Sorrel spoke of being alone, but the house was often hoaching with servants and gillas and attendants. In the morning, you often had to wait for someone, perhaps laden with tray or box or cart, to pass through a doorway before you could progress, as if it were some stevedores’ yard. Queues formed outside Sorrell’s bedroom, delivery folk in blue caps, uniformed caterers, any number of people needing her word on some matter or other. I had my own room, to which I retired every night, after I had performed my petty function for her.

  I mostly spent the mornings in bed. A new grey smock would be waiting at the foot of the bed, of the same substantial weave as the one I had worn at the press meeting. I would dress slowly, carefully pulling the britches over my weakened legs, then would make my way to the broad window to look at the lifeless brown garden below. This is where I would start my count. I would think about my Buchan, my mother. I would seek out the gentle pain of reflection. Images of their burning remains would sometimes cross my mind, but that only served to increase my focus.

  By mid-morning, Sorrel’s door would click open, and the applicants would disperse, leaving the creaking silence once again, like a stamped foot scattering an eager crowd of sparrows. Anyone who wanted to see her from that point would have to wait until the following morning.

  My count would be in the thousands by the time she would summon me for ‘conference,’ as she called it. On the first full day, the day Gracey had given me the case, I had told her my story as best I could. The process of the work in the bordonite mine, the chaining of our ankles, and the new instruction to burrow deeper into the mountain. I had not told her about my brother on this day, but I knew I would someday, if she kept cajoling. I hadn’t tell her about the counting, either, but I knew I would never tell her about that.

  Day after day I would tell my story, sometimes exaggerating certain features, sometimes with only scant detail, trying to figure out what it was she was after. I wanted to please her, but I always told the truth, more or less. Some days she wanted the naked facts and nothing else. On other days, she wanted my interpretations of the facts. She would close her eyes and tick her head left and right as I spoke. Sometimes she would produce a low, droning hum as she reflected. I told the story until I no longer truly understood what had happened.

  ‘How did that make you feel?’ One day, during my retelling, she had interrupted me with this question twenty-nine times. Her voice was quiet, but she had articulated slowly and precisely, giving each word its space. The voice was not of a welcoming, fireside quality, but I was eager to submit to whatever it asked.

  In these early days, a doctor would visit every day to check on the progress of my legs. Gracey would attend also and would do most of the talking in my stead. The doctor would come more seldom as my legs improved, and then, after a number of weeks, he had produced a thin blade on the end of a red metal handle and sliced a line down each of the casts. He arranged the long arcs of plaster in rows on the floor and they put me in mind of the network of mining tunnels at Pokey. When he offered to take them away with him, I had asked him to leave them where they were.

  I was fearful on the new legs. I looked at them in bed, darker, somehow, as if someone had slathered them in fat and baked them in the furnace. Whatever hair had been there was now completely gone. They were the legs of someone else. I didn’t quite trust them, expecting them at any moment to stop working and drop me on my ass. I started to strap them in light bandages, the better to keep everything contained. Then Gracey arranged for a tailor to design and make me a new pair of trousers that would do the same job. I hadn’t asked him to do this, but soon I had five pairs of tightly fitted trousers with a second layer of fabric snaking around both leg tubes. I would wear the trousers every day. I am wearing a heavily patched pair now as I scratch these words, perhaps forty years later. By this time I had understood Gracey’s perceptive gifts, but this was one of many instances he eased my insecurity without my having to articulate it. Whatever success I enjoy, whatever contribution I have made, much of it is due to Gracey. My Gracey, may the earth find him.

  At lunch, Sorrel would urgently plunder serving after serving of roasted meats and blackened potatoes, as if she feared someone would take it from her. ‘More’ was often the only word she uttered throughout the meal. I had no taste for such richness, having survived until now on little more than bread and britcheen, the mashed pap favoured among Jurckas marginals.

  After eating, we would walk laps in the ruined earth of her garden, saying little. One afternoon, after a bout of heavy rain, she declined to step into the mud, dismissing it as too wet, too slimy. I shambled in as usual. Suddenly, it struck me that perhaps I should strip off my trousers, and sit down in the rain-soaked plains. No sooner had the thought occurred to me than I was doing it, kicking the rolled fabric from my feet, splashing flecks of earth onto my bare legs, then planting my naked behind in the waterlogged earth. Then I scooped caked handfuls of the mud and began to pat and daub it onto my legs. I sensed Sorrel watching intently from the edge. I don’t know exactly why I did it, but I know I wanted a reaction from her. Gracey had described her as a block of ice and it was time to apply heat. After a moment, she stepped down in to the mud and took up a position behind me.

  ‘Lie down,’ she said, reaching up to place a pressing hand on my head. I did so.

  When I was down, she dropped to her knees alongside and began to sweep swathes of earth over my torso, ploughing with her arms, until a ridge began to form on top of me. When I had sat up straight, trying to help her, she pushed me roughly down to the flat of my back again. She continued to add to the pile, as diligent as any tradesperson. As the pile grew, the earth pressed heavy on my chest. She stood up and walked around me, her breath coming out in agitated bursts. I didn’t talk and I didn’t move, afraid to distract her from whatever train of thought I had provoked. She kept shovelling, frantic now, desperate to see how this new seed would blossom. Heat began to generate under the airtight layer. Soon I knew that I wouldn’t be able to move without her help. There was no-one else around. I didn’t know what she would do with me, but I don’t recall any fear. The calmness I had felt after waking up from the mountain still persisted, now some months later. I could be sent back to carkare at a moment’s notice. I had long since excised hope from my inventory. Feelings of guilt about my brother and mother were still there, but their edges weren’t quite as jagged. If she had decided to stamp on my unprotected head with those little square feet until all life had left me, then I couldn’t really have complained.

  Soon I was under a great mound. I couldn’t see the top of it from my vantage.

  ‘How does it feel?’ she asked.

  ‘Good,’ I said, because it was true. Under so many layers, the earth was not wet, only warm. There was also something pleasant about the helplessness, but I didn’t understand that then. Even now, many years later, and having spent many hundreds of hours underneath many varied layers of earth, I still don’t quite understand the appeal of helplessness. Everyone who subjects themselves to Turas mentions it though. There is something powerful about placing your fate in the hands of another. Especially if it is someone you’re not sure you can trust.

  ‘Do you sense your brother there now?’ she asked.

  I don’t know if I answered the question. Time passed. She left me there for a period, then came back and interrogated me further. I remember the featureless white of a gigantic sky. I remember a light rain falling on my face. I remember it stopping then starting again more heavily, forming pools on my forehead, which then overflowed into my eyes.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Later, when I regained the ability to move my arms and legs, the diminishing layers of mud growing lighter, I realised that there was a wooden crate covering my head and that I was in total darkness. I did not know how much time had passed.

  ***

  ‘What is she doing with you, Charlie?’ asked Gracey one morning. He was sitting across from me at the shining brown table, his hands in his lap.

  I had more than enough to eat at Sorrel’s place, and my hands and stomach softened, unyoked from the burden of labour. My every need was met. I didn’t finish my days coated in several layers of sweat. Still, I didn’t sleep very well. I was not free.

  I smiled in response to his question, but Gracey would not accept this. Sometimes we would have lengthy conversations where my only contribution was a nod or a shoulder shrug, but today he looked at me with his eyebrows raised, determined to make me explain.

  As a younger man, such empty silence made me nervous. I would desperately fill it with the first thoughts to enter my head, with a snippet of song, with nonsense gibbering or with clicks of my tongue. Since my time in the mountain, silence had bothered me no further. I was sure I could outlast Gracey.

  Although I was sure I could hold the silence forever, I attempted to answer him. I wasn’t sure if I liked him or feared him. Either way, I wanted him to like me. He was my gaoler. Somewhere in his possession he had a document that would send me to finish my sentence.

  ‘She doesn’t explain. She is trying to put me under the mountain again, I think.’

  ‘What does she do?’ he asked.

  ‘She puts me under the earth. She puts a box over my head.’

  He knew this already, he had just wanted to hear me say it. To see if I knew.

  ‘Charlie,’ he said, in sympathy, as if talking to a child with a scratch on his knee. ‘But isn’t that a great torment?’ he said. He slid a white hand across the table towards me, stopping short before making contact.

  ‘No,’ I say, because it was true. ‘I like it.’

  ‘You like it,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  Among Mudders, or ‘adherents’ as Largan preferred to call them, there is an understanding that Sorrel was trying to torture me, her prisoner, the way a child might pull the legs from an insect. That is why she does not occupy as important a position in the lore around the way of living. My view was that she was just as important as Gracey and Whistlebine. But Largan didn’t share that view.

  Sorrel almost never spoke directly about her hardship, but it was clear that she suffered. She needed someone to help her and I suited the purpose. Her deep interest in my accident, in my encounter with my brother – these were all signs that she was searching for something. She invented Turas, not me.

  ‘It is like sleep, but deeper,’ I said. ‘You wake and you don’t know who you are. It is pleasant.’

  ‘Do you see things? People?’

  ‘I see lots of things. Everything. I see my father, although I never met him. I see my children, although I have none.’

  Gracey looked out the window to the muddy pit below, to the messy person-shaped indent carved into its middle.

  ‘I want to ask what she gets out of it, but I think I know,’ he said. ‘You must know all about her by now, I’m sure?’

  ‘I know of her pain, but she has not described it in detail,’ I said.

  ‘I did not know that she would do something like this. She is more energetic now, I suppose. That’s some measure of success, but she’s not the person she was. I worry about her.’

  He looked out the window again, his head slowly nodding.

  ‘How are you Charlie?’ he asked after a moment. ‘I mean, with all this stuff? The stuff she’s doing?’

  At the time, his kindness often confused me. I thought that he might have sent me away if I didn’t cooperate, but knowing Gracey as I do now, I know that it was genuine concern.

  ‘I am well,’ I said.

  Sorrel had a go in the mud herself that afternoon, trusting me to scoop the earth and place the box over her head. She had closed her eyes and whispered quiet oaths to herself as the earth piled up on her frame. It was warm, and I had sat on the flat stone enjoying the peace. My shadow stretched tall into the dry earth by the time she called my name to free her.

  I watched her face for information as we sat together on the earth, our arms hugging our raised knees. I felt some authority over the situation. I did not fear any consequence for the way my eyeballs devoured her.

  I asked her if she needed anything and she says no. Then she smiled. It was a real smile, one which engaged all quarters of her face.

  ‘It’s just as you said,’ she said. ‘It’s like returning from a trip and finding things in a better state.’

  ‘Worries are smaller,’ I said. ‘They’re still there, but they don’t bother you as much.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  I got few chances to sit in the earth in the following days, since Sorrel wished to explore the dimensions of this new passion herself. She was a more engaged person now. In her bed, the bites and scratches lost their ferocity. She was even gentle betimes. She even asked me to stay one night, which I did, but it was so uncomfortable to share a bed with someone that, when she asked again the following night, I declined.

  She conducted her morning business with enthusiasm now, less likely to demolish someone with a swinging barrage of oaths, less likely to throw anything that came to hand. Soon she came to do her business in the upstairs dining room where I had my chats with Gracey. No longer was there the vibration of nervous tension among the queued applicants. People exchanged quiet stories. Sometimes they even laughed.

  Gracey and I began to have our meetings in the garden, me sitting on the flat stones with my legs stretched before me, and he alongside me on a chair.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve done, Charlie, but keep doing it,’ he said one morning, his feet crossed over each other.

  ‘It is no secret,’ I answered.

  ‘Will she be okay, do you think?’ he asked me.

  I thought Sorrel was fine. I couldn’t imagine her closing her now open fingers back into a fist. Still, if I said that, would Gracey send me away? Would I have to go back to finish my indentures, my purpose here served?

  ‘She is better,’ I said. ‘Something was stopping the wheels from turning, but it is cleared away now. The future?’ I looked at him and made a slow nod. ‘No-one can know.’

  I didn’t think much about the future in those days. I sometimes thought I would stay in Sorrel’s house for the rest of my life.

  Gracey looked out into the garden. The warm season was at its end and a scattering of orange leaves was visible on the earth at the furthest fence.

  ‘We’ll have to clear up those leaves,’ he said quietly. ‘Or maybe she wants them to stay, I don’t know.’

  When I first came here, Gracey was a man of business, running from one appointment to the next, eating his meals while walking. Now, a few short moons later, he had time to sit with me, sighing as he watched the leaves collect. I sensed that Sorrel had taken over some of his duties.

  ‘She’s telling people about you,’ he said, repositioning himself in the chair and arranging his hands in his lap.

  ‘Right,’ I said. What could she be telling people?

  ‘People in the city, I mean. About how you’ve helped her. I don’t think it’s wise, personally, but she won’t hear me.’

  He leaned forward now, placing his elbows on his knees.

  ‘We have made arrangements to keep you here. We have it all squared away with the orderlies, so I don’t want you to worry. But I don’t like to draw attention to the fact. They are known to change their minds when the circumstances change.’

  I nodded, trying to weigh up the variables. I had only known Gracey to deal with all news with the same solid, enthusiastic competence. He was less enthusiastic now, like he could see the possibilities and didn’t like any of them.

  ‘What do you think Charlie? You don’t say much,’ he said finally.

  ‘I don’t know much,’ I said. ‘No-one knows what will happen tomorrow.’

  Gracey laughed.

  ‘Life isn’t something that just happens, Charlie. You have to bend it into shape.’

  The younger me would have said that he was in control of himself and that he was carving his own line through life. But there were lots of things that were out of my hands. The orderlies could accost me at any time without any good reason. I had a weakness for the stoop. If I wanted soldies, I had to put my own desires to one side and subject myself to the will of others.

  Imprisonment is useful, because there is no illusion of liberty. All of your freedoms are taken from you. Once you surrender to this fact, then you can rebuild yourself. When you reach this point, you soon begin to recognise areas where freedom can be cultivated. True freedom. The kind that no-one can take from you.

  ‘Most things you can’t control. Why try to bend things that won’t bend?’ I said.

  ‘Everything can bend. If force is applied correctly.’ Gracey said.

  ‘Let things lie for a day, for a month. You will see that life goes on with or without your action.’

  ‘Actions can change things, if applied correctly,’ said Gracey, his hands now clasped together and gesturing.

  ‘I know. Sometimes no action is the best action,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ he said, impatient, getting to his feet. ‘Soon there will be crowds of people here, poking at you and pinching your cheek as if you were some specimen in a zoo. I would like to save you from that.’ He started to walk back into the house.

  I wanted to say something to him. Something to stop him. ‘Thank you Gracey,’ I said eventually, to his turned back,

  long since out of earshot. ‘Thank you for everything,’ I said again, quietly.