“Nari!” Oleer said in alarm.
I had a choice. It would take too long to try and break it down with my iron bar, so I had to get it out by hand. But with the overseer shouting, I had to either drop the rock and leave it or try and break my fingers to get it out of the hole. Drat. It was no choice really. Even if I broke my fingers the overseer and Dagan Mar would still expect me to work. That was the kind of people they were, after all. And they would probably give me extra shifts or dock my food rations just for having the temerity to get injured.
“Fine. Whatever.” I grumbled, dropping the ore and removing my shaking and battered arm back to grab my carry-basket with its tiny number of rocks sitting at the bottom. Oleer must have seen my look of misery, as he quickly dipped into his own woven carry-basket and deposited a heavy lump into the bottom of mine.
“Here. Just don’t tell anyone,” he said, not waiting for my thanks as he turned back to the rock face and resumed work.
“Thanks,” I muttered anyway as I clambered and squeezed past the line of my fellow prisoners, back towards the waiting ire of the overseer. When I got back, I would have to give him the rock I’d left behind and hope it would repay his kindness.
“Hm,” the overseer said. He was a large, older man, easily twice my size in every direction, with a balding head and a thick set of leather and glass goggles over his eyes. We stood in one of the main avenues that speared down through the mines of Masaka, where it was wide enough to stand up straight and walk three or four abreast. I relished the moment of luxury as I stretched out my fingers and arms.
“Not bad, I suppose,” he had to mutter as he hefted my haul in one hand. “But not any good, either!” he ended with a snap as he dumped my woven and frayed basket onto the cart next to several others, before pulling on the rope that extended from the iron ring of the cart up the passageway. There was an answering jangle of a distant bell, and the cart slowly started to creak forward on wooden wheels. There was a treadmill up there, where a couple of my fellow tribespeople would be endlessly walking as they pulled or lowered the carts up and down the length of this place.
And why all this effort? It was for a woman called Inyene, we had been told – although I had never met her, nor known any slave who had. No one except Dagan Mar, if he was to be believed. He said Inyene owned this patch of highlands – although I didn’t understand how anyone could own a mountain at all, that was as absurd as saying that you owned the air you breathed!
Whatever. This woman Inyene wanted iron brought up and out of her mountain, and so here I was.
But that wasn’t all that she wanted.
“You’re to go Up.” The overseer jerked a callused thumb after the cart. “Special orders from the Chief himself.”
“What?” I said, appalled. Every one of us knew precisely what ‘going Up the mountain’ meant. It was possibly the most dangerous work that any of us could do. “But our shift must be ending soon, by the time I get up there.” I started to protest. I could see a few meters away the large collection of cylinders that made up the Work Clock. It had something to do with bags of sand and ticking rings of metal, but I didn’t understand it. Anyway – I could clearly see under the light of the oil lamps that the large bronze pointer hand was definitely not far off a full circle.
That meant that the bell would ring, and the shift would change over.
“It’s not ending for you though, is it?” the overseer croaked with an almost-laugh. “Special orders I said. Now go on, get!” He aimed a smack for the top of my head, but even in my exhausted state I was too quick for him and I jumped back. I didn’t even bat an eyelid at his attempt to hit me – this was just another daily occurrence for those of us unlucky enough to find ourselves down here.
“But what if I collapse up there without any dinner?” I called to him as I backed away. It was true. I would miss my next scheduled meal.
“For goodness’ sake!” the overseer growled, but he plucked a skin of fresh water from one of the stationary carts and threw it at me, then tore a chunk off the round of bread and lobbed it at my face. I managed to duck that one too, and when I recovered the dusty bit of loaf, I realized that he had ‘given’ me the bit that was dusted with white and green mold.
“Wow, thank you so much, toad,” I muttered under my breath.
“What did you say to me, you little—” the overseer shouted.
“Gotta go sir, special orders!” I called back and jogged up the tunnel after the creaking cart before he could decide to throw any bits of rock at me this time.
Chapter 2
Stone & Scales
“You!” The shout sent icicles down my back. I had just managed to emerge from the Main Entrance to the Masaka mine complex, and the whole dirty, dusty, smelly horror of Inyene’s workcamp was spread out before me.
“Nari!” the voice bellowed, and I wondered if I could ignore it as I ducked my head a bit lower, stuffed my moldy bread into my vest, and hurried along the wide track that led past the turning treadmills and the wooden cranes. The workcamp was mostly built in the natural bowl of the canyon, but there were higher levels that had been cut into the rock, on which stood the ramshackle wood and stone houses that belched smoke, busy tanning the leather or smelting the tools we used day in, day out.
Below me in the canyon was the majority of the buildings however – from the long wooden dormitories where we slept to the tall guard huts on stilts that overlooked the fences. And out there in the distance, above us all and on the banks of one sweeping arm of the canyon, was Inyene’s keep – a yellowing stone structure with towers and turrets, and lush greenery terraced around it.
Ugh, I groaned, as there was the sharp thock! of something biting the stone path a few meters ahead of me, sending a spray of rock dust.
I’d thought I’d managed to feign ignorance from my caller, but there was no such luck
It was a crossbow bolt. That pig had actually fired a crossbow bolt at me! I halted and looked around with a very real sense of trepidation.
“When I call your name, I expect to be answered. You got that, you little whelp of a girl?” shouted the chief of the mines, none other than Dagan Mar himself. He was lurching towards me from the lower level cut into the rock, waving that ridiculous little crossbow thing that he carried around. It was barely the size of his hand, but he menaced us all with it as if it were as large as a battle-ax.
Dagan Mar was getting old, I considered as I dropped to my knees, head bowed in the traditional mode of supplication that all of us slaves had been taught before their Chief.
“Better,” the man lurched and lunged. He wore part leather armor whose ties were pulled open at the chest to reveal his pale skin, scattered with chest hair that was wiry and long. He wasn’t as old as the Elders of the Souda that my mother used to make fun of. I imagined he was somewhere north of his fourth decade, but his years of being horrible had clearly aged him.
There was something wrong with his hip, I think – and although I didn’t know what it was, I hoped it was due to him being horrible to someone a lot bigger and meaner than he thought himself to be.
“The Oversee gave you my order, did he?” Dagan said, toying with the child’s crossbow in his hands as if he were considering whether to reload and fire it at me again. He was actually a good shot, I had to grudgingly admit. The Daza people were deemed good with their short bows and thrown javelins – I remember regular contests and practices out by the Silver Fish Lake – but I had never seen anyone shoot the birds from the sky, one-handed, as Dagan did.