“What was that?” he asked Josef.
“She said she knows the kobolds won’t like Joachim, he doesn’t respect them.”
Schlegel jerked his head at Carey and Carey followed him, feeling very relieved. They unlocked the double doors into the mine, found everything as it had been, Schlegel put one lantern on a shelf and took a candle. He went to the ladder which was bolted in place, diving deep into the earth. Without hesitation, Schlegel shook it, spat down the hole, and stepped on it, his hands and feet going down smoothly and quickly.
Josef went down too and Carey followed. “No two feet on one rung,” came the soprano yell from Josef and Carey remembered the same from the Master’s Mate of the ship Elizabeth Bonaventure, Cumberland’s pride and joy. He changed the way he climbed down, eighty rungs, came to a tunnel that was chipped out of the rock for someone shorter than he was. He followed Schlegel along a tunnel with running water in a drain carved beside it, past a kind of waterfall where water plunged down a shaft to a cistern, and then uphill for a long way until they came to an opening where a stream was running into the mine. Schlegel lifted his lantern and looked for footprints in the snow, but there were only rabbit and fox prints, no boots. A young voice called in Deutsch from the rocks above, Schlegel answered. Then he grunted and turned around, gestured for Carey to go back the way they had come.
Now it all became mazelike and confusing. They went back down to the waterfall, stepped past it on a narrow track and listened to the water going down under its grill. They went on past the bottom of the Furdernuss shaft and on where the tunnels were just big enough for a man of average height to walk. Carey was sweating and his neck was already aching and he had hit his head a couple of times. Schlegel shoved past him at a wider point where another tunnel joined at right angles, and walked quickly along it. The next thing was the sound of his feet briskly going down another ladder in a deep shaft.
It was horrible. His lantern made practically no impression on the darkness and Carey’s heart was pounding. Too soon he came to the ladder, offset from the main passageway, again plunging down into even thicker darkness. He could hear Schlegel far below, and Josef’s lighter steps, and followed, swearing under his breath and promising Jesus Christ to completely stop all future fornication if He would only let Carey out of the darkness.
“Might Joachim be in one of the higher tunnels?” he asked breathlessly at the bottom, more to say something.
“They are dead ends,” explained Josef. “They end at the veins.”
They walked along in the black velvet darkness, Schlegel swinging his lamp, Carey’s boots and his in the trickle of water.
The roof came down suddenly and Carey caught his head again, which was partly padded by his statute cap. The pointed hoods were a clever solution, Carey thought dizzily, you would feel the roof getting lower. Schlegel muttered something that sounded rude. The tunnel was so narrow, just wide enough for Schlegel and tall enough, which meant Carey had to keep his neck bent and walk sideways. He couldn’t even turn his shoulders. Every so often Schlegel would stop and hush them and Carey asked him what he was listening for.
“Shh,” he said sharply, “Joachim und kobolds, off course.”
There were sounds, all strange and distorted. Dripping water but occasional bangs and creaks, the echos of their feet, water tumbling below them. Carey opened his mouth and tried to quiet his breathing. Schlegel was talking to Josef.
“Herr Mine Captain is worried about the great waterwheel. He’s worried about the mine flooding, it sounds wrong.”
They passed a shaft full of falling water, went on a little and Schlegel started down yet another ladder plunging into darkness. “Oh, Jesus,” Carey said to himself, fighting down the fear in his stomach as he climbed down the ladder himself. How deep would they go? Was Schlegel working for Joachim, perhaps? Maybe he was deliberately leading Carey and Josef into the deepest part of the mine to betray them…
They walked back on themselves along a slightly wider though still low-cut tunnel where the noise of water got louder and louder, as if the Thames was falling into a hole above them and the floor became awash with water. Schlegel looked down and suddenly speeded up, saying something that sounded like “Scheisse!”
They came at last to an enormous waterwheel, taller than Carey, creaking round and round. Schlegel said, “Scheisse” again and Carey realised that while the huge waterwheel was turning under the pressure of the water splashing down from above, the bucket chain that plunged even deeper into the mine was not working and no water was being tipped into a channel that led downhill and out of sight. Even so, the channel was filling with the waste water from the wheel.
He blinked at it in the light of the lantern, Schlegel snarled some orders, and Josef grabbed him. “We have to clear the blockage,” he said, “otherwise the mine will flood. Herr Capitan will find out why the bucket chain has stopped. Quick!”
“Christ,” said Carey, “but…”
“If it floods, we will die,” said Josef and led the way into the channel filling with water. Schlegel pressed some kind of tool into Carey’s hand, and Carey followed, bent double, the freezing water over his ankles, the lantern guttering, his sword scraping against the side of the channel. He bumped into Josef who was at a blockage made of rocks, pulling them out. Only one person could work at a time and it was so cramped, Carey had to kneel to get at the rocks with his mattock.
“Take the rocks out,” said Josef, “or when the water comes, the blockage will go back.”
Carey pulled his furlined cloak from Josef’s shoulders, started piling rocks into it, then backed up the tunnel on his knees, into the open space around the great waterwheel, found what looked like a metal box on wheels, oh a truckle, heaved and tipped the rocks into it, glimpsed Schlegel climbing around the wheel, ignoring the sheer drop with the bucket chain beneath him, went back, filled the cloak with rocks again. His head was throbbing; he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. Suddenly Josef pitched forward into the water which was at waist level, and so Carey towed him backwards along with the rocks, got to the waterwheel, then went back and attacked the pile of rocks again, though his freezing wet hands and his knees were sore and he couldn’t see and the lantern was going out leaving him in the velvet darkness, up to his chest in water and unable to say why he was there. Except he knew there had to be an end to the blockage somewhere and so he dug and scrabbled and panted and finally…two rocks broke apart and were swept down the channel, others followed. Carey held the walls against the current and breathed the air that was coming in from where the water poured out of the rock somewhere far away.
Shaking, he climbed against the flow and heard a creaking and a clattering which was the bucket chain moving, pulling up water from the deeper depths of the mine, pouring it into the drainage channel he had unblocked.
He stood there dripping and gasping, while Schlegel patted young Josef’s cheek until his eyes fluttered open.
“Ich versteh‘ es nicht,” Schlegel was saying over and over.
Josef sat up, coughed. “He’s saying he doesn’t understand why Joachim would flood the mine if he’s in it. Why?”
“Samson? Pulling down the mine on top of himself…” Carey suggested, still breathing heavily. “No, that’s not Joachim. Why didn’t he break the wheel if he wanted to flood the mine, instead of just uncoupling it?”
Schlegel asked Carey something and Josef translated, “How did you know he only uncoupled the bucket chain?”
“You got it working so quickly. The lower levels would flood but anything above that might stay dryish. What’s he playing at?”
Schlegel took his lantern and started walking back to the ladder that led upwards and downwards to where the veins of copper ore were. He walked past and the passage went on with a kink in it, Schlegel said something about it and Josef laughed.
“What?” asked Carey, very tired of not being
able to understand.
“Herr Mine Captain was one of the young men who dug out this adit from daylight to wheelpit and he says they were very happy when the tunnel driving in from the hillside and the tunnel driving out from the wheelpit met, even if the tunnel has a kink in it.”
“Oh,” said Carey who was looking in dismay at his hands which were blistered and bleeding.
Suddenly he saw a tiny light to his side where there was nothing. But there was another tunnel at right angles. The light disappeared again, came back. He could hear Schlegel and Josef ahead, but he turned and squeezed into the new tunnel, tried to peer into the darkness to see the light there.
And then he stopped because although he still couldn’t see anything there was the sound of boots echoing from every direction, boots and shouts in Deutsch. Kobolds, he wondered? He was standing in the blackness wondering what they looked like, wondering how big they were…His heart was still hammering, he was stock still in a tunnel in the living rock where he had to keep his head bent which was making his neck so tired, and now he was frightened of being lost, of kobolds, of Joachim, of the dark…Christ’s Wounds, it was so dark.
He took a couple of deep breaths, tried to get a grip on his fear. What he wanted to do was curl up into a ball and hide. But he had to find Schlegel and Josef again. That meant turning round and going back where he came from. So he carefully did that and after a short time, he was back at the kink in the tunnel and went on. There was a scraping noise and something that sounded like a soft laugh, so he went back and found there was no tunnel entrance next to the kink. There was what felt like rocky wall there. He stared at it, blinked his eyes shut, opened them, tried banging on the rocks and they sounded solid.
But by that time there was another young man coming along the tunnel from the ladder up, carrying another lantern and with a candle on his breast. The young lad who had come along the tunnel was speaking to Schlegel in a concerned voice.
“Where’s Joachim?” Carey asked.
“Ay, we’re after him but we’ve got to get the bellows working,” said the lad in comforting Cumbrian tones.
“Why?”
“Bring air in, listen, can you hear them?” There was another sound magnified by the tunnels, a whoomf whoomf sound. “That’s the walking bellows, they’re getting Ox to put him in his harness.”
Carey felt unusually stupid. “Ox?” he asked.
“Ay, he’s the bellows pony, very strong.”
“Have you got the exits covered?”
“Ay, Frau Schlegel did that first, it’s why there’s only two of us in the mine and two at the bellows, your men, in fact, the skinny clerk and Red Sandy, because you don’t need to know anything to step on the bellows. Everyone else is as at the daylights in twos.”
“Good,” said Carey, feeling a little better.
Schlegel meanwhile had cleared another blockage and the young man was piling the rocks into a truck at high speed. Schlegel gestured to Carey to follow and they started walking downwards and the water running along a channel to one side was getting faster. His boots slipped on the wet rock.
“Might Joachim be here?”
“Nein,” said Schlegel and laughed.
Carey sighed and turned back along the passage. He was exhausted from being hunched over and his head was hurting.
“We are looking for him, though?”
“Ay sir,” said Josef, “Herr Steiger said. We think he’s still in the mine. When we have all the exits, then we work inwards.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Yes, sir, whenever somebody is lost or injured.”
“Ah.”
“This is the last exit.” The lad motioned Carey to go ahead and at last they came to a fissure in the rock where there was a channel and the water came out and was gathered into a pool. The dam was in place and a large uncoupled wheel stood silent in the moonlight, snow like sugar everywhere. Carey raised Schlegel’s lantern high, looking for tracks, found some fresh ones in the new snow. Then he saw another greybeard standing there, Herr Moser, the other mine captain, with a crossbow in his hands. That lightened Carey’s mood a little.
“Where’s young Josef?”
“I sent him back to the Furdernuss shaft. He is tired.”
An exchange of Deutsch and the greybeard lifted his hand in salute. They turned away from the silver moonlight and the snow and headed into the dark again, and Carey needed to summon up every ounce of courage to do it.
What’s wrong with me, he wondered, it’s only darkness. Why am I so afraid?
Schlegel was talking and he waved the lad back to translate. “Now we move inwards with lanterns. Now we catch him.”
The shouts from miner to miner echoed through the rock, distorting and sometimes sounding near, sometimes distant. They moved methodically, checking each side tunnel and only going on when they found them clear.
And then they were at the central ladder of Furdernuss shaft again, the ladder plunging upwards into the darkness, and there were three miners and Schlegel looking at each other and arguing in Deutsch and Josef still there, looking anxious.
“All right,” said Carey, “how did we miss him?”
“Impossible,” said Schlegel.
“If he was here, he’s still here,” explained the lad who had replaced Josef as translator-in-chief.
“Yes. But where?”
Carey tried to think and pay no attention to the shadows licking hungrily round the edges of the lamplight. “Are there tunnels Joachim might know of that you don’t?”
“Nein.”
“Do you know all the tunnels?”
“Off course,” said Schlegel indignantly, and said much more in Deutsch.
“He’s saying he has helped dig every part of this mine, he has been here since he was a Junge and came here with the first men from Augsburg…” explained Josef and the young lad in tandem.
“I know,” said Carey wearily. “But couldn’t Joachim have found another tunnel? Is that impossible?”
More angry Deutsch words but suddenly Josef said, “Kobold workings! Perhaps there are kobold workings here. I thought I smelled fresh air.”
Schlegel stopped and looked at the boy, then waved him ahead. “What are kobold workings?” asked Carey.
Josef said, “Places where somebody else dug for silver, a long time ago. Sometimes we find their tools, in other mines and open workings, made of stone or antlers or sometimes bronze-tipped. Sometimes we find falls of rock and the kobolds’ bones.”
“Some say they are the Fae,” Josef added, “or maybe they are Romans or Greeks?”
“Much more likely.”
“In most places where you find silver or gold, somebody was there before you.”
“I thought I saw lantern light at the kink in the…what is it? Adit? Off to my right. As if there was a tunnel there…”
They went back down the ladders, Josef was sniffing as he went, came to where the tunnel kinked, the rock looked solid. “No,” he said, “maybe I made a mistake.”
Carey looked down and saw something odd. There was yellow dust sprinkled on the ground, like sand, and it stopped short under what looked like rock. But it wasn’t sand, it glittered in the lantern light. Surely it wasn’t gold dust? Was it? He lifted a little on his fingernail, smelled it, held it near the lantern. It looked like gold dust, shining in the dim light.
According to Agricola, where you find silver, sometimes you find gold, and you might find pure gold if the vein is rich enough. Was it possible that Joachim had come upon a vein of gold and hidden it with some kind of barrier? That would explain why he came back, for sure. Gold did that to people.
Carey waited a moment, then tested the rock beside him which didn’t move. He tried pushing it, sliding it, pulled it…and felt something give. The section of tunnel moved towards him and he sl
ipped sideways through the gap with his lantern, left it open behind him.
He felt his way through tunnels until he came to an open area.
There was silver light high up and he realised he was almost through to the other side of the hill, and that was a hole letting the moonlight in.
On the nearest wall was what looked like a river of brightness flowing through the rock which picked up the moon’s colour but was yellow, not white. It was in a deep channel that had been chipped out of the rock. Carey looked at it and did not believe what he was seeing. Maybe it was pyrites, fool’s gold.
There were steps cut in the rock, ancient and slippery. Carey looked down, tried to see. “Where is Joachim?” he asked himself, like a child playing a game, to give himself courage.
He started down the steps carefully and found another hole in the opposite wall where moonlight came in. He looked through the hole. There was a platform and a sheer drop of fifty feet, some snow had come in through the hole recently.
He looked back and saw the steps cut in the rock, leading downwards and a new scuff on one of the steps and so he returned and went down holding his lantern tightly, sometimes needing to sit and feel his way down the steps until he came to another small stream of water, heading purposefully for an unseen exit.
All he needs is one exit, he thought to himself, just one. And the water’s got to come out somewhere.
And suddenly he thought, Why did he come back into the mine now? Because it’s a good place to trap me? Maybe a good place to hide too, we made the town too hot for him. But still he could have come back later, when the hue and cry had died down a little…No, this is a trap, specially for me. That gold dust on the ground was bait.
Carey paused then, looking up at the hole where moonlight was coming in. It was a gift, a gift from God, Gottesgaab. Somehow seeing it gave him courage.
A Suspicion of Silver Page 28