Yeah, right. I’d heard things like this before in the last four years: promises to cut our sentences if we managed to bring the biggest load of iron ore in, or the most scales. I’d once had a whole month taken off my sentence for something – I can’t remember what – but somehow it never seemed to make a difference to who was here. Whatever time was taken off would only be added on again for minor misdemeanors – talking back to an overseer, whispering, not walking fast enough – even looking funny at one of the guards!
I’d never seen anyone released early, I thought grimly. Tamin beside me raised an eyebrow, but I only shook my head to let him know it was all a trick to get us to work harder. “I’ll tell the others,” Tamin murmured under his breath.
“That’s it! Wait here while your overseers assign you to your new work teams!” Dagan shouted, as the guards stepped closer towards him and they stalked back out of the open area, to the small wooden tower-hut that was Dagan’s ‘office.’
“Stay by me,” I said quickly to Tamin, before looking over to Oleer, who was still looking sullen and angry. I beckoned him to shuffle closer. “We stick together,” I told him. Oleer only shrugged, but he did move nearer to me all the same.
“You, you, and you.” Overseer Toadie was busy walking through the seated Daza, while on the other side of the assembled throng Overseer Rat-Catcher and a couple of guards were busy pushing apart the criminals from the Middle Kingdom.
“You lot, join them,” Toadie said, gesturing. He didn’t seem to care too much how he separated us, just so long as there were some of the new Daza intake mixed in with the old. I saw that he was picking the nearest people in groups until they added up to the twenty-five on each shift, before adding the ‘new’ Daza. It took a while, but eventually he got to us.
“Nari,” he greeted me – I was one of the few Daza that Toadie apparently knew by name, given our history.
“Sir,” I said meekly, not wanting to give him any chance to take out his ire on me.
“Stand up, you and you,” Toadie started to say, and then stopped when he saw the new collection of Daza I was sitting with. “Already made friends, have you?” he said heavily.
Oh no, don’t do this.
“One-Eye told me to show them how to chip rocks last night, sir,” I said, keeping my head bowed as I stood.
“One-Eye? Who’s… Oh yeah, you mean Maribet.” Toadie’s scowl for once broke into a cheerful grin at the nickname that we had given the other overseer. “Go on, the lot of you before I change my mind.” He waved a hand to encompass our entire small group, which was pretty evenly mixed between the newer Daza and the longer-serving slaves like me and Oleer.
Phew.
“Oh tozut-cakes,” I heard Oleer growl as I saw the small gaggle of Middle Kingdomers who were to join us. Five in all, bringing each work team up to a shift of thirty. There was only one reason why Oleer would be so disheartened by our new mine-colleagues.
“Chubby!” called out one of the lighter-skinned men. He was taller than Oleer, but not as tall as Tamin, who stiffened at my side at the insult. This Middle Kingdom man was thin, with a very short, brown fuzz of hair and a sharp face. He looked a little like a weasel, I thought.
Beside him, the other four criminals appeared to be an even mixture of those who laughed at Weasel’s comment to Oleer, and those who sidled away. The two larger men were chuckling, while one blonde-haired woman and one much smaller, black-haired and black-bearded man who was as thin as a rake just appeared to want to keep to themselves.
“There is no need for this,” I heard Tamin say heavily, in his sonorous tone. I got a picture of how he must have been as a Senior Clerk in that village of Fairwater – dignified, restrained, authoritative.
It did not go down well with Weasel, apparently.
“Say what, grandpa?” the sharp-faced man laughed, rocking back and forth on his heels. He appeared agitated, excited even. I would have wondered if he was drunk, apart from I knew that there was no way any of us prisoners could get our hands on any wine or beer in here.
“We are all slaves for Inyene, we might as well do what we have to do,” Tamin said in measured tones.
Measured, apparently, was not what this little man understood. He bounced forward suddenly, right up against Tamin’s chin as he glared up at him. “You sound like you want to be some kind of boss, old man,” he growled, his earlier enthusiasm gone, and replaced with a terrifying, cold snarl.
“Oi! Fankin!” I heard a sharp snarl, as Overseer One-Eye was marching forward, with a trio of guards at her side. Each of them had their crossbows slung at their hips – but held their stout hardwood batons in their hands. “What did I tell you earlier about no trouble?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” the Weasel Fankin said immediately, stepping back from Tamin. All this time, my heart was in my throat, and I cursed myself for not acting quicker. I should have stepped in the way. I should have protected my surrogate uncle and my friend, Oleer – but how? How could I, alone, stand against all of these?
And just how am I going to be able to lead these people out of the mines, if I can’t even stand up for the people closest to me? I thought, moving to Tamin’s side as One-Eye pointed at the Mine Entrance.
“Western Tunnel Two,” she snapped, and my heart sank. It was the most unstable of all of the mine workings under Masaka. Maribet One-Eye must be hoping that it would collapse on us troublemakers. Never mind how I was going to lead the Daza out of this prison – right now I had to make sure that they all survived the mines!
“Careful,” I said, pointing to the narrow rift in the rock underfoot running parallel to the wide ledge that we were traversing.
On our left was the Drop – our name for the chasm that opened up in the middle of Masaka and seemed bottomless. We had several ledges that ran along the face of the Drop that we used to get to the various tunnels.
And of all of them, Western Tunnel Two had claimed the most lives of the Daza in the time I had been here. At least three or four times that of any other part of the mines.
I held my candle stub lower, making sure that everyone could see the crack that I was referring to. “When they get larger, they fall away into the Drop, sometimes taking whole ledges with them,” I told Tamin, who was behind me. He nodded that he understood and gave an owlish look at the expanse of subterranean dark on the other side.
“You get used to it,” I said. I remembered the stomach-grab of fear and anxiety I used to feel every time I even stepped out from the overhanging wall. That had dominated year one of my incarceration down here but had completely gone in year two.
“Hm.” Tamin and the other new Daza did not sound so convinced at my assertion, which was natural. We were plains people, used to looking up at the wide expanse of sky far above us. For most of us, the world was a landscape we traveled across – not above. Heights were a new thing for us. I wondered, if – no, when – I ever got out of here, whether this would mean that I would be much better at climbing trees. Now in my fourth year here, neither the heights of the mountains nor the depths of the Drop bothered me in the slightest.
“And here is where we’ll be working,” I said as we came to where the ledge stopped and a large tunnel shot down into the right-hand overhanging wall. Its entrance was propped by a mess of wooden beams, and I held my candle inside to illuminate the repeated supports like wooden gates, every few meters or so. The floor of Western Tunnel Two was still littered with boulders and rock chips from the last cave-in. We had cleared out all of the larger blocks, tumbling them over the edge of the Drop, but a host of smaller material was still shaking itself loose from the walls and the ceilings.