CHAPTER
Unbeknownst to his father, siblings, or even to the nanny in whose charge he was supposed to spend the afternoons, Dariel Akaran often escaped the confines of the nursery and wandered off for hours at a time into the bowels of the palace. His journeys had started the previous summer. When his former nanny took ill with a fever, an elderly woman replaced her. She was suitable enough in her plump and amiable manner, but she took a liquid substance in her tea that always put her to sleep. Dariel took advantage of this.
Even when she woke to find him missing, the quarters reserved for the children were so expansive that she could search for him without suspecting he was no longer within the maze of connected rooms. When he appeared, he simply dropped right into conversation with her, expressing his boredom and begging her to play one of any number of board games or darts, soldiers of the realm, sword fighting with sticks…The old woman had not the energy for such pursuits. She left the lad to his own devices for increasingly longer periods of time, just as he wished she would.
He had come across the hidden passageway quite by chance, following an errant marble that had vanished into the crack between his wardrobe and the wall behind it. The wardrobe was an enormous piece of furniture. It covered the better portion of the entire wall, built of solid mahogany and as immovable to the young boy as if it were part of the very stone of the palace. He squirmed his way behind it, first with the length of his arm, then a leg, then a full commitment, chest pressed against the wood of the wardrobe, back rubbing across the cold granite of the wall. He tried to lower himself on twisted knees, fingers stretched down toward where he believed the marble to be. He was so fixated on reaching it, and so annoyed at the intractable materials that were stopping him from doing so, that when he finally found the space to squat down and run his fingers through the dust-covered floor he did not pause to consider how he had accomplished this.
It was only with the marble clenched once more in his fist that he realized he was in some sort of corridor, lit just enough that he could make out the old stonework of the walls, rough edged in a manner rarely seen inside the palace. There was a stillness here, a quiet deeper than he had ever felt. There was also a slight movement of air. A breath across his face that brushed past him like a whisper.
Thus began his introduction to the long-forgotten network of passageways that had been used by servants to navigate unseen throughout the palace in an earlier age. It was a labyrinth of stairways, tunnels, hallways, and dead ends, lit occasionally by holes drilled through the stone and open to the air. He strolled into abandoned rooms, complete with pieces of furniture, wall hangings, and rugs visible only as raised geometric squares thickly layered over in dust. He never came upon a living being while in these precincts, but he found enough to fear in the ferocious figures carved into the lintels, bulbous-eyed beasts that walked on two legs like men and women, with the body parts of boars and lions, lizards and hyenas and eagles, including one that looked like a frog, save that its violent visage had nothing in common with the amusing creatures that emerged from the ground during the spring. What a strange people must have carved these things! What a horrific time it must have been when humans had yet to step away and set themselves apart from beasts. A golden monkey had followed him in once, but upon seeing these statues the creature bolted, leaving Dariel wondering if he should do the same.
On one occasion he emerged from a long, narrow passageway into the bright sunlight and the spray of sea waves just below him. He crept through an opening and crawled out onto a ledge, blinded by the brilliance of the day. He had found a hidden route right down to the sea at the northern edge of the island, not far from the Temple of Vada. He stood smelling the salt-moist air, wind currents blowing his hair about him. A stone’s throw out to sea a shoal of fish churned the water. Large, gape-jawed seabirds circled overhead. He watched as one pulled in its wings and shot down into the water.
Dariel decided to retrace his route and find something to use as a fishing rod. As he began to turn, a swell in the waves smashed against the stone beneath him. It sent up a flume of water that smacked him under the chin and against the chest and lifted him off his feet. For a moment the water billowed and fizzed all around him. His legs and arms lashed out in all directions. He clawed for purchase on the ledge, using his fingers and feet and eventually wedging his torso between two stones. For a moment he lay there breathing in frantic gasps. He could have vanished beneath the waves. No one would have guessed what had happened to him. He would simply have disappeared.
The thought of all of this racked him with sobs. He did not return to that spot, nor did he mention the event to anyone. As much as it had scared him-as much, really as all his subterranean ramblings sent his blood pumping and his hands tingling, and as much as the ghostly breath in the corridors rippled and flexed the hairs on his neck, making them stand and sway like long grass pressed by a shifting wind-he still loved his time in these secret places. He did not wish to give up his adventures, as he knew he would have to the minute anybody found out.
Anybody, that is, from within the world of the upper palace. Those beings of the light were only a portion of the population of the palace. He found several points other than his playroom where the unused passageways connected to others still in use. This world was just as interesting to explore. In the subterranean community of laborers, the unseen society of servants and engineers, cooks and technicians through whose efforts the palace functioned, there Dariel was well known and much liked. Likewise, it was at the elbows of these employees that he found the most joy he had yet experienced in the company of adults-with the exception of his father, whom he adored. It took them some time to get used to him and to get beyond their fears that something might happen to the boy and that they would be punished for it. Indeed, some of them never warmed to him. He suspected they argued about him when he was not there. But in others he found fast friends. He rode in the donkey-drawn carts that a man named Cevil used to bring supplies from the lower storerooms up into the palace. He stood among the full hips of the sweets bakers, stealing one after another of the sugary teacakes that were his favorite. He sat at the knees of the aged former palace workers who lived in frugal retirement in a network of caves, old men and women invisible to royal society.
He spent whole days awed by the labors of the fire feeders who worked in the sweltering, blackened catacomb-like chambers below the kitchens. The ovens that the royal cooks used were fed by a series of gigantic furnaces, from which networks of pipes stretched up and through the ceiling in such a confusion that the boy never made sense of them, no matter how many questions he asked. The feeding room was a brooding kiln of a cave. It was caked with soot and floating coal dust; peopled by blackened men who were often naked down to the waist and streaked by sweat, with bulging forearms and shoulders, bloodshot eyes, and yellowed teeth. The room was open on one side, not for the splendid view of the sea stretching off to the west but to provide some relief from the heat of the ovens and to facilitate the arrival of new loads of coal from Senival, which came in on barges from the Mainland.