“Special orders,” the overseer continued. “You remember that? Are you not hearing a word I’ve been saying? I’m getting it in the neck thanks to you – you’re going back down to Western Tunnel One right NOW!” He ended on a yell, but I was too tired to flinch or cower away from him this time.
I had shouted at a dragon. Don’t forget that, I told myself.
“Here.” I said, unslinging my carry-basket from my aching shoulders and dropping it on the ground in front of him, before turning on my heel and making for the mine entrance. Suddenly, all the rules and orders of Inyene’s camp didn’t seem as important as they had this afternoon. I was sure that I could pick up another empty carry-basket from the Loading Area.
“Hey, wait!” Toadie shouted behind me, but I kept walking. I heard his grumble and then a gasp as he must have looked at what I had collected. Maybe about eight or ten good and strong, large and shiny black dragon scales. Maybe other slaves had collected more scales than that on a work shift – but none of them had found the rarity or the quality that I had.
The overseer didn’t shout at me again as I trudged the distance to the tunnels, grabbed a basket and a stub of tallow candle, and made my way down under the earth.
The mines felt different in the night. They always did, I knew – there were usually fewer of us working down here, and the overseers generally left us to our work as they didn’t want to be running around in the dark when they could be slumbering in their guard posts.
With fewer workers, it meant that there was less noise. None of the big machines were being used – we didn’t have the treadmill up top pumping water down the gutters to be used to heat up new schisms of rock. We didn’t have the two-person stepping-machines that drove bellows or lifted and released the pounding iron weights.
But strangely, with the less sound we made, the more we could hear of the sounds that the mountains themselves made. As I trudged down the Main Avenue on my way to Western Tunnel One, I could hear the deep, resonant booming from somewhere far below.
Like the sea, one of the guards had called it – although I wouldn’t know, never having seen a sea.
And then there was the smaller ticks, taps, and knocks that washed upwards through the tunnels in little bursts. The overseers claimed it was when one of our own echoes – a steel pole hitting a rockface – got lost, and then came back hours later.
But we slaves thought differently. I had been taught by my mother that sometimes the spirits of the Daza still walked the Plains. If the poor soul had gotten lost, or had died in battle, or their tribe had moved – or maybe these souls returned just to smell the plains’ winds again. The knocks and sounds down below, to we Daza at least, were our brave lost kinsmen who must have died in the Mines, and could not find their way back out.
“What are you thinking about, Nari?” I shook my head and took a glug of the fresh water pouch I had been given at the guard station up top, along with my steel pole.
It had to be meeting the dragon, hadn’t it? I thought. I was thinking about my life and the stories of the Plains. And about being trapped down here in the tunnels. And that there was a whole lot more to life than this.
I am going to get out of here, I promised myself as I found the stone-cut stairs that led up the side of a chasm to the entrance to Western Tunnel One. I thought about shouting at the dragon again, and it put a fire in my belly as I walked next to the Drop. Just a little way in was a larger cavern before Western Tunnel One began proper, with tonight’s overseer – a woman with an eye patch – and a guard sitting around a metal burner and a table, playing a game of cards.
“I see you got here at last, girl!” the woman snapped. “Go on and get down there. We’ve had a new batch of workers arrive while you’ve been off frolicking in the meadows, and so I’m going to need you to show them how to do it properly, you got that?”
“I wasn’t frolicking in any meadows, ma’am,” I muttered resentfully but nodded all the same. “Yeah, I’ll show ’em how to chip rock.” For what good it’ll do them.
Western Tunnel One was in a state, with very little chipping going on and lots of muttered talking. It was always like this when they brought in a new team. Usually, I would let myself fade into the background, offer a bit of advice if I thought it could help, or a shoulder if someone was crying.
And there was always someone crying.
“But why?” an older woman was saying. I didn’t recognize her, but from her black hair tinged with a touch of auburn she had to be Daza. From one of the northern villages perhaps, I thought.
“They say that we owe them – but I was making my payments!” the woman was sobbing – but one of the older slaves, a man who had been here longer than I had, and whose eyes were starting to mist with unseeing white, was already at her side, comforting her.
“Water,” I called out, passing my water skin down the line. When you’re new, you don’t understand how to ration it yet. I remembered being parched and thirsty and having all of my skin peeling from my fingers for days. “Take a sip and pass it on. If you need more, just ask,” I said, nodding at the muttered thanks as I edged my way past the knot of people.
I hefted my steel pole in my hand – it was short, just a few hand lengths long, and it had a rounded end. The overseers wouldn’t even let us have sharpened tools. In my heart I wanted to wait before I started to instruct them about what they had to do – but I knew that would only lead them into more trouble. By the time that morning came around, the overseers would be demanding to see how much of the reddish rocks they had gathered and would already be targeting the ones they deemed ‘work-shy’.
“Welcome to Masaka,” I muttered miserably, moving to the largest of the holes that the teams before had punctured into the rock. My mind wasn’t on the task however; it was still up there in the mountains, far above me. The contrast between up there, standing before the great dragon, and down here couldn’t be more stark.
“Narissea? Is that really you?” a man’s voice said.
What? It was a voice that I recognized. But it couldn’t be. How could he be here?
“Tamin?” I looked up to see the larger, older man emerging from the crowd. “Uncle,” I said, as feelings that were too strong for me to name threatened to drop me to my knees.
Silver-haired Tamin wasn’t really my uncle at all. But I had known him for so long that he had earned the nickname. He was spirit-brother to my mother, meaning that the two were almost inseparable, laughing and joking and sharing everything together. When he was in the village, that was. Tamin had grown up as my mothers’ closest friend – maybe there had even been a childhood crush, I considered – before he had traveled to the Middle Kingdom to learn how to become a Magistrate.
‘What does a fool like him need with Torvald books and papers?’ I remember my mother grumbling on more than one occasion – but he had always returned to the village every summer, and always at the head of a caravan of Traders. Tamin had done okay for himself, he had said. He was a Senior Clerk in some Middle Kingdom Border Town, and he had been trying for years to cement the relationships between the Torvaldites and the Daza on the Eastern Plains.
Not that his efforts were that welcomed by mother and the others, I recalled. We Daza people – apart from Tamin, apparently – prided ourselves on our self-reliance. The bolts of cloth and the triple-forged tools that he had brought back with him were useful, it had to be said. But every time Tamin brought up the topic of a Middle Kingdom Outpost, or a Trader’s Station or something similar, it had been rejected by the Daza council. We don’t need their laws, as my mother had always said. And every time you deal with the Westerners, it comes with a price.