This was the priest’s idea, and Cole obviously wanted to be on the good side of the priest. They got read at by the girls at night-meal, preached at by one of the boys that was supposed to go for a priest at morning. Neither the girl nor the boy put any feeling into it. They both made it look and sound as if they were only doing it ’cause they’d get a beating if they didn’t.
Mags ignored it. It was all the same rubbish anyway. Suffer on earth and be rewarded in a heaven he didn’t believe in, by gods who didn’t see fit to do something about misery right now.
Sometimes, when he had a moment to think, and something turned his mind toward these gods the priests were so big about, he wanted to hit the priests, hit the gods if they existed. But that took energy, and mostly he didn’t have the energy to waste. He’d rather have had silence over his meal, or someone to read a book that told you something useful, like how to stay warmer in the winter, or what plants were good to eat. It would have made him mad tonight, to have this girl prattling on about nonsense, except that for a change there was enough food in his belly that he was immediately getting sleepy once he’d stuffed the last of his extra bread in his mouth. He looked up, to see that the three cripples on night shift were just now tottering in. And if he beat the others to the sleep-hole, the straw would still be warm from the cripples’ bodies, he’d get the choice of blankets, and he’d be in the middle of the pile of bodies tonight, which was always the warmest place.
The logic was immaculate, and not even the thought of trying out Davey’s idea tempted him away from it. He hurried across to the barn, crawled into the pit, wrapped himself up in the least torn of the coverings, and was asleep so quickly and so thoroughly that when the others joined him, he wasn’t even aware they were there.
_______________________________
When Jarrik roused them all in the morning, there was a distinct bite to the air, and when they pulled themselves out of the sleep-hole in the thin light of dawn, there was thick frost all over everything. Mags sighed unhappily. Winter would be on them before long. And he didn’t envy the kiddies at the sluices this morning at all. There would be ice at the edges of the troughs. By the time his crew took their places there, the water would at least be a little warmer. It was time to think about finding a moment here and there to plait some rush and straw bags, or find the end of a sack somewhere. That was what they all used in winter instead of shoes, stuffing the bags full of straw to try and keep off the frostbite. The lucky ones found rags to wrap around their feet, and the really lucky ones, now and then found bits of wool too soiled or ruined in the shearing to spin, that they could stuff in those bags. Maybe something would happen that would give them a few hours off the sluices, like the bucket-chain breaking down. If that happened, Mags could go gather a mort of things that would help. Nuts to hide away, seed-fluff that was almost as good and soft as wool to stuff in the foot bags, cattail roots to eat now.
There were fifteen kiddies here at the mine now, and the three crippled adults. Ten of the oldest got mining duty, him and Davey and Burd and Tansy and Ket in the morning, five others in the afternoon. Of the five left over, one was the donkey-boy, and the other four were on the sluices all day. Those four looked particularly miserable this morning; they knew what to expect. They’d be getting chilblains before long, painful red-and-purple bumps on their hands caused by the cold water that could crack and even ulcerate. Of course, if they could get their hands warm, the chilblains would go away, but even taking their hands out of the water for a few moments to warm them in their armpits would mean they weren’t panning the gravel, and if they weren’t panning for sparklies and got caught, they’d get beaten.
Mags had never gotten chilblains, but he considered it luck more than anything. And even without chilblains, when he was working the sluice in winter, his hands hurt with the cold more than enough. The only time they didn’t have to work the sluices was when it was so cold the troughs froze right up, or when there was a blizzard so thick you couldn’t get to the sluices. And when that happened, it was so cold that there was no good place at all to be but the mine. That had only happened twice, and they had all bundled down there, and not even Master Cole had complained about it. Then again, Mags reckoned he didn’t much care for his workers freezing to death either.
The mine was definitely the better place to be, come winter. He felt the temperature difference as soon as he was ten feet down the main shaft and the lower he got, following the old cave that the mine had started as, the better he felt. By the time he reached his seam he was almost comfortable. He found the toolbag where it was supposed to be, at the end of the tunnel, which meant someone had been working his seam last night. Which meant that it might need a support ...
He fetched a timber, but that left him able to only carry his chisel and hammer, He crawled in, found as he had expected that the roof needed shoring, and hammered his timber in place. Then he went to work.
The seam he was following continued to yield good sparklies today. Smaller ones, but more of them. Once he had uncovered them, he went back to his bag for a tool made out of a big nail in a handle, something he used to pry small sparklies with good color out of rock rather than chipping at them.
That was when he overheard Jarrik and one of his brothers talking about something in low, urgent voices.
Thinking immediately that they might be talking about Davey and his “offer,” he ghosted over to the side of their shaft and strained his ears as hard as he could to hear what they were saying.
“I ain’t never seen anythin’ like it,” said Melak, a little Jarrik’s junior. “I mean, I heerd the stories, but seein’ one—it ain’t right. It was hot-mad and tryin’ and tryin’ t’get in, and every way it got stopped, it just tried a new one. Smart. Things like that got no right to be as smart as a man.”
“Ain’t just that it’s smart, neither,” Jarrik grumbled. “It’s got the luck of a devil. Tyndale shot at it, an’ did nothin’ but miss.”
“It scares me. What’s it want?” There was real fear in Melak’s voice, something Mags was not accustomed to hearing. “Why won’t it go away?”
“It wants somethin’ here, I guess,” Jarrik replied. “Somethin’, or someone. Either way, Pa ain’t letting it on the property. He swears he’s keepin’ it off.”
“But how?” Melak almost wailed the words. “Ye can’t shoot it, ye can’t fence it out, and ye can’t stop it! We don’ know what it wants! What if it wants to get in here and kill one of us?”
“Why would it—” Jarrik stopped.
“You know why,” Melak said flatly. “You know why. It’s more’n half a spirit, too! It could even be—”
“Don’t say it!” Jarrik retorted harshly. “Don’t even think it. Let Pa handle it. Let Pa handle it, and leave well enough alone!”
Standing there in the dark, listening them talk about something they feared so much they wouldn’t even put a name to it, Mags shivered. When had this—monster, or whatever it was—turned up and started besieging the mine? Days ago?
Now a horde of little things began to make sense. The sluices had been left without a Pieters supervising them, and half the older boys were not at the mine for the past couple of days. The girls had scarcely been seen out-of-doors, and had quickly scuttled back to the Big House when they did come out. The cooks had been less attentive at the giving out of the food, and a fair amount of cabbage and scraps had been joining the broth in the bowls rather than being husbanded in the pot.