I rest beside her until a basket is swung over and given to her to haul outside. The guard gestures me onto the rope platform and whistles to the men to start pulling.
As I descend, the heat abates. Twice, the platform passes a side shaft cutting horizontally into the rock. The first is silent and dark, and it reeks of waste and sweat. People on their break sleep here, where night and day don’t matter. A waft of uncomfortably hot air puffs out of the second tunnel. Echoes of hammering float like dissonant music. In the gloom of a single lantern, a man glistening with sweat stands beside a barrow filled with rocks, which he is transferring into baskets to be pulled up.
I toss him a pouch of broth, which he will transfer back to me, empty, on my way up.
He calls in soft Efean, “Stone by stone, Spider.”
“Heart by heart, Menesis.”
Down I go as drifts of smoky air make my eyes sting. A speck of dust gets in my eye, the one Gargaron whipped, and I forget myself and rub at it. Pain flares and I breathe through the agony like Anise taught me. Finally it fades to its usual throbbing ache.
The earth closes in around me.
A hand tugs on the rope beneath my feet. As the platform settles onto the ground, I step aside so men can load their baskets of rock. Efeans work in these depths but also Saroese men marked with a criminal’s brand, most of them common murderers and thieves condemned to end their short and violent lives here. I seek through the crowd for faces that have become familiar to me, and as I pause, one of the criminals crowding around takes advantage of the dimness to grope my thigh.
I shout, “Off me!”
An overseer moves in, slashing his whip to scatter the men. “Move back! Move back! You know the rules. What the king claims belongs to the king.”
Another of the branded men waves to get my attention. With his companions, he opens a path for me out of the press.
“My thanks, Selukon,” I say as I come up beside him.
“You’ve promised us vengeance, Jessamy Tonor,” Selukon says in a low voice that doesn’t carry to the guards.
“We will all have vengeance.” I nod at each one as I give them their ration of water.
There are seventeen men here who once, like me, belonged to Clan Tonor. They are all of Saroese ancestry, Patron-born, and they worked in the Tonor warehouses as stevedores and clerks. After I convinced them that we are allies, they told me their shocking tale.
Lord Ottonor didn’t die in debt, as Gargaron claimed. Clan Tonor was growing in influence and power because Ottonor sponsored competent men whatever their birth, like my father, and so effectively managed the lands and harbor and mines he’d inherited that he had doubled his clan’s wealth in a mere thirty years. But after he died and Gargaron took over, claiming that Ottonor’s finances were in ruins, these humble servingmen were branded as criminals and transported here because they knew the truth.
Maybe men like Selukon look down upon Efeans, as many Saroese do, but I have persuaded him and his imprisoned brethren to join us by explaining that if we all work together, we can get out from under this common servitude.
I turn my attention to the children carrying chunks of rock out of the darkness to drop into the waiting baskets. They are as frail and bent as elders, faces filthy with dried snot and hair matted with grime, not even shaved down as is the custom with children. As each one reaches the staging ground in front of the platform, I give them broth. My heart breaks over and over as I call each by name so they will remember they are people deserving of names. Those of us in the kitchen eat twice a day, and I slip pieces of bread from my own morning meal into their grubby hands.
A boy named Anu peers at me through eyes clouded with pus. “Is it day outside? Does the sun shine?”
“It does shine,” I say.
“I’ve forgotten what it looks like, Honored Lady.”
“Do not give up hope.” I don’t mean to sound angry but right now anger is what holds me upright. “You will see the sun again.”
I am not yet done. The final task of my thrice-daily rounds awaits me, down in the depths of a long tunnel supported at intervals by massive pillars of uncut rock. Here and there, oil lamps hang, hissing softly, but there aren’t enough to chase away the wretchedness. Sound scatters around me, not talk—no one has enough air or energy to talk—but rather the sounds of mallets and chisels, of an echoing roar that halts me in my tracks.
Smoke billows into my face from one of the fires they use to crack the rock face. I cough uncontrollably. When my shudders ease, I move forward to emerge into a long open space tall enough for me to stand upright. To my horror, there’s been a rockfall at the far end of the chamber. Men are desperately hammering posts from floor to ceiling to hold up the rock so the whole ceiling won’t collapse and bury them all. Other workers gather around a body trapped under the fall.
A slab of rock too heavy to lift has pinned the man’s leg. He is still conscious, his whimpering moans amplified by the enclosed space. As the others argue about what to do, I flash to a memory of Lord Agalar. How he devised a way to amputate a leg and sew up the gash so the victim would not bleed to death and might hope to heal with a stump.
There is no doctor at this mine.
Only here in the depths have I come to understand what Bettany saw in Agalar: a man who could save lives, not use them up.
A flake the size of my hand snaps off and thuds onto the floor next to me. My skin goes clammy cold as I sway, suddenly indecisive.
The crack of another piece of rock falling from the ceiling jolts me into action. I feel along the back wall until I find the narrow opening of an abandoned vein. The passage angles like a bent elbow, and it stinks of urine and feces. Waves of nausea sweep through me, and my belly cramps, but I push through. The tunnel dead-ends at an air vent into a neighboring mine abandoned years ago. A taste of fresher air kisses my dry lips.
Under my vest I’ve hidden a knife and two rock pounders, crude implements used by the lowest of the slaves to break the big chunks of quartzite rock into smaller pieces suitable for grinding down to release their hidden flakes of gold. I hide these weapons in the vent together with scraps of leather cord knotted together to make longer lines and my prize of the night: a flask of olive oil Djesa has been filling little by little so none is missed.
It’s not much. It’s never much. But I have made a few trusted allies, like Menesis and Djesa and the falsely arrested Tonor men. Carefully we are hoarding supplies in abandoned shafts. I have the barest outlines of a plan, but the biggest obstacle is that we have only stone and the guards have steel.