Deep Water (65 page)

Despair began to creep over her, but she pushed it down. “Who knows the caves best?” she asked.

There was silence, but everyone looked at Medric. He rested his pickaxe on the ground and stared at it, as if unwilling to
meet their gaze.

Sami cleared his throat. “Think you’ll be able to find him, Medric?”

Medric took a breath, and let it out again as if unsure what to say. He shrugged. “If I call him, he might come,” he said
eventually, in a voice that gave nothing away.

“Who?” Bramble asked.

“A friend. Fursey. He, uh… he lives in there.” Medric indicated the mountain with a jerk of his head.

“Human?” Bramble asked.

A couple of the men looked at the ground as though unsure of the answer. One shorter man grinned and said, “Well, we’ve had
our doubts,” and then shut up as Medric glared at him.

“Human,” Medric confirmed.

She was glad of that confirmation as she followed Medric and his lantern down the tunnel and felt the weight of the earth
above her, encountered the absolute darkness of underground for the first time with her own body. The dark hadn’t seemed as
bad when she was looking through Gris’s eyes.

He led her down a long way, through tunnels that sometimes required her to crawl, and sometimes took them through caverns
where the roof echoed high above her head. They stopped, finally, in a small cave — no, a tunnel. She saw the marks of pickaxes
and chisels on the rock walls. This was the bottom of the mine, but there were fissures in the rock, passages like the ones
Dotta had shown her, leading further down. Medric put down the lantern and stood for a moment, as if gathering courage.

“Fursey,” he called softly. “Fursey! I’ve come back!”

He waited a few moments, and then called again, and then again.

There was silence. The earth seemed to grow heavier above them. Medric checked the candle in the lantern — it was more than
half gone. He tightened his lips and sighed. “Fursey,” he called again, but this time reluctantly. “I need your help.”

Nothing.

He raised his voice in frustration. “There are people dying, Furse, and I need your help!” Echoes rang along the tunnel walls,
so that the whole mine seemed to be whispering, “help, help, help . . .”

Medric turned to Bramble and shrugged. “If he doesn’t want to help . . .”

Behind him, from the thinnest of the fissures, a slight figure appeared. A man. Yes, human, Bramble was sure, although there
was something about the way he moved that reminded her of the hunter. He stood staring at Medric for a moment as someone might
stare at a picture of devastation. Then Medric realized where Bramble’s eyes were staring and whirled around.

“Fursey!” He took a step forward and clasped the man to him, but the slight figure slipped out of his grasp and stood looking
at him, head to one side.

“I thought,” he said in a soft voice, “that if you came back, you would come alone. Is this your
wife
?” There was venom in his voice.

Medric flinched. “Of course not. I only just met her. She needs help, and you’re the only one . . .”

“So you came back for her, not for me? How was your family?”

The question threw Medric. “They were fine. Da’s dead. Mam’s remarried. My sisters’re fine. So I came back to find you.”

Somehow, the words took the tension out of the cave. “But you hate the mine,” Fursey said.

“Yes,” Medric confirmed. “I hate the mine.”

“Then you should not have come back.”

Medric bent his head, as he had after he had killed the hunter, and stared at the floor of the tunnel.

Bramble had had enough of all this melodrama. “I need to find the animal cave, the one with the paintings on the wall,” she
said directly to Fursey. “Will you help?”

“That’s a sacred place,” Fursey said.

“I know.” This man might have been human, but he was strange. Well, she had dealt with stranger things than him. “I need to
find some bones,” she said.

“Are they calling you?” he asked.

Very strange. But in a way, they were.

“Yes,” she said. “They have called me for a thousand years.”

He nodded. “Then I will take you.”

T
HIS IS HOW
it was.

It’s cold and windy. Da’s hand is the only warm thing in the world, and there won’t be that much longer.

The man from the mine is not too impressed; this one’s too skinny, his look says, too bloody hungry. My boys’ll eat him for
breakfast. But he clinks some coins in his pocket.

“Five silver pieces.”

Da’s hand tightens. Too much, or too little? It’s hard to tell. What’s five silver pieces worth, anyway?

“He’s worth more than that,” Da says. “He’s a good boy, obedient. He’s a hard worker, aren’t you, Medric?”

Oh, yes. Da’s strong enough to make sure of that. He’s got a hard hand, has Da.

“Say something, why don’t you?”

The man interrupts before Da does more than raise his voice. “Five and a half. That’s it.”

“It’s robbery.” But he takes it.

The man from the mine is called Sami. He’s from the north, with fair hair but brown eyes. Traveler blood in there, somewhere.
A middling-size man, running a little to fat. But a man with a hard hand. It’s not difficult to pick them, once you’ve known
one.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll put you in with the pushers. They’ll start you off right.”

He leads the way to a long stone building with a slate roof. It’d be impressive in a town, but stone’s cheap here, after all.
All it costs is the labor of getting it out of the ground.

A chill strikes off the stone as he leads the way through the doorway. Inside, the floor is packed dirt. The little windows
are so high up that at this time, late evening, there’s almost no light at all. There are wide wooden bunks in rows on both
sides of the room. In the closest bunks are boys, two or three to a bed: every age from ten up, and all of them asleep with
the sleep of exhaustion. They sprawl uncaring, arms hanging out, legs uncovered by the one blanket. The mine whistle blew
an hour ago, as Da hurried up the steep path to the mine, saying, “By all that’s holy, hurry up.”

An hour from leaving the mine to this oblivion.

Da said, “Forget your bloody big words and your bloody airs and graces, boy. You’re here to work, and don’t you forget it.”
Good advice. The only good advice Da ever spoke. Maybe not such a good farewell, though.

Sami gestures to a bunk in the far corner where there are only two boys. “Nav and Fursey. Bunk in with them tonight and they’ll
show you around tomorrow. You’ll be pushing. Get some supper over at the kitchen.”

He points northward, through the stone wall, then considers. “You’d better give me your duffel. This lot’ll steal anything
that’s not nailed down. Don’t worry, I’ll look after it. You can get it back when you leave.”

Right. In seven years, at nineteen. Those clothes are going to be really useful then.

Sami grins. A clip over the ear is clearly his normal way of saying goodbye. It could be worse.

The kitchen is bright with firelight but there’s not much food left. The cook grumbles as he fills a bowl with lentils and
scrounges around until he finds a crust to go with it. The food’s not too hot, but it’s good. Solid. Sustaining. After all,
you have to feed boys if they’re going to hew out a mountain for you the next day.

Nav and Fursey both grumble about having to train a newcomer, but only Nav means it. Nav’s a city boy from Turvite, mean-eyed
and suspicious, sold to pay his “uncle’s” gambling debts. His mother let him go without a word, he says, scared that if she
objected his “uncle” would leave her.

“She’m a twitty bitch,” he says, “no shagging good on her own. I’s well off without her.”

Fursey’s an orphan, with nowhere to go and no one to complain about. He’s yellow-haired and blue-eyed, so his folks must have
come from the south, but that’s all he knows. He’s been here since he was five; he doesn’t remember before that.

“I was somewhere else,” he says. “I don’t care. Now I’m here.” He smiles, sweetly.

Fursey’s the smallest of the pushers, but the others let him alone.

“Go easy with him,” Nav says quietly. “He looks like he’s a soft one, but if he takes against you he’ll kill you. He don’t
never forget nothing; and he don’t never forgive.”

Fursey looks people in the eye, even the hewers. He smiles like a much younger boy, but his stare is too strong for even Sami
to bear for long. So Sami doesn’t look at him.

“Get moving,” Sami shouts at all of us. “You think it’s a holiday?”

Fursey leads the way. Pushers don’t really push — they pull the ore-laden carts out of the mine, up the steep, stony ramps.
The traces go around the chest, and a long strip of leather rests against the forehead and is attached to the sides of the
cart. A trained twelve-year-old boy who leans into the leather headband and puts his whole weight into it can haul a fully
laden cart up a mile of mine ramps in twenty-two minutes. That’s how fast Fursey is, but Sami doesn’t know it. Fursey stops
halfway up, every time, in the darkest part of the ramp, and just looks around.

The leather strap cuts. The ramp is stony and sharp on bare feet. The mine’s not cold, exactly, not like up above, where the
wind cuts through clothing like it was paper. But it’s dark. By the gods, it’s darker than anything. A darkness that settles
down, heavy, like thick cloth over your mouth. The pale yellow of the candles at the turning points of the ramps can barely
be seen. There is only the great bear of the dark. The roof feels like it’s caving in.

“Look for the gold,” Fursey says urgently. His hand is warm. The boy-smell of him is comforting.

“What?”

“Look for the gold. There’s always sparks of it, even here. That’s why I stop, to see the gold.”

There are sparks. Tiny, flickering at the corner of your eyes. Barely there.

“There’s a reef behind there,” Fursey says, pointing at the wall. “But those fools up top don’t know it. They’ve passed it
by.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” Fursey says, and settles the leather strap onto his brow. “Back to your cart, Medric. Follow me. I’ll go slow.”

With the strap around your forehead you have to look down and the dark doesn’t seem so heavy. But it’s a long, long way to
the top of the ramp. To the sunlight. There are four more trips to make before mid-meal.

Well, you get used to anything, they say. Even to unending work, eat, sleep, work again. Not every day is pushing. The mine
closes down at the dark of the moon for two days, and the free hewers go downvalley, to their families, those who have them.

“Dead unlucky to be underground at the dark o’ t’moon,” Nav explains to me. “That’s when the delvers come out.”

“Delvers?”

Nav looks quickly over his shoulder, and makes the sign against hexing. “The dark people, the little people, the eaters of
rock, the owners of the blackness,” he says, and it’s clear those aren’t his words, that he’s learned them off by heart. But
from whom, he won’t say.

Even with the mine closed, the pushers don’t stop working. There’s always work: scything the grass around the barracks, cutting
wood, weeding the kitchen garden. That’s not so bad, with the sun warm on your back and the smell of fresh earth; living earth.
Different from the dark, dead smell of underground rock.

These two days, Fursey is twitchy as a cat. Snapping at everyone. His wide-eyed stare has become a glare.

“He just hates being out o’ t’mine,” Nav says. “I told you, he’m crazy.”

It’s true. Back in the mine, Fursey sings as he pushes; and stops to look at the gold twice as long.

In bed that night, he talks about it, whispering. “I know none of the others understand, but you do, don’t you, Medric? It’s
so beautiful down there, with the gold shining all around me. The gold calls to me, I can hear it, I know where it is underneath
the rock. It wants to be taken out, to be melted down and made into beautiful things. It wants to be admired and treasured.
It yearns for the pain of the pick cutting through the reef.”

His hand is warm. He is the only warm thing here.

“I don’t really understand. But I suppose . . .”

“You’ll see,” he says with confidence. “You’ll get to love it, too.” He snuggles closer. His hair smells of dust and leather.

In time, pushers become hewers. Hewing is better. Striking hard at the rock face, choosing your spot so the whole slab falls
away with just one blow. There is skill in hewing, and responsibility. It’s easy to make a mistake, to bring down a section
of wall on your fellows.

That’s how Nav dies, when a new hewer takes out part of a supporting wall and the tunnel collapses. The mine closes for a
day. The free hewers walk down the valley to the gods’ altar stone to pray for him and for once the bonded hewers and pushers
are allowed to go with them, under Sami’s watchful eye.

“Why don’t they have a proper funeral? Why don’t they dig him out?”

“The delvers will have taken his body,” Fursey says matter-of-factly.

He is right. Expecting the worst, it’s hard to go down into the dark the next day. But Nav’s body is gone and the tunnel floor
partly cleared.

“No one knows where the bodies go, but nothing bad could happen. They only eat rock,” Fursey says. “I think gold is like dessert
for them.” He pauses. “I’d like to meet them someday.”

“Don’t say that! You might meet them the way Nav has.”

He smiles. In the pale light of his candle his eyes have no irises; they are wholly black, like the dark of the mine halfway
up the shaft. The flickering of the candle puts gold into his eyes. Sometimes it is there even in daylight.

“There are worse places to die.”

The bed is bigger and colder without Nav. At home, the night seemed dark. But after the heavy darkness of the mine, even the
blackest night is full of light. Fursey’s head shines in it. Now there is some privacy, but Fursey thinks it’s best to wait
until the others are asleep.

They know anyway. All the boys who share beds share pleasure as well. What else is there? Where else can warmth be had? But
Fursey is like that; secretive, solitary.