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
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.
Chapter 2
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.
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
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
