“You and I are lucky people,” he said as they started up the road. “Has anyone told you that? Yes, it’s true, and I’ll show you so...”
So Vuchak and his niece went walking up the hill together, co-conspirators absconding with a precious pocket of time. On the way, he showed her the stars that Grandmother Spider had hung in the sky, and the first warming light on the horizon, where Grandfather Marhuk had moved the sun to make a place for people to live. He showed her the great valley behind them, the banks of the All-Year River lit up with the watchfires of thousands of a’Krah in dozens of towns and villages, and pointed out Morning Town, where their family belonged. And when they reached the top, he showed her the wonders of Atali’Krah: the great calendar, which had been raised on the place where Marhuk fell to earth, and would stand until the end of days – the Spirit Towers, whose sky-reaching wooden platforms made a rest for the dead – the huge stone Giving Hands, where the bodies of truly exceptional a’Krah were offered up with prayers and feasting. He explained how her body would be laid atop the Tower of Innocence, and how her mother and father would bury her cord under the floor of their house, so that her free-soul might find its way back to them. He told her that she was loved and wanted, and would be warmly welcomed back, if she chose to return. He promised that she would have a good life, even if he wouldn’t get to see much of it.
And when she grew weak and fretful, Vuchak walked her home again, the spring breeze cool on their faces as they left the world behind.
AND THAT WAS how Vuchak passed the night: sitting alone before the fire, an old saddlebag nestled protectively in the crook of his arm as his thoughts dissolved into a treasonous, unspeakable fantasy.
CHAPTER TEN
CREATURES OF EARTH AND FIRE
AH CHE, A child of twelve winters, pressed himself against the bars as the cage door slammed shut.
The iron was grimy, slick with years of palm-grease and dust, but it was still better than being wedged into Orv Orson’s armpit on the ride down.
“God damn, Mag,” Orson swore. “You getting paid by weight?”
The old liftman grunted. “If I was, I’d kick your fat gut down the shaft and retire.” Then came the bells – two and three – and the jolt of the cage as it descended. Then there was nothing but the sound of De Puerta’s wretched cough and the stink of Orson’s gin-sweat as the whole lot of them sank five hundred feet down into the mine.
Ah Che had learned to savor these moments, even cramped and nervy as they were. Standing in the cage was standing, not pounding or crawling or heaving or hauling. It was rest, albeit of the most brief and begrudging kind.
It was like being eaten. Every descending second swallowed them deeper into that foul, unnatural air – hot with the work of two hundred sweating men, humid with the constant seep of water through the walls, and perennially stinking, acrid and sour from that peculiar admixture of spent powder and stressed human bodies.
All too soon, the cage jerked to a stop and the door opened, and then the day’s labor began. Ah Che followed the men through the damp, narrow gallery, his hand trailing the rough limestone wall even as his ears strained to pick out individual footsteps over the clang of hand-drills and sledges and the soggy violence of De Puerta’s putrid hacking. There weren’t supposed to be any tools or timber left out where people could trip on them – but then, there were a lot of things that weren’t supposed to happen down here.
So Ah Che tracked the tunnel edges with his fingers and the bits of debris by the skittering thuds they made when Orson kicked them to one side or the other. He kept his head turned, gleaning every precious bit of light and movement in his periphery, and focused on making it to his worksite unnoticed and unbothered. That was getting harder to do.
He suddenly sensed a body in front of him – just in time to take a hard shove to the chest. “Watch it, part-timer.”
Go break your neck, ditch-pig, Ah Che thought. “Sorry,” he said.
Six months ago, near-misses like that didn’t happen. Six months ago, his earth-sense was sound enough that he could feel the hobnails on a man’s boot soles, even if said man were standing twenty feet away, picking his nose in perfect idle silence. Wally Hen had hammered his into perfect triangle-patterns so that Ah Che would easily find him on his first day down the shaft. Now it was all he could do to make out the striations of a rock with his hand right on it.
Of course, he would be fired in a heartbeat if that got out. So Ah Che kept his ears open and his movements careful and his step-memory sharp, avoiding the little pits and snags in the floor almost as cleanly as if he could see them.
Unfortunately, he had no such strategy for avoiding the people he had to work with.
“Hey, Achoo!” Monk Farley’s odious voice rolled through the gallery like stink off a wet dog. “Off for another long day of playing with yourself in the dark?”
Ah Che kept walking. “Yeah. Lucky for me: if you spent half as much time pounding rock as you do thinking about pounding me in the ass, we’d both be out of a job.”
The consumptive laughter that boiled through the tunnel completed his picture of the other miners. Four in the big stope just ahead and to the right – muckers picking up the broken stone left by yesterday’s blasting, sifting chunks of valuable ore from piles of worthless tailings. Orson and De Puerta had set to work filling in the smaller, exhausted stope farther up and to the left, packing it in with their neighbors’ waste. Up ahead at the end of the gallery, Farley and some other fellow were drilling holes for the blasting powder that would be set to blow at the end of the shift, advancing the tunnel another ten feet, leaving piles of rubble for tomorrow’s muckers to sift through.
“Don’t flatter yourself, chief,” Farley called back. “Runty ratboys ain’t my type.”
There was no heat in his voice – it was all a game to him, dim as he was – but Ah Che hated it all the same. He hated speaking their language. He hated that he’d let himself get good at it – that he’d even started thinking in it. He hated the crude sex jokes, and he especially hated that he understood them now. He hated the damp, and the dust, and the ear-savaging noise, and the collective unspoken fear of what could happen to any of them, at any moment. He hated to think that he’d once wanted to be here.
But as he reached the familiar hole and sat to climb down, the bootsteps approaching from the end of the gallery paused to give his arm a friendly nudge – and for an instant, Ah Che sensed triangle-patterned iron nails. “Good one,buddy,” Wally Hen whispered. Ah Che hadn’t even realized he was down here – it had been weeks since they worked on the same level.
Then Wally Hen went clomping on, adding his voice to the general clamor. “De Puerta! You pilfering weasel – what’d you do with my bar?”
It was the most fleeting, passing moment, hardly arrived before it was over – but somehow it lightened the weight of all those uncountable tons of earth hanging overhead, and banished Ah Che’s foul temper like a sharp breath extinguishing a sullen flame. He sat at the edge of the winze, his legs dangling down into the hole, savoring this stolen moment of serenity. Then he climbed down and got to work.
When Ah Che had first started down the shaft, he was certain he’d be assigned with the speculators and geologists: the easiest, best-paid work in the mine. Ah Che could read the rock as well as any of them – better, even. He could sense where the gold-bearing veins would intersect, knew by a touch where to find the richest beds of silver ore. You couldn’t buy that kind of talent – not on this side of the border, anyway – and he could learn the rest faster than a hummingbird could blink.
But although Mr. Burrell had been perfectly delighted with his talents, his authority ended at the sorting-house door – and the shaft boss, Mr. Rutledge, would have no truck with ‘heathenry and devil-dowsing’. He made it clear that Ah Che would have to earn his way up alongside his paler peers – and under twice their scrutiny.
So Ah Che became a ratboy: a child miner squeezing through passages too na
rrow for grown men, wedging himself into gaps and crevices like a rat crawling up a drainpipe. This month, he was working a bed of galena: too thin to blast for, too valuable to leave behind. So he lay on his back with mallet and chisel in hand, hammering up into the stone scant inches above his head, his mouth and eyes tightly closed to keep the grit out as he pounded away. Whatever else they said about him, Ah Che was worth his weight in unspent candles.
He didn’t dream about being a geologist anymore. It was too late for that now. His earth-sense was growing twisted, blunted, polluted with the brutality of his work. The delicate, lovely layering of crystals and carbonates, folds and faults, had faded to nearly nothing – replaced by the itch of chisels, the throb of heavy sledges, and the ache of powder-pulverized rubble. Ah Che had tried to atone for his daily sacrilege with ever-more-fervent orthodoxy: he grew his hair out and tied it in the keshet, refused bacon and sugar and coffee, spoke only Maia at home – as if by acting more like one of his own people, the earth would be fooled into forgiving his depravities.
When that didn’t work, he just used more tarré.
Tarré was his constant companion now, his morning ritual, his evening release. He had taken to buying the crushed leaves, because they were cheaper than the plugs, and smoking them, because the high lasted longer. He told himself that it was to help him work more efficiently, undistracted by the phantom pains of the mine or the ordinary ones in his own body... but any extra money his ‘efficiency’ made him went right into buying more tarré, and the truth was that he needed it less to soothe his senses than to deaden his mind.
He wanted not to feel the ache in his arms and shoulders, the damp muck soaking his back and behind until he shivered in spite of the heat, the rocks dropping on his face or chest or gut when he misjudged the faults or missed his strike. He longed to avoid the silent, stifled throughline of every miner’s fear: at any moment, there could be a fire, a cave-in, an explosion, and the only prospect worse than dying instantly when the mountain bit down on him was being sealed in its closed mouth and left to suffocate.
More than anything, he needed not to hear his father’s voice.
Ah Che paused to wipe grit from the hollows under his eyes, and then gave the chisel one more hard strike. A fist-sized piece of ore dropped three inches from his head with an angry leaden thunk, like a piece of bone-bark ripped from the skin of the World Tree.
“That is not good work,” his father had told him that day last year. “That is not a thing for human beings to do.”
Ah Che had not been able to hear that then. He heard it now. That grave paternal tone echoed out from every stone-mutilating strike of his mallet, from every petty violence he did to the rock up above. He felt it in his diminishing senses – in the constant cacophony that blunted his hearing, in the casual sacrilege that was poisoning his gifts. And he knew as surely as if his father had told him so that it didn’t matter how scrupulously he minded his diet or tied his hair: he had refused the call of his family, his goddess, and his own conscience, and all his efforts to behave as if he still belonged to them was simply the sad, self-serving pretense of an overgrown boy struggling to fit into the half-rotted garments of a person he hadn’t been for five years now. Ah Che wasn’t keeping the ways of the Maia – he was only profaning their remains. And if he ever wanted to live that life again, he would have to go home... before it was too late.
Soon, he promised. I’ll come soon. He had to stay with Wally Hen just long enough for him to find someone else to share his life with – just long enough so that Ah Che wouldn’t be leaving him alone. The bigger boy – man, now – had been the one to convince Ah Che to go back and see his father again, that one evening on Market Street last year. Wally Hen, who had no family of his own, had been the first to remind Ah Che that that chance was not one to be cast aside in a moment of anger – that his father should be seen and heard and respected, even if he could not be obeyed.
Ah Che had made up his mind on the spot. Perhaps it was true that the two of them could not live well together – that the great violence on the other side of the border would kill Wally Hen just as surely as the greedy peace on this one was draining Ah Che. But if that was so, then he would stay until he wasn’t needed – until his volunteer brother, his self-selected family, had found a family of his own.
That was his mind’s one pleasant roost. This spring, Wally Hen had taken to courting Flory Hayes, one of the girls working at the Magnolia. She was witty and kind and never said coarse things, at least not around Ah Che, and seemed every bit as happy to overlook Wally Hen’s two-colored face as he was to disregard what he called her ‘upstairs work’. He had confided to Ah Che they were both saving to buy out her contract, and when they did, he would ask her to marry him.
Ah Che would stay at least that long. Then he would break the news, as gently as he could. Then he would go, following the directions his father had given him, hoping that the world and Ten-Maia would forgive him for all that he had done in the meantime, and see him safely home.
In the meantime, he hammered and shivered and sweated in the stuffy, suffocating dark, doing his best to focus on strikes and angles, faults and fractures, on cleaving the beautiful cubic galena from the brittle, amorphous beds of limestone, all while packing his soiled conscience and stifled claustrophobia deeper down into his gut. And when at last his trough was full, Ah Che turned over, laid his tools in it, and slid his feet through the loops on either side, dragging it behind him as he crawled back towards the winze. There would be a drink of water waiting for him there, and a chance to stretch his aching limbs.
They talked to him more now than they used to. Even tarré couldn’t numb the stirring unrest inside his own body – bone-pains, new hair, the growth of his appetite and the awakening of a new one. He wouldn’t care so much about Monk Farley’s crude jokes if they weren’t true – if they didn’t make him ashamed of what he did when he was alone. That was unhealthy thinking, and Ah Che knew it. He knew that he had entered the autumn of his childhood, and that winter was coming. He knew that the blood of girls and the seed of boys were special things, connected somehow to the sacred mysteries, the rites of passage that would initiate them into adulthood. But he didn’t know what happened when the men took a boy down into the kiva for the first time, or when it was right to spur himself to creation, or what to do with the result. So he had no rebuttal, no holy bulwark to keep his thinking from being tainted by these perverse people and their great love of guilt and secrecy and shame.
What he did have were exquisite, unspeakable thoughts about Flory Hayes – about how she always smelled like fresh lavender soap, and how she laughed so brilliantly, and how she’d felt that one time she hugged him, a single memory of softness that had provoked his body into opposition more times than he could count. Sometimes Ah Che even thought about John Samson at the bar, who told good jokes and gave him haymaker’s punch for free. He was always careful to put the glass into Ah Che’s hand, which wasn’t really necessary, but Ah Che encouraged it – partly because he was hungry for any human touch that didn’t happen in a shaft cage, but also because John Samson had big, soft hands, with long shoulder-squeezing fingers that lingered in his imagination every time he...
Ah Che’s pleasant fantasy evaporated in the midst of unfamiliar territory. He patted gingerly at the floor, sensing ordinary limestone – but there were none of the familiar pits and ripples to guide him. He put his hand to the ceiling, hunting for traces of his own handiwork – but the galena here was undisturbed, run through with pyrite and quartz.
Ah Che had never found quartz down here.
He froze in place, mentally backtracking through each past movement – but he hadn’t been paying attention. Had he passed the half-moon bump already? Had he just veered a little too far to the right, or turned himself in some other direction entirely? Should he try moving straight backwards, or would that only compound the error?
Ah Che’s heart beat faster; his sweat turned cold. He
listened in vain for some sound from above, any little noise that would tell him where the winze-hole was. But under the tightly-controlled panic in his own heavy breathing, there was nothing but endless, cavernous silence. He was lost.
SOMEONE WAS PULLING Día’s hair.
She flinched and groaned, adrift on a stormy dark ocean. No distractions. She had to keep afloat. She had to stay awake.
Awake...
A harder pull. A small, sharp pain piercing the aching swells. Just noticing it was an effort. Opening her eyes was another. Remembering was another.
Halfwick. Kneeling there in the moonlight, a speechless, deathless horror. Why was he still here?
“Wake,” Día mumbled.
A third pull, the hardest yet – putrid fingers pinching the scant tufts of her hair. Día flinched out from under his grasp, sprawling backwards as a wave of nausea threatened to sink her. Too much. Too long. She’d taken on too much water.
And Halfwick just knelt there, his arm sinking slowly, as if by concerted effort.
They had to get up. Día groped for his hand, missed, tried again. Her fingers found his forearm, the flesh under his sleeve no longer rotting-soft, but as tough as an iceboxed steak.
Frozen.
They’d stayed too long. The night had caught up with him. His eyes didn’t even follow her, but remained locked on the place where she had sat, congealed into a fixed, unblinking stare.
“No,” Día croaked. She needed him to get up – to go get help. Why did he always have to be useless right when she needed him?
Fire. He needed fire. Just enough to limber up his joints – just enough to get moving.
Día fumbled for something to burn. No wood. No plants. Too weak to tear her cassock – but she had his jacket. She pulled it from her shoulders and wadded it up between her feet, a clumsy crane incubating a filthy denim egg. The wind knifed through her. She shut it out, riding dangerously low on the dark waves as she sought out the tiny sun inside her, kindling it for one last burst of heat and light and love.
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