If I hadn’t been so tense, I’d have laughed with surprise. We’d both hidden our true faith from each other. Thinking back on it, I realized Moloch, too, hadn’t really said what he believed in. His eyes met mine again and I nodded. There was nothing to apologise for, nor to explain.

I have never used Hebrew for anything other than prayer, and even when my mother taught my sister and me the meanings of the words it was only for the purpose of reading and understanding this one holy text. It was too dangerous to speak it freely within the house, and so we never used it to express ourselves. “Behold, (it is the) truth,” I managed to finally say.

The young man dipped his head graciously. “Juan Sargasso (is) my name,” he said. Even with the mass of Crystal encumbering him, his voice was clear, unburdened. “My real name Yitzhak Ben Moshe, of Clan Binyamin.”

“I (am) Jill Reynolds. My real name Ruhama Bat Shaul, a Levi. He (is) Haggard Moloch…”

Haggard smiled, his tension eased. “Avraham Ben Yehushafat, a Cohen.”

Moloch turned his brown eyes to me, wary of voicing the question in any language, but I suspected I was thinking the exact same thing. What, in the name of God, is this boy doing here?

“Long have you resided here, Yitzhak?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if the question was clear. “Moons? Years?”

He raised a hand and levelled it at the height of his chin. “From when I was this tall. Years. Yet how many, my friend Ruhama, I cannot know. And perhaps it was a night, long with no end.”

“All with no ally by your side?” I asked.

“No, not all. One came,” he paused, a great pain showing in his face as he searched for the words. “… and left, abandoning me, and there is not a soul living to be found. And thou?” His narrow eyes inspected our relatively mild alterations.

“Six moons in depths.”

“What for?” he asked.

“We are a part of the… Battalions…”

“The army,” Haggard corrected me. “For the Britonish crown.”

“Ah, warriors you are, despite all.”

“Our adversaries are only rock and glass,” I said, finding no word for Crystal in my mother’s tongue. Yitzhak nodded, confirming that he understood.

“Are you a warrior for Espania?” Haggard said.

“I have swung no weapon, only the quarry tools,” he answered. “Now I have no master, no obligation. I (am) just a son of Adam, or,” he brought one of the long Crystal outgrowths in front of his face, as if trying to remember whether it had been there before. “So I pray.”

Haggard’s tone was sceptical, hesitant. “Truly you are not a soldier?”

“Thou shall not falsely testify in your ally, is that not so?”

Haggard looked at me, his brown eyes unconvinced. Not at the phrase, of course, but whether or not our common secret made Yitzhak our ally. I nodded, the smallest of movements. I believed the boy. Even if he weren’t speaking that language of close family and secret-keeping allies, there was some element of cool calmness to him, a solidity that inspired trust.

“Far we are from your mining place,” he continued, meaning the place that we were born. “Why do Britons come here? Did you conquer us and pillage our pits?” He didn’t seem very troubled by the possibility.

“No, for we are not far.” Haggard said. “Above us it is, Yorkshire…”

Yitzhak pointed one long outgrowth to one of the curling pathways of the cave. “Will you behold with your own eyes? Carry your legs skyward and be proven on your own flesh. La España awaits atop that slope.”

Haggard looked at the beginning of that upward path. If that were true, we might have found something much greater than we expected. Yitzhak continued. “Above us is Toledo. How have you come to find yourselves within our…” He struggled momentarily, then found the word. “Pits?”

Confused, Haggard reverted to plain English. “Can’t be,” he insisted. “It would take years of walking. Or… No. He’s been here so long his eggs are cooked.”

“Even if he is mad, that doesn’t explain how he speaks Hebrew. Even the chances of the two of us speaking it are unreasonably low.” I looked at the Espanish boy. He was waiting patiently for us to converse, but I still found it rude to speak in a different language in front of him. “How can this be? There are so few Sons of Israel left. That you are here and speak Hebrew is…” what’s the word for strange? “…wondrous enough, but you, him and me?”

He turned his green eyes to me, a smile on his buried mouth. “It is… a miracle. What more can it be?”

Haggard shook himself, the gesture so slow it hardly seemed like that at all. “A day will come to find answer. But today, we ask you to give us the Crystal that you have found and carved out of these walls. That was you, was it not?

Yithzak nodded, and pride shone in his smile. “Am I my brothers’ keeper? Yes. Half of my bounty I will grant you, and if your sacks cannot hold I shall make more sacks and grant them to you also, and if your backs cannot hold I will carry with you. Yet headily (first), I will serve you a feast and you shall eat and drink and tell me your tales.”

For an instant I wondered how this boy, alone and severely altered, would serve us a feast, but that thought was pushed aside by the prospect of more Crystal than our sacks could carry. If we were to return with enough crystal to fill Haggard’s bag, that would mean changing the course of the war by the following week.

“We have no time for this,” Haggard told me. And then, to Yitzhak–“The time is short. In plea I say, give us this now, and after we will go back to the surface we will return here all manner of riches to your satisfaction.”

“You have hurt me,” the boy replied, and there was a hint of indignation in his green eyes.

“Seek in thine heart to absolve us, Yitzhak,” I said. “We did not think it a part of you.” Even though he was effectively covered in sharp edges, and was practised in using them, I felt no threat from him. I was genuinely sorry.

“Now thou have witnessed and known. Everything I have sovereignty over and can feel hurt when injured is part of me.” He sighed deeply. “You shall hurt me still, when the time comes and you will leave me here to this silence. Let us bargain on my compensation. For much time I had no guests in my home. Eat, sleep, and when you wake you shall leave with half of the glass I toiled for and treasured. Does this bargain please you?”

I looked at Haggard, who nodded. “Aye,” he said in plain English, and in Hebrew added, “We are prisoners-of-gratitude to you.”

Yitzhak gave a joyous “Ah!” sound, and suddenly he seemed, through his alteration, so young I could have even believed him to be sixteen years old. Without another word, he turned around and started walking slowly, his weight shifting from side to side, compensating for the limited angle between his legs. We followed. Haggard picked his broken pickaxe from the ground, looked at Yitzhak, who had his back so trustingly turned to us, and quietly put the halves of the weapon back in his pack.

I watched him as he moved, making ordinary walking motions within the Crystal casing, which adjusted itself around him, the parting for the legs and arms now slightly more visible. To cross above the river with all that weight, holding on with nothing but sharp edges, he must have endured a fright that dwarfed my own.

He led us, shuffling to a spacious, faintly-lit cavern. I entered after Yitzhak and before Haggard, and saw that on both sides of the entrance stood statues, carved into the wall in a half circle, and standing as tall as my chest. In the glow of the single luminescent worm hanging over each one, I saw that they had been rendered in lifelike detail. They looked more Espanish than Britonish, with moustaches and pronounced eyebrows, but I still recognized them: Zeus, Hera, Eros, Artemis; even a stern Apollo and a mischievous, inebriated Dionysus facing one another. Each was made from a different coloured rock, which must have been cut somewhere else and brought here. I wondered how far Yitzhak had gone to acquire these materials.

The semi-circle was not yet finished, and a block of rock stood in a niche cut into the wall. I wondered who it might become.

There were two nooks by the wall, carved out of the same green-yellow rock–beds, perhaps, made to fit the human body, the gentle curving of the rock accentuating different curves. I wondered who the second bed had been for, and what had happened to them. Currently, the boy had no need for a bed—he seemed perfectly comfortable when we found him, lying on the floor. When he’d made them, his alteration must have been partial, only a hint of his current form. My hand went up to my gills.

The hall ended with a cliff, the kind that Ricca would have had me bar with ropes so no one could accidentally fall off while looking for a place to pee. Ricca, I thought with a pinch of regret. She must have been worried sick about me, taking out her fury on Miles and Krentz. Would she forgive me for staying the night here, while worry ate at her? I hoped she would, once I returned with enough Crystal to earn us both a lengthy vacation.

The cliff was five or so metres tall, and there was a path around it, a slope carved into rough stairs, leading to a body of quickly-flowing water—perhaps the same river we’d seen before. It was impenetrably black in the faint shine of the worms. Here there was no crossing—nothing on the other side but a wall, smooth and solid, curving into the hall’s ceiling. On our side, a circular pond connected to the side of the stream, neither obstructing nor adding to the flow.

Smaller sculptures were here, too, human figures and vases of stone flowers, made of rock of many different colours, like the statues.

“Hope I do, that your famine is great.” Yitzhak‘s voice echoed in the larger chamber, as he descended the stairs “I shall make us feast of…” He twisted his encrusted hand as if to mimic the swimming of a fish, struggling to find the word.

“Leviathan,” I suggested. “Small leviathan.”

At that, Yitzhak laughed, again revealing his youth. Too young to be sent out here; too young to be here alone. I laughed with him. “Sí, Leviathan,” he said. “Only we will be swallowing the leviathan, not him us.”

“Fish.” Haggard determined from where he stood, examining Hera’s statue. We both nodded solemnly. That was the correct word.

I followed Yitzhak down the stairs, his heavy form swinging from side to side with each step towards the pond. It was cut smoothly from the rock shore, creating a basin for streamwater. Closer now, I glimpsed Crystals sitting at the bottom of it, and fish swimming among the sharp, precious stones. More Crystal than I had ever seen in one place, present alteration excluded. He held his hand out, and as his fingers moved, a chunk of Crystal almost as large as my head dropped from the edge of that hand’s outgrowth, disturbing the water and fish. I realised he’d had it in his hand the entire time, and I’d mistaken it for a part of his body. “Each one (is) other,” he said, making an expression of relishing a delicious taste. “Other than the rest, and himself.” I took him to mean that each fish tasted different, due to their alterations, but I couldn’t be sure.

Haggard joined us. “There is food in our sacks as well. Ours is yours,” he said, his roughness slowly dissolving.

“And mine yours,” Yitzhak returned. “An honour it is to me. Never have I sat with residents of Briton.”

“Nor have we, with a resident of Espania,” said Haggard,. If he’d been angered that we were forced to stay, he seemed to have forgotten about it.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

Yitzhak stood at the edge of the pool and bent to stab one long thorn slowly at the water. The fish were not the same kind I’d seen here before: these were larger, with eyes that shone in a darkness they had not been designed to tolerate. “My father, before he returned his spirit, left an owing to a creditor. To repay it, I laboured for her family as a…”

“Servant,” Haggard suggested.

“No, not servant. Slave.”

Haggard and I glanced at each other. Slavery was commonplace in Espania, but as far as we knew, it was limited to criminals and debtors. Not children.

Yitzhak continued, “All the while dwelling in their house, praying to their many gods. But not in truth. Not in truth! In truth, I pray in silence, here.” He brought one finger as close as he could to his temple, as if to tap it, but it was separated by two layers of Crystal.

“Aye.” Haggard nodded and sighed. He knew, as I did, what that was like. Funny, to remember how Moloch and I had both pretended to be worshipers of false idols.

“Do the Israelites in Briton also have a speaking, that it is said you should have no other gods over me, and therefore it is in accordance with the law to pray, and sacrifice, and even worship, as long as the one true god, My Lords, is remembered to rule over all of them?”

Haggard hummed in agreement. “So said my mother. She pretended to bring sacrifices to Moloch, but in her heart of hearts sacrificed them to the Name. She thought it clever, to hide behind a faith so detestable no one would desire it.”

“Not so said mine,” I said. “It is because My Lords created the false idols, like the crocodiles and snakes of Egypt and Nimrod the Hunter, that putting up sacrifices is permitted as long as the son of Adam grips, here,” I pointed at my temple, “that they are but hand-makings of the Sovereign of the World.”

“Aye, that reached my ears also,” Moloch added.

“Not mine,” Yitzhak said, bemused. “But, in my eyes, it has grace.”

I smiled. We had all lived by the same rules, and bent them in similar ways. After sharing our excuses, I felt closer to these men, almost strangers a moment ago, than I had to people I’d known for years.

“Is that the labour of your hands?” I pointed up the stairs, towards the statues. I had noticed there was no chisel or hammer to be found, nor any other tools.

Yitzhak bowed, spreading his arms and the Crystal blades that came with them. I looked at the vases of flowers, each cut from a single stone, and tried to imagine how long that would have taken to him fashion. “Why?”

“Thus I was commanded,” Yitzhak answered.“By my mistress.”

I hesitated. Had his mistress commanded him to keep carving after she had gone, knowing she would be, or had he done it while she was here?

“Where is your mistress?” Haggard asked. I wouldn’t have.

As if it would cause him too much pain to say it aloud, Yitzhak pointed with one of the sharp edges of his body towards the gushing river. The sound of the water rushing by the rock seemed suddenly louder. “She dove into the black waters,” he whispered, “and is no more.” He looked down the stream, as if after her, and for a moment the cave seemed like the gullet some titanic beast we were already in the gullet of.

“Why?” Haggard asked. I suspected he had a reason to be so rude, but I could not guess what it was.

Yitzhak, seeming pained or perhaps slighted, gestured at the cave around us, at the stalactites, the Crystals waiting in the pond, the darkness waiting both down and up the river. “My mistress, her husband died in war. In revenge she desired. Not in men of war, but revenge in war herself. There are more caverns here than grains of sand by the sea, and we came here to search for more glass, the two of us, vowing to give it willingly to the army, so much that there would be no more battle. But we never returned. She died here, and a slave like me—the road is unblocked, but how could I return without my mistress?”

Haggard looked at the pond, pondering, perhaps, whether to ask more. His eyes met mine and I shook my head, wincing slightly, signalling for him that silence will be more courteous.

“And because that you shall not ascend,” Haggard finally said, ignoring my hint, but not without compassion. “Because of your shame.”

“Yes,” Yitzhak said.

“And for that you collect the glass,” I said, trying to turn the conversation away from his wounds. There was only so much we could dig into a person’s soul, so quickly, even with our newfound kinship.

“If I am ever to return, I must bring with me enough glass to stop the war. Is it not on my head?” Yitzhak said, and crouched by the pond, the Crystal of his arm sliding silently into the water.

“It is only natural,” Haggard said. He crouched on the floor and began taking cans of persevered food from his pack. “We have burdened you enough with quandaries. Shall we eat?”

Yitzhak nodded, even though it should not have been possible within the Crystal. With a sudden motion of his hand, he flicked a fish out of the water, and while it was in the air, slashed its head off. The two parts fell to the rock floor. “I hate seeing a fish out of water,” he said. “Better like this, in my eyes.” The fish’s tail slapped softly against the rock as it thrashed. The Crystal edges must have been too sharp to skewer the fish. If he’d impaled it, it would have slipped right off. “The leviathans seem good today. Full of life,” he noted.

“What is their origin?” I asked.

“Not these depths. There is a,” he signed a waterfall and we nodded. “Somewhere under the sun. What goes down far enough, can no longer ascend. I saw one fish carried down this stream, then another, swimming against the current as hard as they could, failing to climb back. So I dug this here, their place of final rest.”

Haggard laughed, a hearty laugh, at the dark humour. I saw what he meant – the fish weren’t trapped in the pond, per se, but the current was too quick for them to swim up, and below, well, who knew.

Yitzhak waited for the halves of the fish to stop flailing, then raked the head back into the water, leaving scratch marks in the basalt, and carefully caught the body between his Crystal arms, placing it just at the edge of my reach.

The fish smelled of pondweed, and the sea, and other things, but it was still raw fish, covered in black scales. It did not seem at all edible to me. “I ask forgiveness, Yitzhak, but my stay in these caves has not been long enough to eat raw fish with ease.”

Haggard grinned. “Fortunate that I carried flames with me, is that not so?”
“Flames?” Yitzhak whispered. Haggard opened a canteen, and the smell of alcohol filled the air. When he poured some of the liquid into a metal cup and lit a match, Yitzhak’s eyes shone, as if this ordinary fire was the most remarkable thing he’d seen in these caves. The entire hall lit up, and the shadows of the statues danced on the walls with our own. Yitzhak laughed, excited, protecting his eyes from the brightness with his hands. The Crystal around him reflected and refracted it into many colours, the light playing inside of him as he changed the angles of his surfaces.

Haggard gave the pickaxe’s handle to Yitzhak. As effortlessly as if he were cutting a piece of paper with an army knife, Yitzhak sliced off lengths of wood, then drew more fish out of the water, and gave them to Haggard to skewer. Before long we were all sitting around the fire, naked or nearly so, elated by the smell of frying fish, looking at the fire for what it was—a reflection, in a broader sense, of sunlight. With all the chemistry I’d learned, and all the theology I’d carved into my heart, still I saw in the fire what I’d seen in it when I was younger, what the ancient hunters who had not known God must have seen in it: an idol to be worshipped.

Haggard turned slightly to Yitzhak, his eyes still on the frying fish. “How did your father become so indebted, Yitzhak?”

Yitzhak kept his gaze on the flames when he answered. “The dice and the cards, my friend Avraham. It was a year of drought, and no matter how much he sacrificed to the gods of rains and grains, nothing grew. He pretended to pray at the temple of Demeter, while in truth he prayed to God. But when he started praying to Dionysus with dice tossers and drinkers in whorehouses, he did so in true faith to the god of debauchery. But Dionysus also was not pleased with his offerings, it seemed, because my father lost all we had. He had bet on our land, not with one gambler but with two. We not only lost our land, but were in debt one patch of land we did not own. More debt that one man’s life could pay.”

“The fathers ate a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,” Haggard quoted.

Yitzhak lifted his green eyes from the fire. “So it is. Are they worthy of eating yet?” he asked, tilting his chin towards the fish.

“In a single moment,” Haggard said.

I opened tins – preserved peaches and honied ham, again, and clams for Moloch.

“What are those?” Juan asked.

Suddenly I realised that I no longer had to eat unkosher food in order to preserve my life. “Nourishment worthy for livestock,” I said, and emptied the cans into the pond for the fish to eat. Moloch laughed, and so did I.

“It is better to be hungry in truth,” Yitzhak said, “than to be satisfied in lie.”

Haggard leaned forward to see if the fishes’ undersides were properly singed, and finally gave the command to commence eating. We waited for a silent moment. I watched their eyes slightly narrow, as if something demanded their focus. In another time, that would have seemed like nothing to me, but now that I knew to look for it, it was clear as daylight: their focus as they recited the words in their heads. Strange, to realise there was nothing to hide, now.

“Blessed are you (singular),” I recited, my voice a whisper, but growing louder. “My Lords, our Gods the king of the world, that by his word alone everything is made to become.”

Yitzhak wept as he bit into his fish. Haggard looked at him, and in the darkness, I thought I saw heartbreak hidden in the hardness of his brown eyes. For a moment, we all forgot about the war that had sent us down there, about the responsibilities we had, or used to have. Or so I thought.

The fish tasted quite terrible. There was the taste of iron that I’d almost forgotten about, being beside so much Crystal for so long, but other tastes, too, from octopus to fungus to meat I didn’t recognize and preferred not to.

We ate in silence, aside from the errant sentence here and there. After I’d eaten, weariness overtook me and Yitzhak, an excited host, insisted that I lie on one of his beds made of stone. Haggard claimed not to be tired.

After finding the one that fit me best I had to admit they really were masterworks—the rock wasn’t soft, but it felt as if it fit itself to my form. Yitzhak even offered a quilt made of leaves and pondweed woven together.

My body needed rest, but my mind was reeling, thinking of the bounty we were about to bring back to the surface. The bounty that would end the war. If we conquered the Espanish empire, perhaps we could stop them from holding children as slaves for the crimes of their fathers.

There was no way I would fall asleep.

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