Foundation

was different for girls, they just had to lay there. Or maybe it would be different when he got older, in the spring and summer, when you didn’t ball up all together shivering. But right now his jakko was as tired as the rest of him, and wasn’t interested in a thing. Maybe when he was fourteen. He was only thirteen now, or at least, that was what Master Cole told the priest last time he came.

He kind of hoped it would stay that way. The idea of a few moments of sleep less to appease a part of him that had suddenly got ideas of its own had no appeal.

By the time he made it to the end of the played-out seam, he needed to be there anyway. So it was just as well he’d lied. It wasn’t bad; the donkey-boy had recently dumped rock here. He managed to shake the last of the cramps out on the way back, and crawled back into his tunnel, taking a shoring timber with him.

He always put in so many timbers that Master Cole sometimes shouted at him, but he never had a cave-in, and Master Cole couldn’t argue with that. He’d noticed on his way out that by his standards, the roof was overdue for a prop, so he brought one in and hammered it in place before going back to work.

Once again, he arranged himself at the face, and began working a little lower. Off in the distance, he heard two of the other kiddies start a timid conversation, quickly hushed when Jarrik roared “No jibber-jabber!”

He was starting to cramp again. All right, time to pull a fake. He had enough stones, he wasn’t going to get into trouble unless someone caught him at it—and to do that, they’d have to crawl down this tunnel and he would hear them coming. He stretched himself out, right leg first, then left, all the while tap-tap-pausing on the rock at the side of the tunnel with the chisel alone. Then he flipped over on his back and lay at full length, staring up at the ceiling only a little way above his face, still tapping.

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.