Blood in the Siege Tunnels
A fortress in the desert mountains. A savage battle must be waged above... and below.
For all his forty years, Murad had thought himself a brave man.
“I’ll stay and protect the village,” he’d said to his wife and daughters when they’d left him three weeks ago to flee from the Mutalqi army’s approach. “We’ve defended these terraces from desert brigands for thousands of years. I’ll protect it, as my forefathers did. With my life. I swear to Arruh.”
Then came the day when he looked out the window of his wattle hut and saw the dust from the distant Mutalqi horde sullying the horizon like a djinn birthed of the desert’s own malice.
In the corner a few feet away from him was his grandfather’s spear, its shaft of sturdy cypress and blade of bronze. He’d sworn to take up that spear and make a heroic final stand in his own home, but fear won the war for his heart. He left the spear and his hut and fled with other remaining villagers to the nearby stone fortress of Situ nestled a mile up the mountain slope where the Mutalqi’s enemies were making their defense.
The next morning, looking down from Situ fortress’ ancient ramparts, Murad watched the great Mutalqi army in their thousands array upon the verdant terraces of his village beneath the boiling sun. Pointed helmets and arquebuses as tall as their operators and a baggage train still forming out of the roiling mirages upon the desert wastes, carts rocking and standards beating in a dry wind. Nearer to Murad, just over yonder ridge between the terraces of barley and pomegranate orchards with their recumbent branches, he watched the enemy regulars ransack his home, seize his fellow village men who’d remained behind in a last stand, and cut out their tongues for blasphemy.
He realized he’d left more behind there than just his spear.
He looked back across his refuge of Situ: an ancient fort of gunpowder-black stones hewn using long-forgotten methods. Around a hundred of Murad’s kinsmen had likewise abandoned their huts and fled to Situ, almost entirely men like he who’d stayed behind. The fortress’ current garrison was around two-hundred Credic foreigners, followers of a faith similar to Murad’s but acknowledging Il’Fikar, the Vicar, some dignitary or presbyter from the remote city of Grova Marna. These men were naturally pale, though reddened in the sunlight. They spoke strange languages and wore strange clothes. They did not trust Murad and the other refugees who looked and talked like the enemy.
But these followers of Il’Fikar – these Fikaroon, as the villagers called them – worshiped Arruh nonetheless, albeit under different name, tongue, and rituals. The Fikaroon’s subjugation was preferable to the Mutalqi’s, or so Murad told himself.
***
The Mutalqi assault began the next morning. By day their cannons hammered Situ’s walls. The echoes redounded on the bald and stratified mountains surrounding them. Night brought assaults with ladders. Mutalqi blood spilled across the stones but the Mutalqi had blood to spare. Nonetheless, Situ’s walls proved impregnable. It would not fall from above.
The Fikaroon’s lead engineer feared an underground assault. Standing on the ramparts with the garrison commander, he pointed over the wall to where the Mutalqi slaves and sappers entered crude shacks built into the hillside and left continuously with loads of dirt and stone. Those, the engineer said, were being dug to plant explosives underground. They would undo Situ’s walls from beneath.
Situ needed its own mines. Murad and the refugees would be the miners, and the Fikaroon their foremen.
Within two days a three-foot diameter hole was dug in the corner of Situ’s walled yard, angled into the mountain. Murad spent that time on the surface moving dirt, but by evening he was sent down into its mouth. On his first ever descent he lost his grip on the rope and slid and scraped his back and slid again a hundred feet more before finally stopping.
No light. Air hot and thick but unsatisfying to lungs and polluted with dust. No light. Only shapes, rumors of rock. No light.
Murad screamed. The darkness screamed back.
Something grabbed him.
“Quiet you fool!” spat another refugee turned miner. “You’ll start a cave-in!”
Someone slid down behind him. With a shuffle and strike of flint, the new man lit a candle and created objects out of the gloom. His hair was red and eyes were hard. “Chihi uluo?” he asked.
Murad and the other didn’t understand.
The foreman sighed and pulled something from his waist. A smallsword blade flickered next to the flame. “Avan,” he ordered. “Avan.”
That foreman’s name was Franico, a man Murad would never forget.
***
Cave darkness is more than darkness. It is the death of vision. It renders sight hallucinatory. It seeps inside heads, attacks candle flames, makes breaths louder and emptier.
Naked save for girded loins they toiled, filthy sweat gleaming on skin, subterranean creatures made of melting wax. They sang to one another like lost souls seeking partnership on the other side of this wall. They picked and scraped then paused and lifted their candles to study the strata along the walls and find the next seam or weak point like stone carvers upon a frieze. They loaded the dirt and their own excrement into leather buckets tied to ropes which ran up to the surface. When the bags were full they tugged the lines thrice. The bags lurched away into the dark.
The foremen worked alongside or sat nearby like spiders to these termites. Murad learned to fear them, but especially the red-haired Franico who carried knife and smallsword. They said Franico had already killed two miners for their rations and stowed their bodies somewhere in the depths. Aye, it happened, only four days ago… or was it six? None were certain. They worked sixteen hours at a time. When their companions relieved them, they slunk back through the tunnels, following the beacon lights of oil lamps set in narrow ventilation shafts, and made their way out. Once on the surface they slept at whatever hour it was, for the underground recognized no cadence. Ordinances of sun and moon were imports to this land with little purchase. Down below, the only timekeeper was the witness of the workers from above and the dull sound of the Mutalqi cannons which fired by day and cooled overnight.
Murad lay in Situ’s yard one sunrise – or sunset – and covered his eyes against the sky’s unblemished exposure. He fell asleep instantly, and dreamed he was reunited with his wife and daughters, but they’d forgotten his name. In the end his father arrived, and told him he should have died in his hut, spear in hand. “But I can live now!” Murad said. “I can live for the village!”
His father looked doubtful.
In the waking world someone kicked him. He opened his eyes and looked up at the foreman Franico.
“Tempo d’scabbo,” Franico said. Time to dig.
A Mutalqi cannon boomed.
***
The exception to the Fikaroon’s general cruelty was the lead engineer, a young man named Tenuto with a slight enough stature to squeeze through any hole and a foaming beard to collect dust along the way. He treated foreman and miner as equal. When mining had first begun, he’d brought the team together in the yard to educate them on the local geology, demonstrating with nuggets as samples. These were chert and marl, the softest and most hazardous for cave-ins. This is limestone – use your tools. Then stone of the same stuff as Situ. Efaisto, Tenuto called it. They scarcely followed.
By the end of the first week, the tunnels were wide enough that two men abreast could crouch but not stand, and reinforced with wood planking that could easily be demolished should the need arise. Tenuto checked each passage three times daily along with an escort of two men bearing candles like visitors to a crypt. Tenuto himself carried a peened copper disk of his own construction with a sharp rod protruding from one face like a comically oversized tack. He would periodically pause to pierce the wall or floor then put his ear to the pan with jaw slack and eyes rolled upward, listening for suspicions of the enemy through soil and stone.
On one such foray Murad saw the engineer stop midway through a passage like a dog catching a scent. His hand shot back to urgently grab the wrist of a bodyguard and bring the fellow’s candle right next to his. Staring fixedly at the flame, his face an anguished mask suspended in the gloom, Tenuto licked his dusty thumb and index and snuffed out only his candle, leaving the other lit.
From the smothered wick a delicate smoke tendril rose scarcely two inches, then crooked sideways like a ghostly finger and made for an infinitesimal crack in the wall.
They’d found a Mutalqi mine.
The defenders scurried out of the tunnels quiet as mice and stood in the yard almost naked in the sunlight. Next the armored soldiers quietly descended with swords and knives and a skin of gunpowder.
For ten minutes the sounds of carnage and melee emanated from the hole until finally a boom echoed up and the hole coughed dust. Five minutes later the soldiers emerged. Missing limbs. Broken faces. A blood trail painted up to the surface.
The commander nodded to Tenuto, the latter panting with anxiety.
Murad dragged himself to a well at the opposite end of the yard, drew a skin, and drank greedily. He leaned against the wall and stared into the darkness whence the water had come as though into his own grave. “I’m sorry!” he whispered. “Forgive me Arruh… I have not the courage of my fathers! Forgive me!”
Someone kicked him. It was the foreman named Franico.”Tempo d’scabbo.”
“But.. but I was just down there!”
Cannonfire struck and ricocheted off the curtain wall, deafening everyone inside. Franico didn’t flinch, but his lips moved: Tempo d’scabbo.
***
The successful interception of the Mutalqi sap confirmed their threat. Mining efforts were doubled. Y-shaped stakes like divining rods were driven into the tunnels every sixty feet which the foremen could grasp bare-handed at the crux to feel vibrations in their skulls and teeth.
The miners’ songs were forbidden. The enemy might hear them.
Murad seldom saw the sky now. He would find excuses to pause beside the oil lamps where the venting air was slightly fresher, more full. But the rest of the tunnels reeked like a sick man’s bowels. Many miners fell ill with vomiting and dysentery, and their effluence puddled in the low points for the lines and their leather buckets to snake through. The puddles riled, then settled.
***
A rumble, and not of cannonfire.
Clouds gathered and rain pummeled the mountains. The men aloft could no longer see the village through the veil. A queer panic was overtaking the engineer and he ran about the yard shouting like a trapped hen. Scant light reflected off the disturbed surface of water at the cistern’s bottom.
Down below, Murad was squashing through a tunnel a few feet behind Franico. A bucket line lay down their path, the rope running in and out of each squalid pool.
“Pirem!” Franico suddenly hissed.
Murad froze.
Franico drew his smallsword and crept ahead, taking the candle with him, his body taut.
“Let me follow, Sir!” Murad whispered, for Franico had the only light. “Please let me follow!”
Franico looked back with a terrible glare to compel silence, then continued on.
Murad’s hand went to the wall, but a clinging wetness there coated his fingertips. He looked to see a seep forming in a dirty yellow streak of marl running diagonally down the wall. He could have pushed his finger through it.
He opened his mouth to speak, but too late. There came the sound of worlds breaking.
The tunnel shook and the puddles leaped like water sloshed in a pan. Murad tumbled backwards but this saved his life for the passage sheared straight down the marl seam and Murad’s last eyeful of light was Franico’s terrified gaze as the roof fell and pinned him to the ground and his candle slipped and darkness had its way.
More crashes. Murad scrambled backwards but now the walls were blasting water and the taste of clay was in his mouth. He could feel the levels rising too quickly and he squatted but slipped under where there was no sound either. His head shot up again and cracked against the stone roof and he screamed and the mine mocked him.
His foot touched something. Round and rough.
The rope! Praise Arruh, the rope!
His bare toes splayed and straddled the line and step by step he pressed out. The water was rising and now reached his mouth and he craned his neck and flanged his lips and slurped air. He slipped and rose again and found the rope and kept moving. He would not die here. Not in this way. Not in this way.
The tunnel turned, then curved up, and when he reached the ascent he grabbed the rope and clambered up the path slickened by other fleeing miners and when he burst from the mine he looked up at the baleful, hemorrhaging sky that had tried to drown him, and beneath that deluge the clay ran off his body like blood. At the yard’s other end, one of Situ’s flanking towers was wholly collapsed. A huge chunk of ground had been removed from beneath it, and in its breach the Fikaroon were meeting the Mutalqi in horrific combat.
Someone grabbed Murad by the shoulders, shouting. Murad began to fight back until he realized it was Tenuto himself.
“He’s asking if anybody was down there with you,” someone interpreted.
Murad looked absently back at the tunnel and spat clay. “Nobody.”
***
The Mutalqi assault continued into the night, only abating in the morning hours. Situ’s garrison hastily plugged the breach and laid their dead and dying in the yard. By dawn’s light Tenuto stood in the yard with his eyes shut while the commander screamed in his face. The soldiers had their battlefield above ground, the commander said, and the engineer had his below. This was Tenuto’s failure; the blood of the dead was on his hands.
Long after the commander’s diatribe ended, Tenuto remained standing there staring at the rows of bodies. He was seen to be weeping, but made no sound.
Most of Situ’s tunnels had collapsed in the explosion. Many hands and much equipment lay buried. Work would be slower, and digging implements would need to be improvised from wood or stone. At least a third of their system had drowned in the feculent, sulfuric water. Volunteers tied lines around their waists and dove for survivors. They rescued three trapped miners before a diver didn’t return or respond to lifeline signals. They hauled him out dead.
Another day and Tenuto had constructed two siphons and a bucket chain at the steepest point to be pulled by three men. He could have built a wheel, but was denied the resources. Bodies were exhumed, pale and bloated like a hideous transformation interrupted. Murad helped lay them with the others. He didn’t see Franico’s. When he laid down to rest, he imagined Franico’s corpse floating somewhere just beneath him.
They never could have rescued Franico in time, even had they known. Murad reminded himself of this over and over and over.
The following day. The water subsided from the first set of passages. Tenuto himself descended with his bodyguards. Wading through chest-deep water they eventually found themselves looking through a narrow fissure of smooth, damp limestone blown open along a tunnel wall like the stone’s slightly parted lips. Not even a foot wide.
Tenuto reached his lamp through to inspect the crawlspace, then hoisted himself up and into the crack.
“Sir Tenuto!” his bodyguards flew into panic. “Sir Tenuto, wait!”
They only got a view of his bootheels as he squirmed out of sight.
A minute passed. Then another. Then ten more. Then they heard shouting.
Up above, Murad was laying the last body when he heard the shouts from the hole as Tenuto emerged, shouting one word over and over. “Ilatro! Ilatro! Virika ul ilatro!”
Murad turned to the man next to him. “What did he say–?”
But someone else was emerging from the hole, pale as death but carried by his companions.
The pale, red-haired soldier with the smallsword and dagger rested on his knees and gasped, then looked across the yard. Franico’s eyes found Murad, and watched him.
***
Tenuto had hypothesized the Mutalqi sap had ruptured the fort’s cistern and caused the flood, but it was more than that. The detonation had exposed a gushing spring which ran entirely apart from the cistern: a subterranean river.
Situ was now suffering daily assaults at the breach. It would not survive another undermining. And dirt and stone was still being carried out from the enemy’s mines. The Mutalqi were still digging. Even more worrisome, in the explosion’s rubble they’d found a shovel that was not theirs with thick linen tied around the blade. The Mutalqi were blunting their tools with cloth to muffle their approach.
But now Tenuto had an endless weapon with which to fight back.
They pumped and hauled the remaining water out, then built a reservoir of wood and wattle positioned high above the first descent, tens of thousands of gallons ready to be released. The next Mutalqi tunnel they detected would receive a terrific spate.
With the recent loss of manpower, they could no longer tunnel so aggressively. The strategy changed from interception to detection. They dug new passages, and these ran steeply down and dead-ended in pits the engineer appraised as acoustically resonant, usually near igneous deposits which could gather sound most effectively. Each of these listening pits was round and hardly six feet across and reachable by a steep incline. Sewage gathered on the floor a few inches deep and several feet wide; ever enterprising, Tenuto had sticks driven into even these to catch any resonances.
Murad was assigned his own listening pit. Franico immediately volunteered to join him.
Murad descended first, with Franico behind. They brought a bucket for excrement, and each carried a candle – a requirement this deep, for if either flame suffocated then that meant the air was dead and so were they.
They took a rope slowly down and Murad raised the candle to behold his new home. The puddle. The sticks like stripped bones. A dark volcanic boulder wrinkling up one wall. The cadaverous miasma.
Franico pushed past him and sat down just outside the puddle. Murad found a place opposite. They sat and sat and sat.
***
The candles and the pit. The still and putrid water. The hot and empty air. The darkness. Each time Murad looked at Franico, Franico looked back at him. Like a wolf on the other side of a campfire.
Noises drifting down from above. A miner brought them a daily ration of water and coarse bread, and replaced their excrement bucket. He left without light. Later he came again with the same supplies. When questioned, he frowned at Murad and said a day had passed. Already the surface was becoming a rumor, as slippery as the entry passage.
A third day. Murad dreamed of his family, but woke and could not remember details. Franico tried to speak to him multiple times, but Murad couldn’t understand.
A fourth day, or period they called day. The stick in the water translated ripples out across the pool several times. They reported it. Tenuto visited out of the blackness. He tested the equipment, listened for awhile with his strange copper tack, thanked them, and left. His eyes were redder than the saffron clay with sleeplessness and his skin white as raw roots. He didn’t return. Perhaps other cavities had more promising activity. Murad drew his own conclusions about the signals they were receiving. The ripples are likely from the ground still settling. The ripples say naught else. The ripples are but rumors and shadows. Like all other things. The vigil continued.
A fifth day. Nothing and nothing. Rations never came. Perhaps Situ was overrun. Perhaps Tenuto and the Fikaroon were dead already. Perhaps the Mutalqi found the hole in the yard and simply covered it. What a trick that would be.
A sixth day. “What are you waiting for?” the miner asked the foreman. “I tried to kill you once. Why not take revenge now?” No reply. Was the foreman hesitating, or biding his time?
A seventh day. Or an eighth. The darkness is a patient thing. It watches their candles turning to waxen pools. It leers above them while they sleep, and when they wake its inky residue lingers on their jaws, their cheekbones, the alcoves of their eyes. It lets them imagine a world past this stone womb where dwell odd figments. Sun and sky. Wife and child. Day and night. It covets time. It dandles time. It is become time.
***
Their eyes opened slowly. Waked by some faint instinct. Something in the ether.
Without moving from their slumbering positions they looked at one another, the whites of their eyes shining starkly in the near darkness. They looked down at the puddle between them. Flat and stagnant, save for a single point in the exact middle…
A perfectly circular indent, barely two inches wide, was forming on the pool’s surface. The smallest crater upon the mirror, smooth in its center and smooth along the lip, as if the water’s surface were of temple marble and this impression shaped intentionally by its craftsmen.
They stared at this anomaly in total silence for an entire minute, until a dark grain of dust at the pool’s outskirts traveled across the surface straight toward that indent and slipped into its center and vanished. Then the illusion broke and they knew then what they were looking at.
A drain. And as they stared, the floor fell out beneath them.
Flashes of light and darkness. A dizzying crash of sound and energy. Gravity stolen. Murad fell and could not breathe then struck wet stone.
His candle was out. Another still burned. Through the dust Murad could see they’d fallen less than ten feet. His lungs were empty and he forced himself to inhale.
Someone was screaming like an animal.
They’d fallen straight into the enemy’s tunnel. The screaming man was a Mutalqi slave as naked as Murad and half his body pinned beneath a basalt boulder. He was still howling when Franico raised his candle, then bent.
The screaming stopped. Blood flowed black in the candlelight. Above his torn throat the slave made wide-eyed gesticulation as if desperately trying to make some final statement. Then he died.
Voices down the passage. From the direction of the Mutalqi.
Franico looked Murad directly in the eyes, still holding wet blade and wavering light. He threw the candle down and doused the world.
Murad struggled backwards in the darkness and began to scream. His imagination conjured the foreman’s vengeful knifepoint seeking soft flesh and he waved an arm wildly.
Franico’s hand caught his wrist, then the other clamped on Murad’s mouth and closed off all noise. His throat would be cut next…
It wasn’t. Franico held him there.
Mutalqi voices came closer.
Franico let go of Murad’s throat, then a moment later something cylindrical settled into Murad’s palm. Franico was handing him his knife. Murad wasn’t being slain, he was being armed.
Murad closed his fingers. Franico patted them, then let go and stepped away into the gloom.
In caves, even suspicions of light become discernible. Murad saw the shape of the mine twenty yards down the passage long before the five Mutalqi investigators turned the corner and saw the wreckage. Their lanterns were blinding. Their language was only partly intelligible to Murad. They spoke of the mine, and the cave-in, and of Situ.
Across from Murad, pressed into the broken wall in the shadows, Franico raised a finger to his lips.
The Mutalqi were less than twenty feet away before the frontmost one wearing an officer’s bronze bracer saw Murad and cried out, “Survivor!” He ran to where Murad lay and set down his spear. “How did this happen, slave? You are injured?”
Murad was still on his back, breathing so hard he couldn’t reply. His hand burned on the dagger hidden at his side.
“This blood! You bleed?”
“Look!” cried a second. “Another dead! Where did–”
It happened so quickly Murad nearly didn’t see. Franico stepped from the shadows and stuck his smallsword into and out of the second Mutalqi’s armpit. Blood squealed from the wound and Franico brushed this victim aside and his blade shot forth again into the bottom of the next man’s neck.
The officer was still turning around. Murad had a moment to imagine the wife, family, and community of this man, a piece of Arruh’s precious creation, a universe somewhere above this stone.
Murad drove the blade into the side of the officer’s neck where it stopped against something light and sturdy. The officer gibbered and his fingers covered the opening and Murad brought his foot up and kicked him aside and leaped to his feet, but the enemy lanterns were swinging and falling as Franico fought with the others and there was screaming and then one Mutalqi fell while the other ran away down the passage whence he’d come.
Franico reached for a fallen lantern then winced. His hand was cut and rilling dark blood. He tried again, lifting the lantern and looking back at Murad.
Now the Mutalqi passage echoed with cries and shouts. More were coming, their lights banking around the bend like the first group’s. They would be here in moments. Fear crept into Murad’s heart.
“Ritirabe! Ritirabe!” cried Franico, gesturing up the tunnel toward Situ. Though the pit had collapsed, it had left a ramp back to the rope. They could still warn Situ. They could still open the floodgates.
Murad turned to flee, then stopped at the sight of something.
Franico struggled up into the previous cavity, then turned around. “Non senetime? Ritirabe! Sontan arribone!”
Mutalqi reinforcements were indeed arriving, but still Murad remained stuck staring down at the spear left behind by the officer. It had a shaft of sturdy cypress and blade of bronze.
He picked up his grandfather’s spear, taking a moment to feel the places worn down by his forebears, grooves he’d always dreamed of contributing to with his own grip.
He took up the spear and clambered up the collapsed ceiling, but once there he turned around, perched at the lip of what remained of their pit. “You go ahead,” he said to Franico.
“D’iscro?”
“Go! Ritirabe! Avan! Save the others and release the water! The enemy is too close. If they aren’t slowed, then Tenuto will have to flood the tunnels with our own men still inside. You go. I’ll stay.”
The light down the Mutalqi passage grew brighter. Franico’s face was half shadow and blood still ran from his fingers, but he looked at his smallsword.
“No!” said Murad. “Only me! Arruh is with me, and so is my courage!”
Finally Franico snorted, almost a laugh. He made a brief salute, set down the lantern, and disappeared up the tunnel.
Murad looked back at the approaching enemy, shadows dancing along the walls. He would die alone now.
No, not alone. With Arruh.
The Mutalqi came, and these ones with armor and better weapons. They roared and shouted and Murad shouted back. They bunched at the base of the collapsed point around the scattered corpses. They called up to Murad, inviting him to surrender, to join their side, to be embraced by their god. Murad shouted defiance and recited the names of his forefathers. He prayed and called out to his wife, telling her he loved her.
They attacked from below. He killed one, then injured another. A third grabbed his spear and nearly pulled him down but he wrenched the spear away and stabbed again. He was struck in the ankle. Then along the shoulder. Then his pinky finger went cold and he glimpsed it dangling by a thread. He fought on. Another tip grazed his head and now blood drenched his vision, but Caelum was already in his eyes. It was somewhere among the stars. He would be there soon.
He heard something behind him. Someone was coming down from the Situ’s side.
It was Franico.
“No!” cried Murad. “You were supposed to warn them! What are you–”
Three things happen next. First Murad saw the rope tied around Franico’s waist. Then Franico grabbed him in a massive embrace. Then he heard the floodwaters approaching.
The water engulfed him. Its wet hand grabbed them and tried to wash them away and. The lights left but the rope was taut and the miner and foreman slammed up and down and the passage roared clinging to one another.
***
The waters gushed out of the enemy mines, washing out all manner of objects in a terrific flood that continued on through the Mutalqi camp, carrying away men and wagons and animals and equipment. Even once it had finished running, it left behind several feet of sand and silt. The Mutalqi mines were rendered wholly unusable.
At the fortress of Situ, those not on the ramparts cheering were in the yard gathered around the hole, where out of its mouth were being hauled two men wrapped around one another in a fraternal embrace, gasping and dripping from the womb and squinting in Arruh’s splendid light.
Thanks for reading! Here’s another story that actually occurs at the tail end of the same conflict:
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Wow, such character development in so short a time (it felt short because I loved it). You are a master at this trick.
Great story. I loved the anthropomorphic descriptions of the tunnel dark, and that I absolutely did not see Franico's arc ending the way it did.