SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The noise hit him before the cold did.

Trafalgar stepped out onto the landing above the common hall and the whole street below him went up at once. It was not the ragged cheer the miners had managed at the mine mouth yesterday. This was the entire settlement, packed shoulder to shoulder between the houses, spilling into the side lanes, faces at every window and children up on the roof beams, and every last one of them roaring the instant the door opened.

He stopped where he was, and for one graceless breath had absolutely no idea what to do with himself.

’Right,’ he thought. ’This.’

He had walked into a nest under a mountain alone and felt less exposed. Down there the rules were simple and the work was work. Here thousands of people were looking up at him with wet eyes and open mouths, waiting for something from him, and he had no idea what it was supposed to sound like.

Gerhardt, may the deeps bless him, filled the gap. The old foreman came out onto the landing at his shoulder, raised both arms, and bellowed the crowd down to a rumble with the ease of a man who had been shouting over drill teams for forty years.

”Quiet! Quiet, the lot of you. His lordship has words for you.”

’Does he?’ Trafalgar thought grimly.

The whole street hushed. Hundreds of faces turned up toward him in the cold morning light, and he took hold of the rail and gave them what he had.

”The mine is clear.” His voice carried flat and even down the lane. ”The thing that made the nest is dead. Nothing that came out of it is going to come out of it again. The captain has men down there confirming it now, and the shafts will reopen as soon as the ground is judged sound.”

He paused, because that part had been easy, and the next part was not.

”You held this place together. Two thousand of your people are in the ground, and the settlement did not break, and it should have. That is not a small thing.” He looked over the mass of them without fixing on anyone in particular. ”You kept your head, you sent for help, and you waited it out without tearing each other apart. The mine works again because you were still standing when it could be reopened. That was you. Not me.”

Somewhere in the crowd a woman had begun to cry.

”The households that lost their earners will be provided for. That is being arranged and it is not charity, so nobody needs to thank me for it. It is owed. Go back to your work when the ground is called safe. Bury your dead properly. Take what the mountain owes you.” A beat. ”That is all.”

He stopped talking.

It came out of him exactly as cold as it had sounded in his own head. Flat, clipped, arranged like a report to an officer, every sentence a fact laid down and squared off.

He knew even while it was happening that there were warmer ways to say all of it, that another man in his place would have found the words to make a thousand grieving people feel held. He had never possessed those words. He could take apart a monster’s anatomy in his head in half a second and could not, for the life of him, tell a widow that things would be all right in a way that sounded like he meant it.

’Well,’ he thought. ’They got the truth, at least. It will have to do.’

The street erupted.

It went up louder than when he had opened the door, a great crashing wall of sound that rolled off the housefronts and startled birds off the roofs.

They were cheering the flat delivery and the awkward pauses and all. Men who had lost brothers were roaring themselves hoarse. Somebody set to hammering a pick handle against an ore cart in a hard steady rhythm, and half the street picked it up. Somebody else was chanting his name badly.

He stood there and let it wash over him, mildly appalled.

’They are not listening to the words,’ he realized. ’They stopped listening to the words a while ago.’

That was the whole of it, and he understood it a beat late. A lord had come up their mountain when nobody else did. A lord had walked into that hole alone, and walked back out of it covered in blood, and stood at their graveyard and called them owed. Whatever he said from a balcony was decoration. They had already decided what he was.

Down at the edge of the crowd, leaning against a doorframe with his arms folded and an expression of pure amusement on his face, stood Alfred.

The old airship captain had abandoned his precious vessel on the flats outside town and come in to watch, frost in his eyebrows, a mug of something hot in one hand. He caught Trafalgar’s eye through the noise, and his grin widened by a considerable margin.

It took a while to get down off the landing. Gerhardt had to physically clear a path, and Trafalgar had his forearms gripped by roughly thirty people on the way, and endured being wept on twice. By the time he reached the doorframe Alfred had not moved an inch, which he suspected was on purpose.

”Well.” Alfred took a slow, appreciative sip. ”That was quite a speech, my lord.”

”Don’t.”

”No, no. I mean it.” He set the mug down on the sill and straightened up, and cleared his throat, and delivered it back with his hands clasped behind him and his chin tucked in a fair imitation of a man reading a supply manifest. ”The mine is clear. The thing that made the nest is dead. That was you. Not me. That is all.” He shook his head slowly. ”Magnificent. Truly. I have not been so moved since the last time I read a bill of lading.”

”They cheered.”

”They did. Loudly.” Alfred picked the mug back up, entirely unrepentant. ”You could have read them the ledger of a fish market in that voice and they would have carried you through the streets on their shoulders. Do you understand that? It is not what you said. It is that you are the one saying it.” He took another sip, and something quieter came into him under the teasing. ”You went down there alone. Everything after that is scenery.”

Trafalgar had no answer for it, which Alfred appeared to take as a victory.

Behind them, the noise of the crowd was already changing pitch. Doors were being propped open all down the lane. Someone had begun rolling a barrel out of the storehouse, and someone else was arguing loudly about where the fire pits should go, and the smell of woodsmoke and roasting meat had started to thread through the cold air. Trestle boards came out of a shed on the shoulders of four men. Down at the far end of the street, a fiddle found its first notes and held them.

The whole settlement, all at once and with two thousand dead barely cold in the ground, was throwing open its doors.

Gerhardt appeared at Trafalgar’s elbow, red-faced and beaming, his cap nowhere in sight.

”My lord.” He had to shout it over the din. ”The feast is starting.”