Mercedes Lackey: Foundation

He could only do this when the donkey-boy had cleared out the mined rock. His skin was tough, but not that tough. But the donkey-boy was thorough, he scraped out everything down to the dust, leaving Mags with nice, smooth rock to lie on. Cold, but smooth.

As he lay there, staring at the rock, he heard faint sniffling coming from off in the distance. Jarrik couldn’t hear it, likely, or he’d be shouting about that, too. And then there would be a lecture over noon meal about how lucky they all were, how good Master Cole was to give them all shelter and food and clothing, because no one wanted them, not any of them. And how Master Cole was losing money over them, they were such worthless workers, not even earning their keep.

Now, Mags had no idea what the sparklies were all really called, much less what they were worth, but he had a pretty good idea that all that about not earning their keep was a big, fat lie. Because Master Cole’s house didn’t get any shabbier, he didn’t get any thinner, his wife didn’t get raggedy, and his daughters were finding husbands just fine. And all those things took money. So if they weren’t earning their keep, then where was all the money coming from?

Of course, the priest tut-tutted and agreed with him when he said these things.

Master Cole would have them all down here, all day and well into the night, if he thought it was possible. But while Mags was still in the house, before he’d gotten big enough to join the sluicing crew, Master Cole had figured out that when he rotated his crews on half a day at the sluice and half a day in the mine, they didn’t get sick as often, and weren’t crippled from the unnatural positions they had to take down here. Now the only people he had working for him that were bent over and knotted were the ones that dated from before that period, and the ones that had been unfortunate enough to survive a shaft collapse.

They truly did not have anywhere else to go, and it was quite true that no one else would have them. They knew nothing whatsoever except how to sluice rock and mine sparklies. So they survived on the pittance left to them after Cole subtracted “room and board” from their wages.

Cole was supposed to either let the kiddies go at sixteen, or hire them on at full wages. But where could they go? Like the cripples, they only knew mining and sluicing, so who would hire them, and for what?

Of course few of them survived to sixteen.

As usual, Mags felt resolve harden in him. He was going to survive. That was why he was so very careful. There would be no rock-falls in his seams. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he reached sixteen, but he was going to make it that far. Life might be miserable, but it was preferable to the alternative, because Mags didn’t believe in gods or Havens or anything else of that sort. If there were gods, then why did they let people like Master Cole dress in fine clothing and eat meat and white bread, while kiddies who had never done anyone any harm got killed under rock-falls in his mine? Maybe he, Mags, was Bad Blood and deserved to live like this, but there were cursed few of the others who did ....

Well, he had best get back to work. He couldn’t keep the ruse up for too long. The donkey-boy would notice the lack of rock and report it.

He levered himself back into position and resumed the hunt.

By noon, he had another two sparklies, which virtually assured him of that extra slice of bread, so he joined the line of the rest trudging up to the surface in a better mood than when he had gone down.

When they emerged, blinking, into the thin sunlight, the first thing he saw was Liem Pieters holding out his fat hand for the little bag around his neck. Mags handed it over, and suppressed a grin at Liem’s lifted eyebrow. But all the man did was grunt “Extra ration, noon meal and supper,” and wave him on.

A couple of the others cast envious glances at him as he headed for the Big House and the back-kitchen door.

By some mysterious alchemy, the kitchen had already heard of his good fortune, for he was presented with a bowl of cabbage soup and two slices of barley bread. He carried both to a long shed with a single big table in it that was called the “schoolroom.”

He took the nearest empty seat on one of the long benches and picked up the piece of charcoal waiting there for him. Because that was what you did. You ate, and you learned how to read and write at the same time.

Why? He had no idea. It didn’t exactly make sense, and he knew Master Cole fumed over the “wasted time,” but for some reason it was something he had to allow.

One of Cole’s daughters was there; it was their job to teach the kiddies. She had a big piece of slate mounted onto the wall and chunks of soft, white chalk. This one wore a clean blue dress and had hair that was almost yellow braided in a tail down her back, but otherwise she looked like every other Pieters girl; round white face with very pink cheeks, eyes like a couple of round blue berries shoved into the white dough of her face, and no expression whatsoever. She wrote on the slate, the kiddies wrote what she did on the tabletop in charcoal, they sounded it all out, and then they got to take a bite of food before erasing what they had written and going on.

This was the one part of the day that Mags loved, unreservedly. He was far, far beyond this sort of thing himself, actually. He could read and write entire sentences, and often did so around the word that the others were sounding out. It seemed a kind of magic to him, that he could put these things down and someone else could make the same sense of them that he did. Somewhere, he had heard, there were things called “books” that were full of sentences that told you entire stories and facts about things, and—well, all manner of things it was good to know, or things that answered questions. Master Cole had no books in his house. But other people did.

As if in an echo of his thoughts, the Pieters daughter wrote book on the slate. Obediently, but struggling, the others wrote it down. “B—oo—k. Book, “ they sounded out, while he was writing, Iopen my book to read.

As he erased it, he noticed that Burd, the littlest of the kiddies working the mines, had no bread at all, and kept his attention strictly on his soup, though his face looked as if he was about to cry. No bread—that could only mean he’d come out of the mine empty-handed. And that wasn’t fair. Just because the seam had played out, it was hardly fair to punish the kiddy who was unlucky enough to be stuck there. But that was Cole all over ...

With an internal curse, Mags got Burd’s attention by elbowing him while erasing his sentence, and handed him the remaining half slice of bread. Burd stared at him in, first astonishment, then near-worship. He took the half slice and stuffed it quickly in his mouth, as if he was afraid Mags would change his mind.

Mags just finished his soup.

The lesson ended with Endal Pieters coming in and saying it was done with. The daughter—they were all interchangeable to Mags, all identical, all forgettable, all inconsequential because they had no power to punish him—cleaned the slate and scuttled away. The kiddies, Mags included, erased the last words, bolted down whatever food they had left, and got to their feet as Endal watched impatiently.

Then, forming a line because Endal liked precision, they marched out into the cold to take their turn at the sluices.

In summer, working the sluices was the best job. There was sun, and fresh air, and if you got hot, you just splashed some water over you. It was hard work, right enough, swirling the heavy pans of gravel around and around in the running water, and by day’s end your arms and back ached something terrible, but it was no worse than mining the seam. And if you had to work long hours, either because you were on the morning shift and got up with the sun, or because you were on the afternoon shift and didn’t stop till the sun went down, well, that wasn’t so bad. You didn’t really want to go to bed early in the summer, when you could sluice in the sun and let the heat soak into you, especially after a turn in the mine in the cold. And if you had morning shift and it was hot, the mine felt good by contrast, and it took a while for the heat to leech out of you. Besides, longer hours in the summer got made up for by shorter ones in winter.