Rebels of Vulvar (Vulvarian Saga Book 2), стр. 42
An unkempt, strong-looking lad, with a mop of black hair, sat beside me.
“Do you know where they are taking us, friend?” I asked him.
He regarded me for a moment with his pale green eyes.
“To the mines,” he said shortly.
His words stunned me. “To the mines?” I said.
“Yes, the copper mines outside the city, deep beneath the surface of Nisa,” the man said. “There, we will toil for the rest of our miserable lives.”
“The Anax of Nisa did not sentence me thus,” I said in confusion. “When I appeared before her, she imprisoned me while deliberating my case.”
The man roared with laughter. “Listen, stranger,” he said. “Any man expecting justice from Sola, Anax of Nisa, is a fool. After Dabar Cooke debauched her during the slave rebellion, she hates men even more passionately than before. To her, it fits us men for her to crush us beneath her heel.”
“Our sentences have no end?” I said.
“No man returns alive from the mines,” the man said glumly.
“What is your crime?” I said.
“Conspiracy against the throne,” the man said bitterly. “I was with Dabar Cooke.”
“I am Tobias Hart of Thiva,” I said. “What is your name?”
“Jumah,” he said.
“Of what city?” I said.
“Of Raue,” he said. “Dabar Cooke’s men freed me from a farm there. I joined them, and they trained me as a warrior.”
“Were you captured in Nisa?”
“Yes, I served in the garrison when Dabar Cooke advanced on Thiva,” Jumah said. “When the Thivans and their allies surrounded the city, they broke through a gate and overwhelmed us. We were too few to withstand them.”
“At least they didn’t impale you on the city walls,” I said.
“I wish they had,” Jumah said. “That would have been more merciful.”
After an hour on a dusty road, the driver brought the cart to a halt. A guard unlatched the iron door and ordered my fellow prisoners and me out of the cage. They lined us up beside the road and then marched us to the entrance of the mine and prodded us at spear point inside.
We entered a long, low, and narrow room that workers had hewn out of the solid rock. A short, swarthy, powerful man holding a whip stood before us. He was entirely bald with deep-set eyes blue like cold steel. We wore a copper earring in one ear. His other ear, at some time, had been torn from his head.
“I am Udo,” the man said menacingly. “I am the Administrator of the Mines. Here you will work to pay your debts to Sola, Anax of Nisa. I assign every slave a daily quota of ore. Any man who cannot meet the quota will taste the lash of this whip.”
After Udo’s brief speech, he turned us over to other slaves who he had appointed overseers within the mine. They led us down a rickety twisting wooden staircase, deeper beneath the surface. We entered a long, narrow, low passageway that was perhaps four feet by four feet where we all had to stoop to shuffle along beneath the low ceiling. Small, foul-smelling oil lamps set into the walls every few feet provided only dim lighting.
The overseers shackled us all together with lengths of chain. Then they handed each of us a steel hand pick with a short wooden handle and a large leather pouch with a strap that they motioned for us to put over our heads and shoulders to carry the sacks we would fill with ore. We advanced along the stone corridor. The floors sloped downward, taking us deeper into the mine until we entered a massive cavern that was long and broad. But the stone ceiling was even lower, which forced us to move on hands and knees.
Inside I saw about forty, emaciated-looking, dirt-covered men wearing tattered tunics hard at work picking ore out of the walls of the cavern. An overseer held up a chunk of ore so we might recognize it. The men in the line passed it from one to another, so we might all examine it. When the ore came to me, I saw that it was a rock with a thin black crust holding deposits of red to reddish-brown, soft, ductile, and malleable metal within it as seen in the dim reflected light of the oil lamps. The overseer then commanded us to start working. On hands and knees, we chipped the solid stone with our hand picks until we mined chunks of the black rock containing the reddish metal deposits, which we deposited in our leather pouches. I worked beside Jumah, the lad I’d sat beside on the cart.
Deep below the Vulvarian surface where there was no sun made the passage of time meaningless. Thus, I knew not how long we toiled that first day, but presumed many hours had passed before an overseer blew a blast on a trumpet signaling the end of the workday. An overseer directed us from the great cavern into another corridor where the ceiling was higher. We could once again move along on our feet while stooping to avoid striking our heads against the rough stone ceiling. One by one, we handed our pouches of ore over to the men manning scales. They weighed our sacks and then dumped the ore from the leather sacks into small, sturdy wooden carts with iron wheels set upon a set of narrow gauge iron rails.
While he weighed my sack, the man I’d handed it to told me we were not subject to the daily quota since we had not worked a full day. But he warned me that the administrator would expect us to meet the quota the following day and every day after that.
Other men took our hand picks, which I