Chapter 3: The Cave-In

The clock said the pulse would come at nine minutes past the shift bell, and the clock had never been late.

That was what the crews called the timetable chalked on Drum's slate: the clock. The clock says. The clock's got the east face at the bell. You did not argue with it any more than you argued with a tide, and Kael went to argue with it anyway, with the number from the plate in his coat.

He started with the crew, at the landing, picks over their shoulders. The beam ticks, he said. The plate's been scraped.

"I've a hand to feed, Veyran," said Tessa. The bound palm hung against her chest, grey at the edges where the cloth had dried. "I've a hand and a child."

"You loaded under it yourself," said Ketter, with no heat in it.

Joren said nothing. He was looking at the floor, and a fifth tag hung on the crew's cord at the cage post, Nadi Tarn's, still bright.

They went down in the cage together, and nobody spoke. The new seam ran north from the landing in a single drift, with the face at its far end and a shored station halfway, where Drum stood on an upturned crate with his slate on its strap. Between the station and the face the east rib opened on a service gap: a slot cut by the survey crews to reach the old workings, narrower than a man's shoulders, shored with a lattice ward brace of iron strips across its roof, and joined at its far end to a tool pocket behind the face. Kael had crawled it once, on a dare, at fifteen.

At the back of the station a new man stood in a dust cloth, tied over his nose and mouth, and coughed. Kael did not know him. A water boy, a first-month hand with his face scrubbed pink, went along the line with a pole of lamps.

"East seam," Drum read. He read to the roof. "Extraction pulse at the bell plus nine. Isolation seal at the pulse plus fifteen. Fifteen notches on the gear, a notch to the minute. The face is rated."

"Hold the face a bell past it."

Kael had not meant to say it so loud. Every head in the station turned. Drum's eyes came down off the roof and went over him without stopping.

"The schedule stands," Drum told the roof. "Return to your cart."

Hask stood at the end of the station with his roster. "Veyran," he said, and looked at the roster.

That was all. The room shuffled toward the drift, and no one met Kael's eye. Joren Pell walked past close enough to touch.

Kael went to his cart, empty to the rim at the seam end of the line. He had the wedge block in his belt, the one he had shaved for the axle. He looked at the service gap thirty paces up the drift, and the lean of the muck pile under the face, and the dead beetles, and the strut over everything. If the face let go, it would go down the drift the way the muck leaned.

He put his shoulder to the cart and shoved it up the drift to the gap.

Hask caught him at the mouth, on his way to his own post. "What's that?"

"A cart."

"It's in my haul."

"It's chocked." Kael knelt and drove the wedge under the near wheel with the heel of his hand, and set the cart with its flank to the face and its back to the gap frame, as you would set a prop, so that a slide would shove it against the frame and not over the mouth. "It'll stay."

"It goes on the roll."

"Put it on."

Hask wrote on the roster with his chalk and went away down the drift. Kael stayed with his palm on the cart's cold rail.

The iron began to hum.

It was nothing a man would call a sound. A tremor under his hand, a pressure in the teeth, a low note in the timber like the throat of a bell before the stroke. It had been in the strut a minute, under the noise of the shift. Now it climbed. Down the drift Joren Pell's head lifted from his work, and the old man turned his face to the beam and stood with his pick forgotten.

Kael was on his feet before he had decided to be. "Drum. The strut's singing. Pull them off the face."

"Pulse in two minutes," Drum called from his crate, to the roof. "The face is rated."

"Two minutes. Pull them off for two."

Hask had come back up the drift. "Clock says two." He did not raise his voice. "Cart's short of quota. Post, Veyran."

"Joren. Tessa." Kael pitched it down the drift. "Off the face."

"Quota," Tessa called back, not unkindly, and did not move.

"Cart's short and Hask docks the whole crew that walks off a rated face," Joren said, to the rib. "We can't carry the day, boy."

"You pull a crew off a rated face on a hum," Hask said, "it's your invoice. Your token. Post."

It was an order, and an order was a thing a man could stand behind. Kael stood behind it. Drum counted aloud, "Pulse in ninety," and the hum went on rising in the rail, and Joren stood with his head up and did not leave his place, and Kael did not leave his. "Sixty," said Drum.

He went at sixty. Hask's hand closed on his sleeve and he tore out of it, and had covered a handful of paces toward the face when the bell rang.

It hit like a hand slapped on a table.

The strut went first, with a report like a split anvil. The beam above it dropped a hand's width. The lamps swung out on their hooks and went out one after another. Then the ore came down the drift in one piece, a grey moving wall of broken stone and dust, and the sound of it filled the seam so that Kael felt it in the rail before he heard it.

He had thrown himself behind the cart. The cart took it. It jammed against the frame of the gap with a shriek of iron, the wedge biting, and the slide piled against its flank and stopped there, heaped to the beam. The dust came after. It was solid. It filled his mouth and his eyes and sat in his lungs like a spoonful of flour.

"Cage!" That was Hask, somewhere. "Cage roll, cage roll!"

"Seal at the quarter-bell!" Drum's voice, higher than Kael had ever heard it, and for once not reading. "Clear the seam!"

Down at the landing the seal gear took its first notch with a grind of iron. Fifteen to the floor, a notch to the minute. Every miner on the Cut knew that count the way he knew his own knock.

He went with the crowd for twenty paces with his arm across his face. At the cage the men fell on the gate in a heap, and Hask stood on the landing with his roster and a lamp, shouting names.

The crew's cord hung from the cage post. Kael found it with his hand in the dark and ran his thumb down it: knot, tag, knot, tag. A man turned his tag when he came up. Ketter's lay face up. Kael turned his own. Three still lay face down. Joren. Tessa. The new name.

"Veyran!" Hask shouted. "Veyran!"

"Three still down."

"Answer the roll."

"Joren, Tessa, the new man. They're behind the ore."

"Answer the roll or get in the cage."

The cage waited, swaying, full of men with white eyes. The gear took its fourth notch. If Kael stepped in, the cage would carry him up into daylight and the seal would close behind him. If he stayed, Hask would mark the sheet, and a man struck off the roll for leaving his post paid for it with his token and then with his place. He saw it in the foreman's face, the roster tilted already toward the lamp. A minute. He had stood a minute for the clock, and Joren was on the other side of it.

Hask held out his hand.

Kael put the brass token into the palm. Hask looked at it, then at him. His mouth worked and nothing came out of it that was a sentence.

"Veyran," he said, and went up.

The cage went with him. The landing was suddenly very big, with one lamp burning on the post.

Kael took the cord off its hook, wrapped it round his forearm, and walked back up the drift into the dust.

The slide ended where the rib began. He found it with his boots, a slope of ore running up into the black. He pressed his palm to the stone, and then his ear.

Nothing. The drip of water. The tick of cooling rock.

Four knocks.

They came from deep in the ore, four dull raps on stone, spaced and slow. Then a voice, hoarse, thin as a shout down a well.

"Boy. There are three of us. Count us."

He stood with the cord in his fists and his throat shut. Then he said, in the cage voice: "One. Two. Three."

"Three," said the voice. "Get on."

The slide had walled the three behind it, in the face end of the drift, with the way out choked. But the gap went round the slide. It ran through the east rib behind the ore, and the cart stood at its near mouth with the wedge biting under it, and the shored slot lay open in the cart's lee as he had set it. He could reach them. The far end of it might be choked. It might not. He needed a chain.

He ran back to the landing, and there were men in the cage drift who had not gone up: a gang from the next crew, half a dozen of them, with their picks and their white faces, standing back from the dust and arguing in whispers. He told them what he needed. Props, buckets, lamps, hands.

"There's a stand-down after a bad shift," one of them said. "For every crew that was on the east. Nobody pays us for that."

"Hask docks the ones who stay," said another.

"Ten notches left," Kael said. "Then the seal's down."

"Then you've got ten."

They stood. Nobody moved. Two more notches went on faces that would not turn. He went back up the drift with the cord, because that was where the three men were.

He tied the end round his waist with the knot Joren had taught him and a tug to test it, so that the cord ran back from his waist along the rib and gave him no way out except forward. Then he stood in the lee of the cart and waited, and one of the gang from the next crew, who had followed him up the drift against his better judgment, picked up the free end and held it.

"Pay's the same either way," the stranger said, through his teeth.

It was something. Kael nodded. Others came. One, then three, then the whole sullen half-dozen, and they strung themselves out along the rib with the cord passing hand to hand, and the lamps began to move along the line, and the first prop went down it. The gear had taken its eighth notch.

The drift bent at the old cross-cut where a rib of rock stood out like an elbow. Between the rib and a fallen timber there was a slot a hand and a half wide, and the props could not go through it. Only an arm.

The water boy was standing there. He had not gone up. He stood with his pole of lamps in both hands and his lip shaking, fourteen, perhaps, with the pink scrubbed off his face and replaced with grey.

"Here," Kael said. "You're the middle."

"I can't."

"Only your arm fits the slot." He did not make it sound kinder. He said it as the bare fact it was. "Mine won't. His won't. Yours does."

The boy looked at the slot. Then at the cord running through it into the dark, slack as a dead snake.

"Put your hand on it," Kael said.

The boy put his hand on the cord.

"Feel that?"

"It's moving."

"That's it holding. A hand at each end. You pass what comes. You don't let go of it."

The boy nodded. His fingers closed. The first bucket came down the line and the boy's arm went into the slot to the shoulder and took it, and passed it on.

The delay had left two props still in men's arms when the second shake came, three paces short of the wall they were meant to stand against. It was the tenth notch. A low grumble went through the rock, and the cord at his waist jerked taut so hard it knocked the breath out of him. Down the line the stranger lost the free end. For the length of three breaths the whole chain hung on the knot round Kael's waist and the strength of Kael's legs. The cord burned through his palms. It took his weight and the chain's, and it ripped the stranger's arm half out of the socket as the man grabbed for it and missed and grabbed again, with the other hand this time, and held.

A gasp, down the line. A man cursing in a voice with all the tears pressed out of it. The buckets began to move again.

Knocks came from beyond the ore, from the pocket side: Tessa, with her bound hand on the stone, giving him a bearing. "Paces," she called, faint and dry. "One. Two. Three. Keep coming, Veyran." He crawled into the gap. The gear took its eleventh.

It was narrower than he remembered. He had to turn on his side and go through it like a letter through a slot, with the stone dragging his coat off his back. The brace over the near mouth hummed above him. He kept his eyes off it. The far end was half choked with rubble. He tore at it with his hands, and the rope on his waist tore at his skin, and he did not notice either.

He broke through. Lamplight, grey and small: Joren's lamp, in Joren's lap, against the far wall. Tessa's hand, the bound one, closed on his collar.

She looked past him at the heap against the pocket wall, and did not move.

"I've got him," Kael said. "Get in the gap."

"Go," Tessa said, to Joren, and shoved him in ahead of her.

They crawled for the mouth, Joren first, then Tessa, shoulder to heel. Kael listened to them go: scrape of boots, a grunt, hands taking hold at the far end, and Joren's breath sawing out of the gap in long pulls. Then he turned to the third.

Nadi Tarn lay against the pocket wall under a heap of timber and stone, his legs under the fall, the dust cloth still tied across his mouth. Kael dug him out. He was breathing, shallow, quick. His head lolled. The cloth across his face was grey as the rock, and nothing in the dark gave Kael anything to look at but the cloth. He felt for the harness, the strap and the ring at the back, and got a fist through the ring.

"Nadi."

Nothing. He was dead weight. He was a boot heel worn half away against Kael's thigh, a hand lying open on the rock with the fingers curling. A cold hand.

Kael wrapped the strap twice round his right wrist and began to drag him. The gear took its thirteenth.

He went headfirst, on his belly, the strap running back over his shoulder to Nadi, who came after him on his back like a sled, heels bumping stone. His hands were wet, and he kept his eyes off the reason. He counted the body-lengths aloud in fours, four and four and four, the way a crew counts a cage, and every four he gained the grinding at the landing got nearer, and somewhere behind him the roof muttered.

At the last pace the roof rose. There was a sill of old timber under his chest and a little more headroom than there had been. He got to his knees. He got his shoulder under Nadi's chest and rolled him up across his back, the strap still round his wrist. The brace was just over his head, three hand-widths above his shoulders.

Through the mouth the chain's hands came reaching. Four, six of them, white in the dust. "Give him here," a man said. "Pass him down."

"No."

"We'll take him."

"No. I've got him."

It would have been faster. The man could have taken Nadi's weight and handed him down the line, and Kael would have been free. But to do it the man had to step under the brace. He had to put his back where Kael's was. The brace was singing now, a high thin note in the iron that Kael could feel in his back teeth, and he knew the sound.

"Back," he said. "Back off the mouth. Get out from under it."

They drew back. One body-length. Their hands stayed out in the dust.

Nadi's weight lay along his spine. The boot heel pressed his thigh. A cold hand hung over his shoulder and closed once on Kael's wrist, with no strength in it, and let go.

"Three paces to the lamp," Kael said.

"Five," Joren said, from the dark ahead. "Not three. Five paces to sound roof. Keep low."

Kael lifted his knee. The gear took its fourteenth. The brace let go over his head.

It went with a crack like a spine breaking. The iron strips burst in all directions, whipped away into the dark, and the lattice that had held the roof apart for forty years fell in pieces onto his back and Nadi's and the sill. Dust and stone rained after it. The roof above came down a hand's breadth and stopped, shuddering, and hung there on nothing at all.

He was on his knees on the sill. Nadi was across his back, with the strap round his right wrist and Nadi's whole weight in it. The chain stood a body-length ahead, hands out. Over his head the roof was moving.

He reached up for it.