Mercedes Lackey: Foundation

The one advantage that the kiddies had over the three night shift miners, the ones all twisted and not right in the head, was that daytime was their shift. Night belonged to the ones Cole cared even less about, if that was possible, and they worked their whole shift in the mine itself, leaving their rock to be sorted through in the day by the kiddies come to the sluice in the morning. They were already twisted up, so the damage was done, and it didn’t matter anymore if they got further crippled. As long as they could hobble to the shaft, that suited Cole. If they got sick, small loss. Master Cole would find some other cripple to replace whoever sickened and died. Assuming one of the kiddies hadn’t had an accident by then and had already gone to night shift.

Some of the kiddies were scared of them, weird buggers that they were. When the kiddies all trudged to the sleeping hole, the night shift would be waking up, blinking at the light, looking like a bunch of cave crickets, pasty-pale under all that dirt, with limbs stuck out at odd angles. They never talked, just mumbled, and what you could understand rarely made any sense.

In summer, despite the night workers getting much shorter shifts than the day workers, Mags felt just a little sorry for them, as much as he could feel sorry for anyone other than himself. They never got clean, they never seemed to care that they didn’t. They never saw the sun unless it was coming up or going down. They went from one hole in the ground to another. And he wondered if they looked back on their stints at the sluices with pleasure, or at least, with regret. Or did they just not think about things anymore?

But in fall as it got colder, and in winter, when the water was freezing and there were icicles on the sluice itself, it was bitter work, and he envied the night shift. At least it was relatively warm down in the shaft, compared to the work at the sluice. Maybe being crazy wasn’t so bad. It might be worth being crazy to avoid the sluices in winter.

It was fall now; the leaves were starting to drop from the trees, and the water was hand-numbing cold. Mags eyed the water being dumped into the sluice by the bucket-chain with disfavor as he approached. The wheels squeaked and complained, the buckets splashed over the leather belt that took them up and down again into the well, the water splashed down into the sluices. The donkey hitched to the wheel running the whole thing plodded on, head down.

Each of them took a spot on one of the three sluices, wooden troughs that the water from the mine was pumped into, and augmented by water from the well brought up by the bucket-chain. Piles of rock pounded into gravel at the hammer-mill were brought here after sorting. Master Cole’s daughters and youngest sons did that; there were a lot of sparklies pounded out by those hammers, fracturing the rock around them but not the crystals themselves. The kiddies got the gravel when the Pieters siblings were done with it. The sorting house was a pleasanter place by far than the sluices. You were allowed to sit down. The doors and windows stood open to the breeze in summer. There was a fire in there, come winter. The only time the kiddies ever saw a fire was when there were leaves and trash being burned, or they took a turn as a kitchen drudge because a drudge had took sick. The sorting house was clean and bright and the work was just tedious, not backbreaking. But then, that was to be expected, since the Pieters kids served there ... and it was rare indeed that anyone else got a turn in the place. Usually old man Cole or his wife or one of the rider boys would bend their heads to work there before they let a kiddie in the door. It had happened once to Mags’ knowledge, the year that an ague and a flux went through the whole place, carrying off two Pieters kids and several servants, but leaving the mine workers oddly alone. Maybe even a fever realized what a misery their lives were and figured they had enough punishment.

Mags took his place at the head of the third sluice, with his back to the afternoon sun, so that, weakening as it was, the warmth of it could soak through his raggedy shirt and into his skin. He got the pan that had been left by the kiddie on the last shift under the sluice, scooped up enough to cover the bottom from the gravel pile next to him and began swirling the gravel in the running water, watching for the glint of something colored and shiny.

Again, his thoughts flitted back to the Pieters kids, and that there seemed to be a never-ending supply of mean boys and girls like lumps of dough, as if someone in the kitchen was making them, all alike, and then only baking them halfway. There were the four oldest boys, two girls married off, a couple more that did the teaching, and it seemed like a dozen small ’uns. Surely Cole’s wife didn’t litter them like kittens! Yet there they were, a horde of them, from the eldest that worked at cutting the sparklies to the youngest that bossed each other in endless and pointless games until the boys were put to work in the sorting house and the girls began learning household duties under the housekeeper’s watchful eye.

“Wonder why there’s so many Pieters,” he muttered, not realizing he had said it aloud until the kiddy next to him—Davey, almost sixteen, and still not crippled, not addlepated, and making no secret that he was leaving when the priest next came—laughed out loud. Davey was a good head taller than Mags, and like all the kiddies, he was so coated in dirt that it was hard to tell what his skin tone actually was. But his eyes were hard and cold and brown, like pebbles. His hair, matted, with bits of straw still in it, was hacked off short, as Mags’ was and, like Mags’, was dark, somewhere between brown and black.

“‘Cuz ol’ man Cole can’t keep his hands off n the housemaids,” the older boy guffawed. “An’ don’ it make the right-wise born ones hoppin’ mad! The boys, anyhow. Ever’ time one of them maids squirts out a kid, you kin tell, ’cause they look like thunder.”

Mags blinked, spotted a sparkle in the water, and fished out a bit of pale blue like a fingernail paring. “Huh? Why?”

“‘Cuz ol’ man Cole likes t’ tell ’em, when he don’ like what they’re doin’, that he’ll leave the mine an’ all t’ the bastards if they don’ do what they’re told.” Davey snickered this time. “He got Jarrik t’ say he’d marry some ugly stick come spring thataway, instead of some pretty piece that don’t come with money. He wasn’t half hot about it, an’ I hear the girl had some things t’ say!”

“How’dye know all that?” Mags glanced at him sideways. Where was Davey getting all this? He talked like he was in and out of the Big House all the time, and Mags knew that wasn’t possible. Granted, Davey generally came to bed last, and even in winter he was known for some sort of prowling. Mags figured he just had some angle going, maybe with the stableboy. Or maybe with a kitchen drudge. Neither the stableboy nor the drudges got paid even the pittance that the other servants got, and they took what they could get when they could get it. The stableboy secretly cooked up messes of the oats to eat, and kitchen drudges could snitch bits of this and that as they cleaned pots and pans. Mags had never been hungry as a kitchen drudge.

“’Cuz I got ears. ’Cuz I don’ need as much sleep as you kiddies, so I go sneakin’ round the Big House and listenin’ under winders.” Davey glanced over at Mags and gave him a wink. “’Cuz when you learn stuff, sometimes y’learn stuff what’s worth sumpin’. I learn stuff, makes the cook gimme stuff. I learn stuff, gets me better stuff to wear. Why you think I’m gettin’ outa here? I know stuff. I know stuff Jarrik don’ want his pa t’know. I know stuff ol’ man Cole don’ want his wife t’ know. Like about them housemaids. He tells her ’twas the boys, but it’s him, when the by-blows come.” He leaned over conspiratorially and whispered, “I’ll tell it all to you afore I go, if ye get a couple of those yaller sparklies, hide ’em, an’ keep ’em for me, then give ’em t’ me afore I flit.”