manuscript, with beasts and devils etched in turquoise around the capital letters. “No, I believe you. I’m just not sure what I can do.”

“We need for a holy person to be in talking to An El,” the lady said quietly. “We have no holy people here now, and no magic. The French, they took our witches.”

Someone spat. It was fast becoming the traditional reaction to any mention of the French. The French called their king Guillaume the Conqueror. The English called him William the Bastard.

Hildegard nodded slowly. Christ and the Church must never have made it to Hreodwater, even if stories of Saint George had. The abbey wouldn’t love that, but in all the ways that mattered, it was irrelevant. They were in need and they had asked the abbey for help, and the only good thing to do was give it. That was how you shone the light of the Church into the dark places: not by turning away when someone needed a lamp. “How do I talk to him?”

“He is north, under the earth.” The lady glanced around the other elders, some of whom nodded. “We are in hoping that he is alive, but we fear he is not.”

Hildegard tried not to let her mind leap ahead, but she’d always had a frog mind, and it couldn’t help leaping. Sometimes, it was useful: sometimes it meant she heard a foreign word and she could guess what it meant. Sometimes, like now, she had Hell visions of some poor soul these people had decided was special somehow and locked underground. It wasn’t out of the question. People had a way of making their own gods when there were none of the usual kind forthcoming. You took a person, and if you made them separate enough and strange enough—first, you made someone like her, someone in holy orders who people trusted. Stranger and more separate, and you had what she suspected these people would call a witch, and the stranger the witch, the stronger the magic. Stranger still, and more terrible, and you could make . . . something else.

“Can you take me?” she asked.

“Yes,” the lady said. She paused. “But—it is dangerous, for an Outsider. You will need armour.”

“Armour,” Hildegard echoed, dismayed. “I’m not a warrior.” She touched her staff, as though her habit and veil didn’t say it clearly enough.

“No. Against the salt light. It is strong, where he is. We have silver in us, but you will need it from the smith.”

Hildegard didn’t know what that meant, but it seemed churlish to argue now. With a tightening worry deep in her chest that they were sending her towards something much more real than a curse or a standing stone, she let the lady lead her away, to an antechamber where, already standing ready on a wooden mannequin, was an exquisite suit of silver armour, worked with writhing vines and dragons, and silver mail that flowed like mercury.

On another island in the flooded fen, across a wooden causeway and beneath the archway made of mammoth tusks, there was a gash in the earth. It looked like someone had blasted through with explosives. The way was uneven, not mined out. The only thing that looked like people had made it was the stairway down. Steps cut into the rock salt. Down, into the dark. She took a torch, and the sword she always brought whenever she travelled now, in case of French knights. When she looked back, everyone was watching her, looking drawn. The perhaps-queen bowed slightly to her, and again, Hildegard had an urgent feeling she was being sent to do something she didn’t understand, with consequences she couldn’t know.

But that was what faith was. You did what you could, you judged as well as you were able, and you trusted God for the rest. He wouldn’t look after you—the opposite. He might throw you to the lions, have you shot apart, or burned alive. You didn’t trust him with your safety. That was irrelevant. But you did trust that whatever was to come, however horrifying, was to a purpose.

Even so, she hoped that the golden age of martyrs was over. She turned to face the darkness.