The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (11 page)

'The
soldiers...'

'I
thought
so.'

When
the old man nodded, the candle bound to his forehead set light leaping over the
roof of the stope. He squatted about ten feet from Guennar, his hands hanging
between his knees. A bunch of candles and his pick, a short-handled, finely
shaped tool, hung from his belt. His face and body, beneath the restless star
of the candle, were rough shadows, earth-colored. 'Let me stay here.'

'Stay
and welcome! Do I own the mine? Where did you come in, eh, the old drift above
the river? That was luck to find that, and luck you turned this way in the
crosscut, and didn't go east instead. Eastward this level goes on to the caves.
There's great caves there; did you know it? Nobody knows but the miners. They
opened up the caves before I was born, following the old lode that lay along
here sunward. I seen the caves once, my dad took me, you should see this once,
he says. See the world underneath the world. A room there was no end to. A
cavern as deep as the sky, and a black stream falling into it, falling and
falling till the light of the candle failed and couldn't follow it, and still
the water was falling on down into the pit. The sound of it came up like a
whisper without an end, out of the dark. And on beyond that there's other
caves, and below. No end to them, maybe. Who knows? Cave under cave, and
glittering with the barren crystal. It's all barren stone, there. And all
worked out, here, years ago. It's a safe enough hole you chose, mate, if you
hadn't come stumbling in on us. What was you after? Food? A human face?'

'Water.'

'No
lack of that. Come on, I'll show you. Beneath here in the lower level there's
all too many springs. You turned the wrong direction. I used to work down
there, with the damned cold water up to my knees, before the vein ran out. A
long time ago. Come on.'

The
old miner left him in his camp, after showing him where the spring rose and
warning him not to follow down the water-course, for the timbering would be
rotted and a step or sound might bring the earth down. Down there all the
timbers were covered with a deep glittering white fur, saltpeter perhaps, or a
fungus: it was very strange, above the oily water. When he was alone again
Guennar thought he had dreamed that white tunnel full of black water, and the
visit of the miner. When he saw a flicker of light far down the tunnel, he
crouched behind the quartz buttress with a great wedge of granite in his hand:
for all his fear and anger and grief had come down to one thing here in the
darkness, a determination that no man would lay hand on him. A blind
determination, blunt and heavy as a broken stone, heavy in his soul.

It
was only the old man coming, with a hunk of dry cheese for him.

He
sat with the astronomer, and talked. Guennar ate up the cheese, for he had no
food left, and listened to the old man talk. As he listened the weight seemed
to lift a little, he seemed to see a little farther in the dark.

'You're
no common soldier,' the miner said, and he replied, "No, I was a student
once,' but no more, because he dared not tell the miner who he was. The old man
knew all the events of the region; he spoke of the burning of the Round House
on the hill, and of Count Bord. 'He went off to the city with them, with these
blackgowns, to be tried, they do say, to come before their council. Tried for
what? What did he ever do but hunt boar and deer and foxen? Is it the council
of the foxen trying him? What's it all about, this snooping and soldiering and
burning and trying? Better leave honest folk alone. The count was honest, as
far as the rich can be, a fair landlord. But you can't trust them, none of such
folk. Only down here. You can trust the men who go down into the mine. What
else has a man got down here but his own hands and his mates' hands? What's
between him and death, when there's a fall in the level or a Winze closes and
he's in the blind end, but their hands, and their shovels, and their will to
dig him out? There'd be no silver up there in the sun if there wasn't trust
between us down here in the dark. Down here you can count on your mates. And
nobody comes but them. Can you see the owner in his lace, or the soldiers,
coming down the ladders, coming down and down the great shaft into the dark?
Not them! They're brave at tramping on the grass, but what good's a sword and
shouting in the dark? I'd like to see 'em come down here...'

The
next time he came another man was with him, and they brought an oil lamp and a
clay jar of oil, as well as more cheese, bread and some apples. 'It was Hanno
thought of the lamp,' the old man said. 'A hempen wick it is, if she goes out
blow sharp and she'll likely catch up again. Here's a dozen candles, too. Young
Per swiped the lot from the doler, up on the grass.'

'They
all know I'm here?'

'We
do,'
the miner said briefly.
'They
don't.'

Some
time after this, Guennar returned along the lower, west-leading level he had
followed before, till he saw the miners' candles dance like stars; and he came
into the stope where they were working. They shared their meal with him. They
showed him the ways of the mine, and the pumps, and the great shaft where the
ladders were and the hanging pulleys with their buckets; he sheered off from
that, for the wind that came sucking down the great shaft smelled to him of
burning. They took him back and let him work with them. They treated him as a
guest, as a child. They had adopted him. He was their secret.

There
is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all
your life long if there's nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing
hidden.

There
was the silver, to be sure. But where ten crews of fifteen had used to work
these levels and there had been no end to the groan and clatter and crash of
the loaded buckets going up on the screaming winch and the empties banging down
to meet the trammers running with their heavy carts, now one crew of eight men
worked: men over forty, old men, who had no skill but mining. There was still
some silver there in the hard granite, in little veins among the gangue.
Sometimes they would lengthen an end by one foot in two weeks.

'It
was a great mine,' they said with pride.

They
showed the astronomer how to set a gad and swing the sledge, how to go at
granite with the finely balanced and sharp-pointed pick, how to sort and 'cob',
what to look for, the rare bright branchings of the pure metal, the crumbling
rich rock of the ore. He helped them daily. He was in the stope waiting for
them when they came, and spelled one or another on and off all day with the
shovel work, or sharpening tools, or running the ore-cart down its grooved
plank to the great shaft, or working in the ends. There they would not let him
work long; pride and habit forbade it. 'Here, leave off chopping at that like a
woodcutter. Look: this way, see?' But then another would ask him, 'Give me a
blow here, lad, see, on the gad, that's it.'

They
fed him from their own coarse meager meals.

In
the night, alone in the hollow earth, when they had climbed the long ladders up
'to grass' as they said, he lay and thought of them, their faces, their voices,
their heavy, scarred, earth-stained hands, old men's hands with thick nails
blackened by bruising rock and steel; those hands, intelligent and vulnerable,
which had opened up the earth and found the shining silver in the solid rock.
The silver they never held, never kept, never spent. The silver that was not
theirs.

'If
you found a new vein, a new lode, what would you do?'

'Open
her, and tell the masters.'

'Why
tell the masters?'

'Why,
man! We gets paid for what we brings up! D'you think we does this damned work
for love?'

'Yes.'

They
all laughed at him, loud, jeering laughter, innocent. The living eyes shone in
their faces blackened with dust and sweat.

'Ah,
if we could find a new lode! The wife would keep a pig like we had once, and by
God I'd swim in beer! But if there's silver they'd have found it; that's why
they pushed the workings so far east. But it's barren there, and worked out
here, that's the short and long of it.'

Time
stretched behind him and ahead of him like the dark drifts and crosscuts of the
mine, all present at once, wherever he with his small candle might be among
them. When he was alone now the astronomer often wandered in the tunnels and
the old stopes, knowing the dangerous places, the deep levels full of water,
adept at shaky ladders and tight places, intrigued by the play of his candle on
the rock walls and faces, the glitter of mica that seemed to come from deep
inside the stone. Why did it sometimes shine out that way? as if the candle
found something far within the shining broken surface, something that winked in
answer and occulted, as if it had slipped behind a cloud or an unseen planet's
disc.

'There
are stars in the earth,' he thought. 'If one knew how to see them.'

Awkward
with the pick, he was clever with machinery; they admired his skill, and
brought him tools. He repaired pumps and windlasses; he fixed up a lamp on a
chain for 'young Per' working in a long narrow deadend, with a reflector made
from a tin candleholder beaten out into a curved sheet and polished with fine
rock-dust and the sheepskin lining of his coat. 'It's a marvel,' Per said.
'Like daylight. Only, being behind me, it don't go out when the air gets bad,
and tell me I should be backing out for a breath.'

For
a man can go on working on a narrow end for some time after his candle has gone
out for lack of oxygen.

'You
should have a bellows rigged there.'

'What,
like I was a forge?'

'Why
not?'

'Do
ye ever go up to the grass, nights?' asked Hanno, looking wistfully at Guennar.
Hanno was a melancholy, thoughtful, soft-hearted fellow. 'Just to look about
you?'

Guennar
did not answer. He went off to help Bran with a timbering job; the miners did
all the work that had once been done by crews of timberers, trammers, sorters,
and so on.

'He's
deathly afraid to leave the mine,' Per said, low.

'Just
to see the stars and get a breath of the wind,' Hanno said, as if he was still
speaking to Guennar.

One
night the astronomer emptied out his pockets and looked at the stuff that had
been in them since the night of the burning of the observatory: things he had
picked up in those hours which he now could not remember, those hours when he
had groped and stumbled in the smoldering wreckage, seeking ... seeking what he
had lost... He no longer thought of what he had lost. It was sealed off in his
mind by a thick scar, a burn-scar. For a long time this scar in his mind kept
him from understanding the nature of the objects now ranged before him on the
dusty stone floor of the mine: a wad of papers scorched all along one side; a
round piece of glass or crystal; a metal tube; a beautifully worked wooden
cog-wheel; a bit of twisted blackened copper etched with fine lines; and so on,
bits, wrecks, scraps. He put the papers back into his pocket, without trying to
separate the brittle half-fused leaves and make out the fine script. He
continued to look at and occasionally to pick up and examine the other things,
especially the piece of glass.

This
he knew to be the eyepiece of his ten-inch telescope. He had ground the lens
himself. When he picked it up he handled it delicately, by the edges, lest the
acid of his skin etch the glass. Finally he began to polish it clean, using a
wisp of fine lambs-wool from his coat. When it was clear, he held it up and
looked at and through it at all angles. His face was calm and intent, his light
wide-set eyes steady.

Tilted
in his fingers, the telescope lens reflected the lamp flame in one bright tiny
point near the edge and seemingly beneath the curve of the face, as if the lens
had kept a star in it from the many hundred nights it had been turned toward
the sky.

He
wrapped it carefully in the wisp of wool and made a place for it in the rock
niche with his tinderbox. Then he took up the other things one by one.

During
the next weeks the miners saw their fugitive less often while they worked. He
was off a great deal by himself: exploring the deserted eastern regions of the
mine, he said, when they asked him what he did.

'What
for?'

'Prospecting,'
he said with the brief, wincing smile that gave him a very crazy look.

'Oh,
lad, what do you know about that? She's all barren there. The silver's gone;
and they found no eastern lode. You might be finding a bit of poor ore or a
vein of tinstone, but nothing worth the digging.'