When they emerged, blinking, into the thin sunlight, the first thing he saw was Liem Pieters holding out his fat hand for the little bag around his neck. Mags handed it over, and suppressed a grin at Liem's lifted eyebrow. But all the man did was grunt “Extra ration, noon meal and supper,” and wave him on.
A couple of the others cast envious glances at him as he headed for the Big House and the back-kitchen door.
By some mysterious alchemy, the kitchen had already heard of his good fortune, for he was presented with a bowl of cabbage soup and two slices of barley bread. He carried both to a long shed with a single big table in it that was called the “schoolroom.”
He took the nearest empty seat on one of the long benches and picked up the piece of charcoal waiting there for him. Because that was what you did. You ate, and you learned how to read and write at the same time.
Why? He had no idea. It didn't exactly make sense, and he knew Master Cole fumed over the “wasted time,” but for some reason it was something he had to allow.
One of Cole's daughters was there; it was their job to teach the kiddies. She had a big piece of slate mounted onto the wall and chunks of soft, white chalk. This one wore a clean blue dress and had hair that was almost yellow braided in a tail down her back, but otherwise she looked like every other Pieters girl; round white face with very pink cheeks, eyes like a couple of round blue berries shoved into the white dough of her face, and no expression whatsoever. She wrote on the slate, the kiddies wrote what she did on the tabletop in charcoal, they sounded it all out, and then they got to take a bite of food before erasing what they had written and going on.
This was the one part of the day that Mags loved, unreservedly. He was far, far beyond this sort of thing himself, actually. He could read and write entire sentences, and often did so around the word that the others were sounding out. It seemed a kind of magic to him, that he could put these things down and someone else could make the same sense of them that he did. Somewhere, he had heard, there were things called “books” that were full of sentences that told you entire stories and facts about things, andâwell, all manner of things it was good to know, or things that answered questions. Master Cole had no books in his house. But other people did.
As if in an echo of his thoughts, the Pieters daughter wrote
book
on the slate. Obediently, but struggling, the others wrote it down.
“Bâooâk. Book,”
they sounded out, while he was writing,
I open my book to read.
As he erased it, he noticed that Burd, the littlest of the kiddies working the mines, had no bread at all, and kept his attention strictly on his soup, though his face looked as if he was about to cry. No breadâthat could only mean he'd come out of the mine empty-handed. And that wasn't fair. Just because the seam had played out, it was hardly fair to punish the kiddy who was unlucky enough to be stuck there. But that was Cole all over . . .
With an internal curse, Mags got Burd's attention by elbowing him while erasing his sentence, and handed him the remaining half slice of bread. Burd stared at him in, first astonishment, then near-worship. He took the half slice and stuffed it quickly in his mouth, as if he was afraid Mags would change his mind.
Mags just finished his soup.
The lesson ended with Endal Pieters coming in and saying it was done with. The daughterâthey were all interchangeable to Mags, all identical, all forgettable, all inconsequential because they had no power to punish himâcleaned the slate and scuttled away. The kiddies, Mags included, erased the last words, bolted down whatever food they had left, and got to their feet as Endal watched impatiently.
Then, forming a line because Endal liked precision, they marched out into the cold to take their turn at the sluices.
2
I
N summer, working the sluices was the best job. There was sun, and fresh air, and if you got hot, you just splashed some water over you. It was hard work, right enough, swirling the heavy pans of gravel around and around in the running water, and by day's end your arms and back ached something terrible, but it was no worse than mining the seam. And if you had to work long hours, either because you were on the morning shift and got up with the sun, or because you were on the afternoon shift and didn't stop till the sun went down, well, that wasn't so bad. You didn't really want to go to bed early in the summer, when you could sluice in the sun and let the heat soak into you, especially after a turn in the mine in the cold. And if you had morning shift and it was hot, the mine felt good by contrast, and it took a while for the heat to leech out of you. Besides, longer hours in the summer got made up for by shorter ones in winter.
The one advantage that the kiddies had over the three night shift miners, the ones all twisted and not right in the head, was that daytime was their shift. Night belonged to the ones Cole cared even less about, if that was possible, and they worked their whole shift in the mine itself, leaving their rock to be sorted through in the day by the kiddies come to the sluice in the morning. They were already twisted up, so the damage was done, and it didn't matter anymore if they got further crippled. As long as they could hobble to the shaft, that suited Cole. If
they
got sick, small loss. Master Cole would find some other cripple to replace whoever sickened and died. Assuming one of the kiddies hadn't had an accident by then and had already gone to night shift.
Some of the kiddies were scared of them, weird buggers that they were. When the kiddies all trudged to the sleeping hole, the night shift would be waking up, blinking at the light, looking like a bunch of cave crickets, pasty-pale under all that dirt, with limbs stuck out at odd angles. They never talked, just mumbled, and what you could understand rarely made any sense.
In summer, despite the night workers getting much shorter shifts than the day workers, Mags felt just a little sorry for them, as much as he could feel sorry for anyone other than himself. They never got clean, they never seemed to care that they didn't. They never saw the sun unless it was coming up or going down. They went from one hole in the ground to another. And he wondered if they looked back on their stints at the sluices with pleasure, or at least, with regret. Or did they just not think about things anymore?
But in fall as it got colder, and in winter, when the water was freezing and there were icicles on the sluice itself, it was bitter work, and he envied the night shift. At least it was relatively warm down in the shaft, compared to the work at the sluice. Maybe being crazy wasn't so bad. It might be worth being crazy to avoid the sluices in winter.
It was fall now; the leaves were starting to drop from the trees, and the water was hand-numbing cold. Mags eyed the water being dumped into the sluice by the bucket-chain with disfavor as he approached. The wheels squeaked and complained, the buckets splashed over the leather belt that took them up and down again into the well, the water splashed down into the sluices. The donkey hitched to the wheel running the whole thing plodded on, head down.
Each of them took a spot on one of the three sluices, wooden troughs that the water from the mine was pumped into, and augmented by water from the well brought up by the bucket-chain. Piles of rock pounded into gravel at the hammer-mill were brought here after sorting. Master Cole's daughters and youngest sons did that; there were a lot of sparklies pounded out by those hammers, fracturing the rock around them but not the crystals themselves. The kiddies got the gravel when the Pieters siblings were done with it. The sorting house was a pleasanter place by far than the sluices. You were allowed to sit down. The doors and windows stood open to the breeze in summer. There was a fire in there, come winter. The only time the kiddies ever saw a fire was when there were leaves and trash being burned, or they took a turn as a kitchen drudge because a drudge had took sick. The sorting house was clean and bright and the work was just tedious, not backbreaking. But then, that was to be expected, since the Pieters kids served there . . . and it was rare indeed that anyone else got a turn in the place. Usually old man Cole or his wife or one of the older boys would bend their heads to work there before they let a kiddie in the door. It had happened once to Mags' knowledge, the year that an ague and a flux went through the whole place, carrying off two Pieters kids and several servants, but leaving the mine workers oddly alone. Maybe even a fever realized what a misery their lives were and figured they had enough punishment.
Mags took his place at the head of the third sluice, with his back to the afternoon sun, so that, weakening as it was, the warmth of it could soak through his raggedy shirt and into his skin. He got the pan that had been left by the kiddie on the last shift under the sluice, scooped up enough to cover the bottom from the gravel pile next to him and began swirling the gravel in the running water, watching for the glint of something colored and shiny.
Again, his thoughts flitted back to the Pieters kids, and that there seemed to be a never-ending supply of mean boys and girls like lumps of dough, as if someone in the kitchen was making them, all alike, and then only baking them halfway. There were the four oldest boys, two girls married off, a couple more that did the teaching, and it seemed like a dozen small 'uns. Surely Cole's wife didn't litter them like kittens! Yet there they were, a horde of them, from the eldest that worked at cutting the sparklies to the youngest that bossed each other in endless and pointless games until the boys were put to work in the sorting house and the girls began learning household duties under the housekeeper's watchful eye.
“Wonder why there's so many Pieters,” he muttered, not realizing he had said it aloud until the kiddy next to himâDavey, almost sixteen, and still not crippled, not addlepated, and making no secret that he was leaving when the priest next cameâlaughed out loud. Davey was a good head taller than Mags, and like all the kiddies, he was so coated in dirt that it was hard to tell what his skin tone actually was. But his eyes were hard and cold and brown, like pebbles. His hair, matted, with bits of straw still in it, was hacked off short, as Mags' was and, like Mags', was dark, somewhere between brown and black.
“ 'Cuz ol' man Cole can't keep his hands off'n the housemaids,” the older boy guffawed. “An' don' it make the right-wise born ones hoppin' mad! The boys, anyhow. Ever' time one of them maids squirts out a kid, you kin tell, 'cause they look like thunder.”
Mags blinked, spotted a sparkle in the water, and fished out a bit of pale blue like a fingernail paring. “Huh? Why?”
“ 'Cuz ol' man Cole likes t' tell 'em, when he don' like what they're doin', that he'll leave the mine an' all t' the bastards if they don' do what they're told.” Davey snickered this time. “He got Jarrik t' say he'd marry some ugly stick come spring thataway, instead of some pretty piece that don't come with money. He wasn't half hot about it, an' I hear the girl had some things t' say!”
“How'dye know all that?” Mags glanced at him sideways. Where was Davey getting all this? He talked like he was in and out of the Big House all the time, and Mags knew that wasn't possible. Granted, Davey generally came to bed last, and even in winter he was known for some sort of prowling. Mags figured he just had some angle going, maybe with the stableboy. Or maybe with a kitchen drudge. Neither the stableboy nor the drudges got paid even the pittance that the other servants got, and they took what they could get when they could get it. The stableboy secretly cooked up messes of the oats to eat, and kitchen drudges could snitch bits of this and that as they cleaned pots and pans. Mags had never been hungry as a kitchen drudge.
“ 'Cuz I got ears. 'Cuz I don' need as much sleep as you kiddies, so I go sneakin' round the Big House and listenin' under winders.” Davey glanced over at Mags and gave him a wink. “ 'Cuz when you learn stuff, sometimes y'learn stuff what's worth sumpin'. I learn stuff, makes the cook gimme stuff. I learn stuff, gets me better stuff to wear. Why you think I'm gettin' outa here? I know stuff. I know stuff Jarrik don' want his pa t'know. I know stuff ol' man Cole don' want his wife t' know. Like about them housemaids. He tells her 'twas the boys, but it's him, when the by-blows come.” He leaned over conspiratorially and whispered, “I'll tell it all t' you afore I go, if ye get a couple of those yaller sparklies, hide 'em, an' keep 'em for me, then give 'em t' me afore I flit.”
Mags felt his heart do a double-beat and bent over the pan to hide his expression. No one had ever made such an offer to him before.
He was temptedâoh, yesâhe was tempted. Seriously tempted. This could mean the difference between being stuck here his whole life and getting out, like Davey. If the offer was real. The knowledge might be good for more than just getting out; it might be good for more food, a better blanket, an easier time of it from Jarrik. He, too, might get some of those advantages from the cook, and maybe other things, too.
But it might not be a real offer, and it might be a trap. Maybe Davey never meant to tell him anything once he had the sparklies, or maybe he'd make stuff up to tell, stuff that wasn't true, that would only get Mags in trouble if he tried to use it. And then there was the danger of doing the theft in the first place, Mags had never seen what happened to kiddies who snitched sparklies, because in his time no kiddie had had a reason to try, but it had to be a lot worse than ones caught snitching food or blankets. And Master Cole was just mean enough to have said to Davey, “I'll let you leave here with money in yer pocket and a good suit'o clothes if you find out who'd snitch sparklies, given a chance.” Mags was convinced that there was nothing Master Cole wouldn't try just for the meanness of it.