Chapter 36: Neville – White Silence
Marching to the mines of Anuré was easier but more sinister than following the Frontier paths. Neville and his men had to take shelter in the forest twice, pressing their backs against the trees as the storm whipped the land with snow and wind. Even so, no man died. The darkness that made their swords swifter also protected them from the storms, suffocated nature.
The soldiers in Anuré, like those from Lencon, fell like petals in a storm. For a while now Neville had seen death as petals because death rained just like them and, in a way, it was beautiful. Between death and grey, at least death made sense. Anuré didn’t make sense.
Red petals made the rocks slippery. A silence fell. It was Maëlle’s shallow silence when she came out of the mines, swallowing with her eyes all those bodies on the rocks, like old discarded doormats. She didn’t see petals. The Eslarian’s haggard silence while he held his strong bread-shaping hands, now gnawed by the mines. The white silence when Maëlle and the Eslarian refused to go with Neville and leave the other slaves behind. There were forty-three of them.
‘They’ll die on the way,’ said Neville. It was an excuse. Seven years earlier, he wouldn’t have thought of leaving those people. Robert was right: Neville was sick of the soul.
The Eslarian pulled another slave from the mines, a skeleton covered in withered skin. The skeleton widened his eyes and Neville felt another silence behind him: that of his own soldiers seeing for the first time a cruelty without blood, that gnawed away the flesh from that man’s very bones. The dilacerated death of soldiers in the Mouth of War was routine, that living skeleton was a nightmare.
Neville found the wagons that took the slaves from Lencon to Anuré and used them to transport sixteen of the weakest people. The skeleton was among them. The others, including Maëlle and the Eslarian, had to walk.
The silence between Neville, the Eslarian, and Maëlle. It was almost a geographical barrier of guilt between the two rebels and he who still served Henrique of Baynard. Neville’s guilt for being absent the last seven years; Maëlle’s and the baker’s guilt for having, in a way, betrayed Neville with their silence about the revolution. He wanted to protect them, they wanted to save him.
While they traveled, a new type of silence grew. Something intrigued, lost, sad, but a kind of sadness that no one could explain. It reminded one of loss and the reason for it were the slaves: some from Patire, some from Baynard, and even some from Deran.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Manó. ‘Anuré is in Patire. There should be prisoners only from Patire.’
‘Deran and Baynard sell their prisoners to Patire,’ said Maëlle.
The skeleton’s bony voice sounded like a saw and it said:
‘In slavery we’re all Franish.’
The silence that followed was also Franish.