ALL NOVEL Chapter 48: Glintridge
The labor of the mine went apace, but Yorvig was in no mood for good or bad news, though he continued to stalk through the mine, adding and subtracting his sums, getting reports from the various chiefs and crafters. Some days he mined ore. Others he helped carve the terraces. Though he saw Onyx in passing down drifts from time to time, only once would their paths have crossed if he had not ducked down one of the new drifts, pretending to examine how the kulhan were doing carving their private chambers. Many of the kulhan had taken to the chambers with gusto, using up their allotted tens. Others simply cut themselves sleeping shelves in the rock kept private by a hanging blanket.
There were scores of small tasks that Yorvig could not dedicate any dwarf to exclusively, but which needed completed—the tanning of hides, the making of buckets, casks, barrels, cookware, mugs, bowls, crocs, handles, barrows, the maintenance of sluices, pumps. Each dwarf was responsible for their own personal kit—clothes, tools, and the like—though the mine smith kept tools sharpened and in fit shape. And when anything was missing or in short supply, Yorvig would hear of it and be expected to reassign some labor to rectify it. If it was for any of the skilled dwarves’ workshops, he told them that they were responsible for making their own equipment. Sometimes he did odd jobs himself, but he was pulled in too many directions throughout the days to accomplish much of his own labor.
Then one day, when the buds had burst and opened wide and the riversides looked dense with green, Yorvig felt unusually frustrated and decided he wanted to go for a hunt, get out of the mine, and possibly walk in the uplands again. Tonkil was planning an expedition. Yorvig foresaw—or convinced himself he foresaw—nothing that needed his attention for a few days, and it might be the last chance before they had to start seriously expecting the herds and flocks to arrive. Despite Sledgefist’s protest, he gave what few directions might be needed in his absence. Then he took his crossbow and his walking hammer Treadfoot from his private chamber, trying not to think about how Onyx's handcraft was all over them. With his now rather ragged pack upon his back, he scratched behind Striper’s ears as she purred and rubbed against his legs and left to follow Tonkil and his four hunters out of the mine before dawn. The bridge was raised after them, and they climbed down the tower in silence.
They crossed the bridge in the dark, cold rushing water misting up around them. He could feel the tread of the others vibrating through the wood planks. They plunged into the dark forests to begin working their way up the opposite ridge. By the hour of dawn, Yorvig could already look back through the trees and see the dell far below, stripped bare of trees and left open and obvious like a bowl inset into the mountain, thin tendrils of smoke rising from the cliff-face, the tailings pond dark and still.
The hunter dwarves had already taken on a silent, grim demeanor in the past months, and Yorvig wasn’t sure if that was because they were the sort who volunteered to hunt or if the hunting had weathered them so. Regardless, he found the silence refreshing. As they ascended, the wind grew stronger, rocking the treetops and breaking through to them, rustling their beards.
By midday, they reached the top of the ridge. Just to the north was an upthrust helm of rock crowded around with firs, but the ridge continued southward for some way in a long narrow crest. Tonkil led them south along it, seeming to know where he was going. Yorvig knew that the hunters had ranged over many miles of country thereabouts. This time, they traversed two miles south, to a place where only scraggly hemlock and pine clung to mossy broken rock atop the mostly exposed ridge. Ahead, a wide granite slab jutted upward and eastward, as if the weaker sandstone around it had weathered away until it had leaned over and nearly toppled, only its root buried in the ridge. It jutted out over empty air.
Where the granite met the ridge, a copse of tall pines huddled together. Tonkil led them beneath the pines, and there was a ring of cobbles with charred ashes in a shallow pit. It was obvious this was a camp they had established before. Tonkil turned to Yorvig.
“We’ve used this spot a couple times. This time we’re hunting west.” He pointed opposite the granite outcrop. “But I thought you might like to see this.”
Yorvig followed him to the granite slab, which at this distance he could see was more of a matrix for myriad quartz crystals the size of sand-grains. The slab itself was nearly twenty feet wide, worn smooth on top. Tonkil stepped up onto the stone and followed it out, for its slope was not too steep to easily walk. With the aid of Treadfoot, Yorvig followed. They emerged from the trees and came to the end of the slab, twenty yards into the open air, far above the slope below. Yorvig looked back toward the dell. The sight of the expanse of space, sky, and mountains was like being in a different world from the close confines of mine and dell. He could see the fold of the mountain, the southern arm of the dell, but he could not see below the far side. From where they stood, the world looked untouched, undulating and green, broken by the rocky outcrops and the glinting line of the river winding far below them. Then Tonkil pointed south, down into the valley.
A thin line of smoke as from a campfire rose from the trees along the river. Maybe a half mile further, Yorvig saw another. At first, he thought the flocks and herds were arriving, but that would be far sooner than he expected. He frowned.
“Prospectors,” Tonkil said.
“Why have fires this time of day?”
“They might be searching there,” he said. “Your claim stretches only from that rise and the ridges running down from it, not south to here.”
Yorvig noted how he said your claim. But then, the rest of them weren’t owners, so it might mean nothing.
“I wonder if they’ll find anything,” Yorvig said.
“They will. Whether it’s as rich as Glintridge, I can’t say.”
"You're calling it that, too?"
“That’s what everyone calls it.”
“Really? Glintridge?”
“Do you not like it?”
“We had called it Quartz Dell.”
“Ay, yes. But Sledgefist told all of Deep Cut that the rock of the ridge glints with gold like the eyes of a rhundal maid.”
Yorvig shook his head.
“Of course he did.”
“It could be worse.”
“How so?”
“He also said the mountain lusted to be mined.”
“Seven fires.”
“You sent him. And here we are.”
Yorvig stared south toward the curling trails of smoke.
“This river could become crowded."
“I have not seen so many promising veins so close together as I have seen in this country,” Tonkil said. “And I have traveled much. The others and I. . . we have seen lodes that might rival Glintridge."
Yorvig thought about it.
“I expect then, we might lose your aid after the year is out.”
“There is a vein of gold-bearing quartz under this outcrop,” Tonkil said. “Maybe one day I will actually stay put and mine it. Don’t tell.” He put his finger against his nose and grinned. “In truth, I’m surprised you haven’t lost more already. But it isn’t so easy to make a foothold here. You've done well.”
Yorvig smelled smoke and glanced behind. The others already had a fire burning, and they were heating water over it for soup.
“How much harder is it than the western Red Ridges?” he asked.
“No comparison. The foothills of the western ridges are less than two weeks to Deep Cut. The biggest claims are little more than three weeks away, even East Spire. You could resupply your claim with a foot cart for months on end. If you run out of food, you could make it back before you starved to death.”
Yorvig stared out at the beautiful yet hostile country.
“What was it like in the Long Downs?”
“More like this in some ways. At least when the ürsi came, but you could still get to Deep Cut in a couple weeks. This is the furthest any claim has been established that I know. That's one reason I wanted to see it. It was brave, if nothing else.”
“That was Sledgefist,” Yorvig said. “And Hobblefoot. They kept thinking there was something better just a bit further upriver. You should have seen them before. . . they couldn’t think of anything but finding a lode. If it weren’t for the runes they carved for me, I would never have come so far.”
"But you did."
"Did the Jackals aid you?" Yorvig asked. "When the ürsi attacked the Long Downs?" The Deep Cut Jackals were the contingent of warriors that patrolled the waste and its borders for the Council. They were secretive and few in number, but they had a fearsome reputation. Every gilke in Deep Cut stared in mixed awe and fear at the gruesome warmasks of the Jackals of the Waste. Yorvig knew their claim was much farther than the Long Downs, but he did not know if there was any hope of requesting protection or aid, if only to encourage trade.
"The Jackals," Tonkil snorted. "Do not trust the jackals or their masters to aid you. The council will not lift a hand if it threatens their finger. They did nothing when the Long Downs called, except to tax the trade."
They gazed out for a time in silence as Yorvig thought on all this. The dwarves had come hundreds of miles through rough country to reach the claim. Any road that could support wagons would be even longer, having to wind through valleys and gaps, adding countless more miles. It took two months to make the trek to Deep Cut, and that was with what a dwarf could carry on his back. For heavier loads, it would take much longer. Pack-trains of donkeys were all they could hope for.
Tonkil sighed.
“I fear that many may come unprepared.” With a shrug, he turned and headed back down to the camp. Yorvig stayed for a while longer, breathing deep of the high air as he stood upon hard mountain stone—mountains of opportunity, mountains of death, mountains that had complicated his life beyond reckoning, but had filled it as well. Ever his mind went to Onyx, and to the many dwarves now struggling their way toward him.