Lover in the Rough

by Lowell, Elizabeth

  Reba’s fingers trembled as she touched Chance’s lips, feeling her own body burn with need of him. With a reluctance that she couldn’t conceal, she stepped back out of his arms.

  “Tourmaline,” she said in a determined, shaky voice. “That’s why we’re here, right?”

  His laugh was almost harsh. “I never thought I’d have to be reminded why I was down in the China Queen.” He drew a deep breath. “Tourmaline it is,” he said firmly.

  But his eyes followed the lithe curves of her body as she knelt next to the small mound of lepidolite. The rock had sloughed from the ceiling near one of the thick pillars that had been left when the rest of the room was excavated.

  When Reba began sifting through the crushed and broken minerals, Chance knelt beside her. Together they uncovered a few more shards of bright pink. They found a half-inch-wide shaft of pink tourmaline still embedded in a chunk of lepidolite. The tourmaline was a mere fragment of what it had been before the dragon twitched and shrugged and rolled the earth like a cloak over its massive shoulders. Even in the specimen’s diminished state, the contrast of hot pink tourmaline and cool silver-white lepidolite was quite arresting.

  “A few million years sooner,” sighed Reba, when her fingers found the bottom of the white pile and scraped over the hard floor of the mine.

  Chance smiled slightly and put the fragments of tourmaline crystals they had gathered into a small pouch on his belt. He would have left the worthless, glittering pieces behind entirely, but he knew that Reba would object. He wasn’t sure he blamed her. Even to his skeptical eye they looked special, a reflection of her joy.

  Chance pulled Reba to her feet and led her a short distance away. “Stay here,” he said, getting a pair of transparent goggles out of the rucksack. He pulled them over his eyes and went back to the patch of white on the ceiling. Using the sharp end of his hammer, he probed the lepidolite. The ceiling was barely an inch above his head. Soon his face and shoulders were covered with shiny white grit and shimmering particles of mica.

  Reba shifted impatiently, training her light on the pocket of rock where Chance was working. “Do you have another pair of goggles?” she asked finally.

  Chance wiped his mouth on his sleeve before answering. As he turned toward her, bits of mica and crystal glittered in his moustache. “Yes. And no, you can’t use them. All the stuff I’ve found so far is small, but there’s no law that says it will stay that way. Lepidolite is nothing but a fancy name for hunks of minerals of all sizes that crystallized out of a particular kind of magma. The only thing keeping the different minerals together is proximity and habit. I’d hate to loosen a few kilos of rock and have it come down around your tasty little ears.”

  She swallowed. “If it’s that dangerous, why are you doing it?”

  “It’s not that dangerous for me,” he explained with a wry smile. “I just calculate the risks differently when it’s your head on the block.”

  Before Reba could think of an answer, Chance went back to probing the lens-shaped pocket, pausing occasionally to lower a double handful of coarse minerals to the floor. Soon he had covered the short distance to the top of the nearby column. The lens of bright white continued into the column. Chance didn’t. He took off his goggles, spat grit from his mouth, and turned toward Reba.

  “You going to help me look for tourmaline or are you planning to stick me with all the work?” he asked innocently.

  “Chance Walker, you are the most maddening—” began Reba, but whatever else she said was lost in his laughter.

  With a smothered word or two, she knelt and began sifting through the loose stuff he had piled up. He worked beside her, still chuckling from time to time. She ignored him until their hands met inside the pile of shiny white. His fingers entwined in hers. He lifted her hand, kissed it quickly.

  “Even grit tastes good on you,” he said, his voice deep and his eyes very silver.

  She shook her head, sending light swinging crazily. With a quick motion she brought his hard hand to her lips. The tip of her tongue flicked out, tasting him. Mica glittered on her tongue for an instant before it disappeared behind her smile. “You’re right,” she said. “On you, anything tastes good.”

  “You’re tempting me,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her. When he lifted his head, particles of mica shone above her lips where his moustache had brushed. “My woman,” he murmured, “shimmering wherever I touch you.”

  Her lips parted and softened, shining. With a soft curse he went back to searching for tourmaline. They found many fragments and a few cylindrical segments that had been shafts of tourmaline as long and thick as Chance’s finger before the earth had twisted, fracturing and finally shattering the tourmaline’s crystal integrity.

  “Well,” sighed Reba, looking up at the patch of white shining at the top of the pillar, “back to digging in the ceiling.”

  Chance followed the line of her light. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let me tell you a story about digging in pillars,” he said, “or shaving, as we called it on Lightning Ridge. No piece of earth is exactly the same composition through and through. The Queen, for instance, is like a haphazardly layered fruitcake filled with different-sized goodies. The cake is what holds it all together, but in some places the cake is thinner than in others. Those columns may be no more than pockets of lepidolite held together by a veneer of chemically bonded dirt.”

  Reba looked uneasily at the pillars rising throughout the underground room.

  “On the other hand,” said Chance, smiling, “the columns may be as solid as the granite at the far end of the mine. I could shave a few and find out if you like.”

  “Er, no thanks,” she muttered, moving her head so that a nearby pillar was bathed in light. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see the differences. They may be standing in a pegmatite dike, but pegmatite was another name for a mixed mineral pudding.

  “Smart woman,” he said. “The Arabs weren’t that bright.”

  She turned. “What do you mean?”

  “They took some of their oil money and bought mining rights to the world’s only known tsavorite mine. It was a bargain. The African government that owned it was bankrupt.”

  Reba frowned. “I read something about that… .”

  “Did you read to the end?” Chance asked dryly.

  “No.”

  “It’s simple, really. Most human greed is. The Arabs decided that rather than pay to develop more of the mine, they’d just have the miners shave all those fat pillars. It worked, too. There were as many green garnets in those columns as there had been anywhere else in the mine … until the roof came down. Then there was only death. The stupid bastards who owned the mine weren’t the ones to be buried alive, of course.”

  “I think,” said Reba, swallowing dryly, “that the China Queen’s columns look just fine the way they are. No shave. No haircut. Not even a bath.”

  “Wise decision.” Chance’s headlamp slowly picked out each pillar in the room. “Only five,” he said. “That’s not a hell of a lot, given the restlessness of Pala’s dragon, not to mention the faults, the discontinuities and the general chemical mishmash that passes for rock around here.” His light revealed the worried expression on her face. “I’ve worked in worse mines,” he said. “But now that I’ve had a better look at this mine, you won’t come into the Queen with me again.”

  “I’m not that frightened.”

  “No more poking about for you until I’ve seen the reports your geologist wrote when you wanted to know what shape the mine was in,” said Chance as though Reba hadn’t spoken. “Maybe not even then. In fact”—his headlamp swept the room once more—“I think it’s time I took you back for lunch and a nap in the sun.”

  “I thought we were going to eat lunch down here.”

  “Not this time.”

  “What about you? Are you going to give up on the Queen?”

  He smiled. “I’ll prowl around a bit while you sleep.
”

  “If it’s safe enough for you, it’s safe enough for me,” she said, her voice even, stubbornness in the set of her jaw.

  “I’ve already explained about that,” Chance said easily, drawing Reba to her feet. “My standards are different for your safety.” When she would have argued he kissed her into silence. “Don’t you want to go back to the hill where the grass is as soft as the wind?” he murmured, moving his tongue over her lips with each word. “But nothing is as soft as you, chaton… . My God, how I want you.” With a deep sound he pulled her close, possessing her mouth as he hungered to possess her body.

  “You win,” she said breathlessly when he finally lifted his head. “Let’s go find that hilltop.”

  Chance bent and pulled the rucksack into place. After a last look around to make sure he hadn’t left anything, he gathered both pick and shovel in his left hand, held out his right hand to her and smiled. “I’m going to enjoy loving you in the sunlight,” he said softly, “all of you, sweet and hot and soft around me.”

  A delicious languor shimmered through Reba. She wanted to stretch and rub over her man like a honey-haired cat, purring the demands of love. “Chance,” she said in a low voice, “it’s such a long walk to sunlight… .”

  Before he could answer, the floor shifted minutely. A tiny shower of dirt came down. Vibrations shivered through the air, rock strata groaning in octaves too low for humans to hear. The ceiling stretched and tilted subtly, shifting rocks that had sagged beneath a skin of dirt since the room had been dug more than a half-century ago.

  Chance’s body hit Reba in a flying tackle that sent both of them rolling toward the hard white granite wall at the end of the mine. Behind them the ceiling sighed and shuddered in the moment of release. With a ragged roar, a cataract of rocks poured down, burying the place where Reba and Chance had just been standing.

  Chance covered her body with his own, protecting her the only way he could from the cave-in. Dirt and rock dust billowed outwards from the fall, covering them in a choking mass. When the last of the rocks had fallen and it was quiet again, Chance shifted his weight. Rocks the size of his fist rolled off his back and clunked to the mine floor.

  “Reba,” he said urgently, “are you hurt?” His hands ran over her trembling body, searching for injury.

  “A little bruised,” she said, her voice shaking, “and a lot scared. What happened?”

  “One little shaker too many.”

  “Like the straw that broke the camel’s back?” she said, lifting her head and giving him a tremulous smile.

  “Yeah. Only we had the bad luck to be riding the bloody beast when it happened.”

  “You’re hurt!” said Reba, seeing rivulets of blood bright against Chance’s dark cheek.

  “Just a bit of flying rock,” he said, dismissing it.

  The cone of light from Chance’s helmet moved over Reba, checking for cuts. Her clothes—and his body—had protected her from the worst of it. Her shirt was torn and she had some scrapes and bruises, but she was more scared than hurt. Reassured, he sat up and began looking for the tools he had thrown toward the granite wall when the cave-in occurred. They were nearby, buried but for a bright wedge of steel pick poking up out of the fringes of the rubble. He pulled out the pick and shovel and set them beside her.

  “Stay put,” he said. “If the ceiling starts to go again, hug the granite wall. It’s the safest part of the mine.”

  Reba watched as Chance carefully walked along the edges of the cave-in. At first she thought it was the grit filling the air that made the room look so small. Then she realized that the cave-in had filled half the room. Cold fear crawled over her skin as she leaned forward, staring across the room, trying to pick out the small tunnel where they had entered.

  There was no tunnel, simply a mound of dirt and rock that went from floor to ceiling without interruption. The entrance tunnel had been sealed beneath tons of earth. She and Chance were trapped in the China Queen.

  Buried alive.

  Panic went through Reba, shaking her until her teeth clattered. With a strangled noise she forced her fist into her mouth, biting down until no sound could escape. Pain cut through her panic, wrenching her out of mindless fear. She forced air into her fear-paralyzed lungs, forced herself to breathe deeply and evenly despite the thick air, forced herself to think instead of react.

  After a few minutes the worst of her panic passed, leaving her sweating and shaken but in control of herself again. Watching Chance had helped. His strength, his stillness, his calm prowling along the perimeter of disaster all reassured her. If anything could be done, Chance would do it. And whatever happened, she wasn’t alone. He was there, strength and light moving through the darkness toward her.

  Chance knelt easily in front of her, his head tilted to the side so that he could look at her expression without blinding her with his helmet light. He took her hand, saw the livid marks left by her teeth, the extreme paleness of her skin, the fine tremors that shivered through her every few breaths. Very gently, he put his mouth to her palm.

  “It could be worse, chaton,” he said. “Neither one of us is injured. The oxygen should last as long as our water. But the tunnel entrance is gone.” When there was no reaction from Reba, he squeezed her hand. “You knew that already, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Her voice cracked. She swallowed dryly and tried again. “Yes, I saw.”

  “There are at least six meters of loose rock and dirt between us and the tunnel, and no guarantee that the tunnel itself isn’t gone. The cave-in started at that end of the room.”

  Reba waited, holding his strong hand with both of hers.

  “If I have to, I’ll tunnel through that mess,” Chance continued calmly. “It would be a real bastard, though. I don’t have any way to shore up the sides. And it’s loose now, really loose. It will come apart at the first sneeze.”

  Reba nodded slightly, sending light dipping across the face of the cave-in.

  “I think we’d have a better chance if I tunnel through that side,” Chance continued, turning his head until his light shone on the wall to her left, which ended in a pale thrust of granite. “There should be another tunnel not more than a few meters away, one of the narrow ones your family dug trying to locate the pegmatite again.”

  She hesitated, searching his dirt-streaked face. He met her eyes, but there was something hidden beneath his calmness. “Is there something you aren’t telling me?”

  Chance frowned and held her palm against his cheek. “There’s no guarantee that the tunnel I’m looking for parallels this room at this level,” he admitted. “Digging for it is a gamble.”

  “But it’s less of a gamble than digging in that?” she asked, gesturing toward the cave-in.

  “Yes.”

  “Do what you think is best,” she said simply.

  “Chaton,” he whispered. “I never should have brought you into this bloody hole.”

  “With or without you, I would have come to the China Queen eventually. If it’s possible to get out of this, you’re the man who can do it. Alone, I’d be …” Reba threw her arms around Chance suddenly, hung onto him with surprising strength, then let go. “I’m glad I’m with you,” she said, touching his hard mouth with fingertips that trembled. “Whatever happens, I’d rather be with you than anywhere else.”

  Chance closed his eyes, unable to conceal the emotion that gripped him. When his eyes opened again they were very silver, very bright. Without a word he stood and began pacing off the distance from the cave-in to the wall where he hoped to dig through and find a tunnel leading up to the sun.

  “When I came to the Queen before,” he said, prowling the wall that came into the granite at a right angle, “I could tell that she’d been dug by amateurs. All those tunnels leading off the main one are pretty much parallel to each other in three dimensions. A real gouger would have dug up, down and sideways looking for the displaced vein. At the time I thought those parallel tunnels were amusing. Now, I’m
damned grateful your family didn’t know the first thing about tracking a drift.”

  Reba didn’t answer, knowing he didn’t expect her to, that he was talking to reassure her with the sound of his voice. She kept her helmet light trained in front of him when she could, helping him to judge the composition of the wall.

  He paced the wall and edges of the cave-in several times, measuring angles and distances with an experienced eye. From time to time he stood very still, eyes closed, as though reviewing or creating a map in his mind. Finally, he chose a place just a few feet out from where the granite and earth walls angled together.

  Before Chance began digging, he came to Reba and knelt in front of her. He smiled slowly, his teeth very white against the dirt-streaked tan of his face.

  “One kiss for luck.”

  She felt his lips warm and sweet, his arms as hard as the granite wall, heard beautiful liquid words she couldn’t understand and then he was gone from her arms. The harsh, gritty sound of a pick gouging into mixed earth and rock came back to her. She eased down the granite wall until she found a position where she could add the light from her helmet to his, making it easier for him to see as he worked.

  For a long time the only sounds were those of metal and rock and steel. A mound of earth formed at Chance’s feet. He ignored it, swinging the pick rhythmically, tirelessly, more like a machine than a man. Sweat turned his dust-covered shirt into a wet blackness that clung to his flesh. He peeled off the rucksack, shotgun sheath and shirt with hardly a break in rhythm. Rubble piled around his feet.

  Reba pulled her gloves out of her back pocket, put them on, and picked up the shovel. “If I stand on your left, I can shovel some of this junk out of your way.”

  Chance’s lamp swiveled suddenly, picking out Reba’s shape in the darkness. Her determination was clear in every movement of her body. He hesitated, then said only, “Shovel it as far away as you can, otherwise we’ll just have to move it again.” His teeth flashed in a thin line. “You’d be surprised how much dirt there is in a few cubic meters.”