Deities of Deceit

Chapter Thirty-six

Iman Bashar | Thirty-six
THE MINES OF DEATH
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The prison mines was a two-hour ride away from the capital city of Ara. I, alongside twenty other prisoners, was transported in a bamboo cage by enforcers, with chains around our wrists and ankles.

The only black person in the cage, a young man around my age or a few years older, wore a rosary around his neck. I recognized it from the days I spent protecting Christians during their hours of worship. He toyed with the cross attached to it, his eyes closed with the back of his head resting against the bamboo cage. The only reason a man like him would be shipped off to the mines was if he too was found guilty of blasphemy. The rosary around his neck with a cross was enough to implicate him. From the looks of him, he was no high born.

His eyes fluttered open and I turned my gaze to the cracks between the bamboo. We were now on the outskirts of the capital, where the roads were not as smooth or as wide. The cage rocked us all from side to side. As time passed, the lines of huts morphed into lines of trees and open farmland, then that morphed into large gray mountains.

The noise of the city was now far behind us, leaving only the sounds of throttling horses and the lazy swaggering wheels of our cage, rolling over stone and sand. There was nothing else for me to see out there. Nothing but large vast mountains with sharp pointed edges, piercing the orange sun in the sky.

"Halt!" a deep voice yelled and we throttled to a stop. I swallowed, glancing about. We had arrived.

A few prison guards walked around the bamboo cage, examining it, before one asked, "How many?"

"Twenty," replied an enforcer, then he jumped off his horse.

They spoke for a few more minutes before the prison guard put two fingers under his tongue and whistled. A deep croaking noise filled the air as gates I could not see from the tiny spaces between the bamboo were being pulled apart. The bamboo cage was loosened from the enforcers' horses and transferred to those of the prison guards, and our journey continued.

It wasn't until we were crossing the gates I was able to get a good sight of it. It was like crossing the valley of death. The gates were made of iron, at least four floors high, and wide enough to cast a long shadow that just stretched on. We continued in for a few minutes before reaching the second gate with similar resemblance to the first. Once we were past the second gate, it was shut behind us. The prison guard jumped off his horse, and the sound of jangling keys followed him to the door of our cage.

"Get out! Line up!" shouted the pot-bellied, heavily bearded guard, once he'd unlocked the cage. We obeyed, jumping out and staggering to maintain our footing. "Keep it moving, we haven't all day!" he screamed. "Straight line! Straight line!"

We lined up as best we could with the chains around our ankles and wrists hindering easy movement, my eyes darting everywhere, memorizing every corner it could reach. I knew once we were in the mining caves, there would be no seeing daylight for too long. We could hear the clanking noises, axes' and hammers slamming into stone. Iron hitting against iron.

The air was hazy, thick, and smelt of iron and smoke. The dust tormented our lungs with each breath, there was coughing and sneezing among us and my eyes watered. It was all iron and wood and stone. All gray and ash with no greenery. I had barely gotten a good sight of the prison, but it was already living up to its reputation as one of the most dreadful places in all of Arjana.

"You'll ease into, alright," the pot-bellied guard said, moving his belt in place, allowing him unhook another set of hanging keys.

A thin scruffy white boy came running out of the caves, his tiny hands shielding his eyes from the sun. He was dirty, his pale skin covered in brown patches, his sack clothes that should have been white in color appeared to be smeared all over with coal, and his feet were calloused and covered in blisters. When he arrived and bowed before the pot-bellied guard, the guard tapped him on the shoulder, then handed him the keys to our chains. Without needing anymore commands, the boy began unlocking our chains.