Darien: Empire of Salt (Empire of Salt Trilogy 1) Read online

  C. F. Iggulden

  * * *

  DARIEN

  Empire of Salt: Book One

  Contents

  PART ONE

  1: Risk

  2: New Boy

  3: Quick Study

  4: Threefold

  5: Levers

  6: Threefold

  7: Elias

  8: Desert

  9: Tomb

  10: Bones

  11: Darien

  12: Nancy

  13: Harvest

  14: Nancy

  PART TWO

  15: Choices

  16: House Sallet

  17: The Gate

  18: Golem

  19: Blue Border, Blue Border

  20: The Sallet Stone

  21: Hunter

  22: Witch

  23: Deeds

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Also by Conn Iggulden

  Dunstan

  THE WARS OF THE ROSES SERIES

  Stormbird

  Trinity

  Bloodline

  Ravenspur

  THE EMPEROR SERIES

  The Gates of Rome

  The Death of Kings

  The Field of Swords

  The Gods of War

  The Blood of Gods

  THE CONQUEROR SERIES

  Wolf of the Plains

  Lords of the Bow

  Bones of the Hills

  Empire of Silver

  Conqueror

  Blackwater

  Quantum of Tweed

  BY CONN IGGULDEN AND HAL IGGULDEN

  The Dangerous Book for Boys

  The Pocket Dangerous Book for Boys: Things to Do

  The Pocket Dangerous Book for Boys: Things to Know

  The Dangerous Book for Boys Yearbook

  BY CONN IGGULDEN AND DAVID IGGULDEN

  The Dangerous Book of Heroes

  BY CONN IGGULDEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY LIZZY DUNCAN

  Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children

  Tollins 2: Dynamite Tales

  To Jillian Taylor

  PART ONE

  * * *

  1

  Risk

  He was a hunter, Elias Post, a good one. The village elders spoke of his skills with enormous pride, as if they owned some part of his talents. The people of Wyburn looked to him to bring them meat, even in the darkest months of winter when other places lost their old and young.

  The land around them was exhausted, though they still worked it hard, forcing some small crop from each scrub field, guarding slow-growing things from crows and ravenous pigeons. Sheep still roamed the bare hills. Doves pecked and glared in their boxes. Bees drowsed in lines of hives. It might have been enough to feed them all if some of the woods had not been burned and sown to grow oilseed for the city, earning silver over food. Elias did not know the rights and wrongs of those choices. When the grain store was down to a crust of years past, when the warrens were trapped out and empty, thin-fingered hunger crept into the village, peering in at old men as they rocked by the fire.

  He’d gone out first when he’d been a boy, coming back to his mother in triumph with ducks clutched together or hares all tucked up under his belt like a skirt of grey fur. There was an abundance in the summers, but it was in the deep winter where Elias earned the praise of the village council. When the frost came down and the world was white and silent, he had been a sure source of venison and partridge, hares – even wolf or bear if the snows were deep. He drew his line at fox, though he trapped them to let the hares thrive. The meat was foul-tasting and he could not bear the smell.

  As he reached forty, he’d been offered a place on the village council himself. He took pride in attending the meetings on the first day of each month. Along with his skills, there was an authority in him that grew each year, like a cloak he was made to wear whether he wanted to or not. He did not speak often – and then only when he knew the subject well enough to be sure of his judgement.

  The one source of disagreement was his refusal to take an apprentice, but even then they knew his son would follow him when the boy was grown. What did it matter if Elias preferred to teach his craft to his own kin? There were always some who grumbled when every other hunter went into the forests and returned thin and empty-handed, with frost on their beards. Elias would come in then, hunched and bowed by the weight of a carcass draped over his shoulders, all black with frozen blood. He did not laugh or boast to the other hunters, though some still hated him even so. They were proud men themselves and they did not like to be shamed in front of their families, no matter how he shared the meat, in exchange for other goods or coin. They held their peace, for they were not fools and the village needed Elias Post more than the other hunters. No one wanted to be cast out, to have to go to the city for work. There were no good endings there, everyone knew that. When young girls ran off to Darien, their parents even held a simple funeral, knowing it was much the same. Perhaps to warn the other girls, too.

  The plague had arrived that summer on the cart of a potion-seller from the city, or so they said. It had first become a scourge there, where people lived too close and rubbed cheek and jowl with fleas and lice. No doubt it was a punishment for sinful couplings. You did not have to live long to know that healthy lives had hardly any pleasure in them. This plague began with rashes, and for most of them it was no worse than that. A few days of fever and itching before good health returned. They all began with that hope, only for some to lie cold and staring after a week of misery and pain. It was a cruel thing that year, and it knew no favourites.

  When the proctors of the village met that autumn, they were not surprised to see Elias’ seat standing empty. They murmured the name of Elias Post in sorrow and pity then. They had all heard. Wyburn was a small place.

  His son Jack had gone in just a week, a little boy of black hair and laughter who’d been struck down and snatched from life, leaving a piece of river ice in his father’s heart. The hunter had aged as many years as the boy had lived in that last night, sitting with him. Towards the end, Elias had walked a mile to pray at the temple outside Wyburn, that stood alone on the road leading to the city. He’d made his offering – a wisp of golden hay from the harvest. The Goddess of the reaping had turned her face from him, spinning on her iron chain. By the time he’d trudged back across the fields to his house near the village square, the boy was cold and still. Elias had sat with him for a time, just looking.

  When the sun rose, his wife and daughters were weeping and trying not to scratch the welts that had risen on their skin, dumb with fear, pale as plucked flesh. Elias had kissed them all, tasting the salt of bright sweat. He’d hoped for the plague to take him, and when he slept for a while and woke again, it was almost a relief to discover his own welts swelling, his forehead damp. His wife had wailed to see him sick, but he’d gathered her in with their two daughters, a knot of arms and tears and grief.

  ‘And what would I do on my own, my love? You and the girls are all I have left. Now that Jack is gone. I had one chance to be happy and it was taken from me. I will not be left alone, Beth! No. Wherever we are going, I will walk with you. What does it matter now, love? We’ll go after Jack. We’ll catch him up. We’ll fall into step beside him, wherever he is. He’ll be pleased to see us, you know he will. Why, I can see his face now.’

  As darkness came, Elias found he could not bear to sit and listen to breaths crackling in the silence. He rose from his chair and stood for a time at the window, looking out on a moonlit road. It was an early dark then and he knew the tavern would be open. Yet it was not ale he wanted, nor clear s
pirits. He had no coin to waste on those and no taste for it. There were other things to be found in the light and the noise of a crowd.

  He knew he would be thrown out or even killed by frightened men if they saw the raised patches on his arms and stomach. He grimaced, uncaring, driven wild by the itching. Perhaps it was murder he was considering, though he did not think it was. Some men were taken, others were spared. That was just the way of it then. They knew it was spread by touch; no one really understood the manner of it. There had been plagues before. They rose in summers and burned out in the cold months that followed. In some ways, it was as ordinary as the seasons, though that was no comfort to him.

  Elias shrugged. An old shirt and a long coat would hide the marks. There was a patch of swelling under his hair and another at the crook of his throat. In the mirror, it looked like a map of islands, white in a pink sea. He shook his head, then buttoned the shirt up high.

  Hunting was clean, especially in the dark and the cold. He went out and he used his knack and he caught deer with his hands. It was a thing he had not shared with anyone, though he had hoped his son would learn the craft of it when he was older. That thought brought such a wave of grief that he could not bear to remain in the house. He pulled thick clothes from a reeking pile and yanked them on, adding a felt hat with a broken brim that would hide his face. He could not just lie down and die. That had always been a weakness in him.

  There was medicine in the city, everyone knew that. There were doctors who could make the dead stand up and dance, so they said. Yet such miracles required more coins than a village hunter had ever seen. In the autumn, Elias butchered hogs on local homesteads and took away some chops and kidneys for his labour. Or he cut wood in exchange for a pot or two of honey. When he caught white or red foxes in his traps, he saved the skins and sold them all at once to a fellow a few miles downriver, for real silver bits. Elias had never been to the city himself, but he knew they had all sorts of learned men there, who could do just about anything. For money, anyway, not for kindness or for love. That was understood and he could accept it. The world owed nothing to anyone. He had made a living from it even so.

  Elias kept his precious coins in a pot on the mantel, saved for the years ahead when he would not be able to hunt in the snow, when his fingers would not grip the knife too well. Perhaps too for when his knack would surely wither in him, like a man’s sight or hearing. He touched the pouch in his pocket, its contents taken down and counted out on the kitchen table earlier that day. Perhaps he’d intended this thing all along, he did not know. The mind was a strangely complex beast, slow and deep, layer upon layer. His father had said he felt like a boy riding a great ox at times, without very much idea of what the ox was thinking.

  The fruit of a dozen years of fur and meat trading could be held in one hand. Yet even his precious pieces of silver would never be enough, Elias knew that. Doctors were rich men. Rich men expected gold, with the heads of other rich men pressed into the soft metal. Elias had never seen a gold coin but he knew there were twenty silver to one noble – and they were somehow worth just the same. It was a little like the captains of the troops of soldiers who came through sometimes in the spring, looking for young men to recruit. Each captain lorded it over twenty men, telling them what to do and where to step. Elias wondered as he walked how many captains a general would command. A dozen? A score? Was there a metal they valued more than gold? If so, he had never known its name.

  He considered this and other things as he made his way down the road towards the inn, his mind whirling in grief and anger and recklessness. He had worked hard and raised four. One had gone into the ground after just a few days in the world. Back then, he and his wife had been younger, more able to put it behind and try again. He’d told Beth they’d given one back, comforting his wife in that way. He said they’d paid the tithe of their lives in that grief.

  It had not been part of the bargain for his son Jack to follow, nor for the itching plague to touch his daughters. Elias had known that most of those who grew sick survived it. He’d been calm and utterly certain it would pass at first, denying what was happening right to the moment when he’d felt his son’s hand had somehow grown cool. The flesh had kept its colour, but it always had been warm before. He’d known then.

  He’d been teaching the boy how to read, letter by letter. It just wasn’t possible that the lessons would stop, that he wouldn’t hear one more halting word or feel the boy’s laughing weight as he leaped on his father from a doorpost. Perhaps it was a kind of madness, but Elias felt no check or curb on him that evening, as if he’d seen his life through glass and understood at last that nothing mattered, but those he loved and those who loved him.

  He knew that night was one of two in the year when farmers sold their wool. The great Harvest Eve was coming and that would be a day of celebration, where hams were cut thick and for one day the villagers drank one another’s health and ate until they could hardly move. First came the wool sale, at the end of summer. There were men with real silver in the tavern that evening, pleased with themselves and drinking jug after jug of the rich brown ale.

  Elias wet his lips with his tongue, feeling the cold air dry and tighten them once again. He had never used his knack amongst men before. That secret heart of him was for the deep silences, for the dark hills and the frosts. The thought of using it with eyes on him was akin to walking in with his buttocks hanging out of his breeches. He found he was sweating and began to scratch himself. No, not that night. He would just have to keep his hands still, no matter how much it was a torment. The whole countryside was alive with warnings of plague and they all knew his son had been failing.

  He remembered then that the Goddess had turned her face away from him when he asked about his boy, Jack. Elias had to bite his lip for a time at that thought, until the pain made him shiver, anything rather than curse her. She might be deaf to those who needed her help, but she heard every word spoken ill. It was hard to pull his mind back from the furious words that simmered and seethed in him. He stumbled along to the light that spilled onto the street, drawn by the sound of laughter and the clink of brown pots.

  Elias slipped in amongst the drinkers and talkers without his presence being noticed at all. He had never been a large man and he wore his beard short, with patches of grey. He had lived forty-four years in that town and if that was to be his last, there had been more good times than bad. He nodded to one or two he knew and swept past while they were still widening their eyes. No one had seen Elias in the inn before, not in all the years he had hunted. He was just not a sociable man. He would never be a proctor of Wyburn, though he might help choose the man who was.

  At the far end of the room were the gaming tables Elias wanted, filled with the farmers he hoped to see. Despite his serious intent, his mouth twitched when he remembered his mother’s words of warning about this very tavern and the vices it contained. She had been in the ground for a long time, in a hole dug by his own hands. He had packed up the earth twice to leave a mound in the years since, when it sank down. Still, her words remained in him.

  Already there were piles of silver coins in front of the men at the tables. Elias dug in his pocket, gathering up the dozen he owned. He held them out as proof he had the right to stand there, looking for the leader, whoever it was. They were not men he knew, on the whole, though he had seen a few of them around the village stores. One of them had a harder stare than the others – and they were men used to wrestling a sheep out of thorns or a muddy ditch. Elias looked away when he felt the stranger’s gaze crawl over his face, convinced there would be a cry of disgust and a shout of plague. The man looked more suited to being a whorehouse guard. Younger than the others there, he wore a smart yellow waistcoat over a white shirt that marked him out all on its own. White shirts were usually kept for funerals and marriages, if they were owned at all. The rest of the men wore the sort of colours that showed dirt only as a shine on hard-wearing cloth. The yellow and the white was a challeng
e in itself. Whoever he was, the fellow did not work the land.

  Elias found his gaze trapped by the man’s interest in him. Wide-shouldered, the stranger lacked the sheer bulk of the farmers at that table. He was more sheepdog than mastiff, Elias decided, more speed than brawn. Yet there was still a threat in the man’s eyes that stopped Elias cold.

  He held out his coins even so, tight between black-nailed fingers. He had not used his knack before in such a way and he felt his hand shake, uncertain until that moment that it would even work.

  The young man shrugged and nodded to an empty chair. As Elias stepped towards it, he saw one of the new guns they made in the city was on the fellow’s hip, a thing of black metal that looked sleek and oiled in its holster. It was said to make a great noise and to punch a hole through a side of beef. Elias looked at the thing in awe and fear and the weapon’s owner caught his interest and smiled widely.

  ‘You’ve seen my toy, my warmaker? Don’t be afraid, meneer. My name is Vic Deeds. If you’ve heard of me, you’ll know I do not draw it in this sort of company.’

  ‘I am not afraid,’ Elias said.

  He spoke with such transparent truth that the man looked at him oddly. Before the gunman could ask any more questions, the cards were dealt and Elias seated himself and pushed his first coin into the middle. Beyond a few games at his kitchen table with his wife and son, he had never played in public. He sat with his back to the crowd and knew enough to clutch the squares of card very closely to his chest. He’d heard of men placing their friends behind other players to signal good or bad hands.

  The game began with a bet, then a chance to improve the draw, then a final round of betting. There did not appear to be any limit for a given hand, so Elias knew he could lose everything he had in a single round. His first cards were worth nothing, so he placed them face down and waited for the rest of them to bring it to an end, struggling to find the calm he needed.