Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 18, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
Aeryn tilted the cup until the water stood level with the rim and took up what came away on one finger.
A hundred and eighteen drops, less the one now on her hand.
Two short of a hundred and twenty, which was what a bath cost, and the figure had been sitting in her before she opened her eyes, because there had been nothing else to do in the dark but hold it.
It went down without any sensation at all.
For the first hour there was nothing.
By the second, the cot had gained weight and so had her hands, and the seam of light under the door had a thickness to it that it did not have on a morning she kept her drops.
The gain returned by dark.
Twice now she had watched it go out and watched it return, and she trusted the ledger of that the way she had once trusted a supply line she had audited herself.
Outside on the gravel, Nettik set down the third pail and started the fourth, out loud, as he did everything.
The crate was still in the middle of the floor where it had stood for two nights, at the distance a person sits at when they have come to be answered.
Moving it had been beyond her then.
Moving it was beyond her now, and she had taken it off the list of things she intended to do.
The boy put his head round the door frame without coming in, which was the arrangement and which he had never once broken.
“Nobody’s cutting,” he said.
“Ma says nobody’s going under that and she says it in the voice she uses when she’s already said it to somebody else.” He thought about it.
“Hask said the same at the fire.
Then somebody said something about the sling, and everybody stopped.”
He went back to the pails.
Four, he said, and then he was off down the gravel counting his own paces.
Vekka pushed the door open a while later without knocking, which nobody else on this face did, and put her eyes on the ceiling plate and left them there.
“Your cut didn’t go in,” she said.
When.
“First light.
And it’s still first light down there in the sense that nothing has happened since.”
Why.
Vekka kept her eyes up there a moment longer.
Then she brought her eyes down and took the thing from the side, which was her habit before a thing she did not enjoy saying.
“Torrin has sixty men on that apron and not one of them has refused anything.
Nobody refuses out loud here.
They find work at the other end of the ground, and they stay at it.”
The face.
“Aye.”
Torrin thinks it will hold.
“Torrin’s been telling them your rock holds it.
Read the four words of it out before the light was properly up and told them a trench is the same thing lying down.” Vekka shifted her weight.
“There’s a man came off that apron on the fifteenth, and he’s carried the arm in a sling since.
He stood there while it was read, and he looked at the sling.”
How long has it stood.
“Since first light.
Torrin has them on the north end shifting a bank that didn’t need shifting this month.” Vekka let that sit.
“A day today.
Tomorrow he’ll find them something.
The day after that he won’t.”
Aeryn began a line on the band and cleared it before the second word.
Three days.
The bank had come down on the fifteenth with a sound like a very large quantity of gravel being poured somewhere else, and it had taken the apron and thirty paces of robbed rail and the outer skin of the shoulder with it, and it had put four people under Vekka’s hands and nobody under it.
Three days was not long enough for a man to look at a cut face and see stone.
What three days was, was a sling.
Four words had gone to Torrin on the fifteenth, off a bench, with her arms shaking.
A rock.
Turn, not lift.
A principle about one timber, handed to a man who had walked up a path to check it against the rock she had turned it on, and she had watched him go and had moved on to the next column.
He had taken it away and made a trench out of it.
I will go down.
“How far can you walk?”
The true answer and the safe answer were not the same, and her hand got most of the way to the band before she stopped it.
Eight paces on the sixteenth.
No figure since, because there had been nowhere worth spending one.
Twenty.
“You have not got twenty.”
I will find out.
Vekka looked at her properly, which she did perhaps once in a week and never for long.
“I’ll send Torrin’s wife and a girl from the house above the cistern.
Women carry.
You’ll go down on their arms.”
I will walk the last of it.
“Aye,” Vekka said.
“You would.”
Seven days until three men came down off the Raw to a woman they had last seen unable to sit up.
That sat in a column too, with the drop, and the reserve that her own reckoning put back in her this morning and that nobody alive could confirm.
She counted the paces down, and she counted the standing.
There was no second column, because everything in the first one was hers.
The spoil smelled of wet rock the whole way down, and under it lay the older smell of a mine working, which was oil and hot metal and men.
They carried her as women here carry anything heavy, one at the shoulders and one under the knees, and neither of them spoke to her or to each other.
Torrin’s wife had a grip like a winch and put it where a grip belongs.
The girl was younger and breathed harder and did not once adjust her hold, and at the steep turn below the cistern she took the whole weight on her own arms rather than change it.
They set her down at the lip of the apron and stepped away, and the ground opened out in front of her.
Forty paces of it were still under a man’s height of spoil.
Where the bank had torn off, the shoulder stood up in a clean cut, gray going blue at the wet, and high in it was the squared black mouth of the channel with its thread of water coming out and running down the stone in a stain no wider than a hand.
Below the cut they had opened the trench.
Not a clearance.
A cut through the spoil, two paces wide, driven at the stacked season’s cut lying under it, and it went in under the face for twelve paces before it turned.
Props stood in threes along the drag line to the north.
Sixty men were on that ground and about forty of them were working, and every piece of the work was at the far end of it.
Aeryn got her legs under her and walked.
The first eight were nothing.
The next four were the hand on the crate, the arm going out of an instrument and back into a piece of meat, except that it was both legs and there was no crate to put them on.
At twelve the men nearest the drag line stopped pretending to be busy.
At fourteen the pretending stopped everywhere else.
At nineteen she reached the trench mouth and turned and stood under the face, in the place where nobody had stood since first light, and put her back against the rock.
Nobody came within arm’s reach of her.
Nobody stood inside four times that.
Torrin arrived at the edge of that circle and stopped where everyone stopped.
A wide man with his cap in his fist and no hostility anywhere in him, which she had established on the fifteenth and had not needed to establish twice.
“You’ll want to be five paces left,” he said.
“That’s where a man would stand to cut.”
She moved five paces left.
It took a while, and nobody helped, and nobody looked away.
From there the cut ran up past her in one piece.
No bedding running down into the trench, which was the thing that would have mattered and the thing nobody had mentioned.
Two old shot holes about halfway, both of them dry.
The channel’s stain coming down over the whole of it in a single unbroken line, which meant the water had been arriving in the same place for longer than anybody had been alive to watch it, and a face with a hundred years of water in one track on it is a face that has already done whatever the water was going to make it do.
The face was not the hazard.
The hazard stood on either side of her at shoulder height and had been made by men yesterday out of spoil that had been made by men a century before that.
The sides.
Torrin took half a step and stopped.
“What about them?”
They are cut straight.
They will not stand straight.
“They have stood since yesterday.”
Then cut them back before they stop.
He looked at the near wall of his own trench for what was probably the first time that morning.
“That is another half day out of it.”
Yes.
“Aye,” Torrin said, and did not sound happy about it.
Down the drag line two men brought a prop down between them and slowed, and stopped, and stood holding it.
Their line ran three paces off her shoulder.
Torrin turned and put an arm out and sent them round the long way, out past the stacked props and back in at the trench mouth from the north, which was sixty paces instead of twenty, with a prop on their shoulders the whole distance.
A third man followed with the shim bag and went round without being told.
“Forty-one,” Nettik said, from somewhere below her elbow.
She got her chin around far enough to find him.
“Men that have gone round,” he said.
“Since you got here.
Forty-one.” He considered it.
“Hask says fifty, but he’s counting the ones coming back, and that’s the same men.” Then he settled back to watching, without a particle of embarrassment, in the manner he watched weather.
Torrin had run the same count and had not said it out loud.
What he said was, “By the time the last of them is back on his own line, that is a half shift.
And I’ve one gone round twice because he forgot.”
Then move me.
“Can’t,” Torrin said.
“Nobody here can put a hand on you, and you cannot walk, so you are where you are until one of yours comes down for you.” He stated it as a fact about the world, in the same voice he would have used to say that a prop was too short.
Aeryn had the whole of it then, standing in the middle of it.
That was made ground.
This is not.
Torrin read it and waited for the rest.
It came down on a line.
There is no line in this.
“I’ve been saying that since first light, in my own words, which aren’t as good as those.” He turned the cap over once in his fist.
“They stood and listened to the whole of it.”
He put the cap on and took it off again.
“If I take the sides back a pace either side,” he said, “do I lose the turn at twelve?”
No.
You lose a day.
“Aye.”
Behind him the trench mouth stood open and dark and empty and had stood so since first light, and above it the cut rose past the channel mouth and did not move, because it was rock, and rock does not move because a man with a sling is looking at it.
Aeryn had given this man four words about a rock, and he had built a trench out of them and put her name on it in front of sixty men, and she had not asked once what he intended to do with them.
***
The gravel came up against her cheek before she understood she had gone down. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
It was cold through the shift and wet under the cold, and every piece of it had its own edge, and the world narrowed for a moment to one sharp stone somewhere under her hip.
Standing had done it.
Not the nineteen paces.
The standing, which she had priced at nothing on the grounds that it did not move.
Aeryn got her face clear of the stone and no further.
Sixty men.
The nearest was Torrin, and he had come two steps and stopped, and then taken a step back, and put his hands behind him where he could see them.
Nobody moved toward her.
Nobody was going to.
The band sat on the arm she had gone down on.
Writing anything meant rolling her weight off it in front of the whole face, and she left it where it was.
What was left to her was breathing, which had to stay slow, and her jaw, which wanted to set and would have told the whole face something about her.
Nothing in the face.
Not one thing.
Her face did nothing.
Holding it at nothing took more out of her than the walk had taken, and it went on taking it, and there was no shouting available to her and nothing in the life behind her had built a place to put this.
“I’ll go,” Nettik said, and went uphill at a run, counting.
The face did not go back to work.
The two with the prop set it down.
A man at the stacked shims straightened up and stayed straightened.
Somebody at the far end who could not see what had happened shouted a question and got no answer, and then came up the drag line to find out, and stopped when he saw, and joined the standing.
Aeryn began counting the ones standing, and got to eleven, and stopped, and did not begin again.
Torrin did not tell them to go back to it.
He stood where he was, with his hands behind him, in the posture of a man waiting outside a room.
Aeryn counted the stone under her hip, and then the stone under her shoulder, and then the wet against the side of her face, and somewhere in there she lost hold of how long the boy had been gone.
Not long.
A run uphill by a child and a walk back down by a man who does not hurry.
The sun came over the shoulder while she waited and put light along the whole apron, and every man on it was visible, and every man on it was standing.
Somebody put a folded coat on the ground a pace from her head, close enough to reach and far enough to be nobody’s hand, and was gone again before she could get her eyes around to see who.
Then Vekka’s boots came across the gravel, without any hurry in them at all.
“Put them in,” Vekka said.
“On what?” Torrin said.
“On her.”
The pause ran about four seconds.
“And if it goes,” Torrin said.
Vekka went past him.
Aeryn heard her stop at the trench mouth.
Heard her tell the first four men to take their props and get in under it.
Heard one of them answer, and could not see any of it, and lay on the stone listening to a woman send men under a face on an assessment written by a woman lying on the ground behind her.
The props went in.
The first one seated hard against the roof of the cut, and the shim was driven in four strokes, and after that the sounds were ordinary, and there were a great many of them.
Vaelith came down the gravel some while later.
He did not run, and he asked nobody anything on the way.
He went down on one knee at her shoulder and put his forearm out across in front of her chest and left it there.
Cool came off him as it always did.
A man could have got both arms under her and had her up that path in a hundred heartbeats, and the path was open, and there were sixty witnesses to watch him do it.
“I will hold it there,” he said.
Aeryn got her hand onto his wrist.
The arm did not travel toward her by a finger’s width, and it did not give when she pulled.
She came up onto her knees and then upright with the whole weight of herself going down through his forearm and his shoulder and into the ground, and he took all of it without a sound and without once closing his hand on her.
They went up the path.
Behind them the face was working, the whole of it, at the end that mattered.
***
The drop came back at dark, on schedule, as it had the last two times.
Vekka stood at the door and did not come in.
Below them, the trench mouth had two lamps at it and men going in and out, and the noise of it came up thin off the rock.
“They’ll have the half shift back by the middle of the night,” she said.
“Torrin asked for it, and they gave it.
That is not a kindness.
There is a season’s cut under there, and they want it out.”
The half shift was mine.
“It was.”
The sides of the trench.
“He has four on it since the middle of the afternoon.
Came up and told me himself, which he doesn’t do.” Vekka took the doorframe in one hand.
“He’d not have got that off a rock.”
Then she went off down the gravel.
Nettik was at the doorframe a moment behind her with the evening pail and did not come in.
“Fifty-eight,” he said.
“Men that stopped.
I counted them while you were down.” He got a better hold on the pail.
“Torrin told me not to tell you.”
Then he was gone as well.
When the sound of both of them was off the gravel, Aeryn got up off the cot and crossed the room to the wall and back, and then did it twice more, and her legs took all of it and had more in them afterward.
Twenty-two paces.
She put out the lamp and lay down and listened to the second shift working.