by K. J. Parker
“Now, then.” Aechmaloten stooped, dug a spit of silt and gravel out of the side of the bar. “Of course, you can simply use the rim of the plate. Easier that way if there’s just one of you, but if there’s two, this way means less stooping.” He spooned silt into the plate, then propped the shovel up against his leg, took the plate from Kunessin’s hands and peered into it, the tip of his nose practically touching the silt. “Can’t see anything,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean much. Got to wash it first.”
He stooped and pressed the plate down through the surface of the stream, just enough to flood it; then he began wobbling it from side to side, nudging water and silt over the rim. “Gold’s so heavy,” he said breathlessly, his lungs cramped by crouching. “It sinks right down to the bottom and stays there. Means you can wash off the shit, all the light stuff, and the gold’s still there, so long as you’re careful. Really, there’s nothing to it,” he added, his hands moving the plate in a series of twists, thrusts, nudges and jerks, flicking off waste from the edge of the silt deposit while stirring the middle. “It’s all in the wrists and the elbows. Once you’ve got that, it’s a piece of piss.”
You could, of course, say the same thing about playing the harp, or surgery. “You’ve done this before,” Kunessin said.
Aechmaloten nodded, his eyes still fixed on the plate. “There was a strike at Forches when I was a kid,” he said. “What, thirty years ago. Me and my dad went, but we came in just on the tail end, when it was nearly all gone. Ended up spending out more than we brought back; we’d sold the farm to pay for the stake, see, and of course, everything costs so much where there’s a strike; food and lodgings - the locals are the ones who make all the money. We came back poor, but I did learn how to pan. It’s a mug’s game, though, unless you’re in right at the start.”
He’d got rid of nearly all the silt; just a few spoonfuls left, swilling round in the bottom of the plate as he twisted and turned it. “There,” he said, and his voice was high and a little shaky. “Come here, you can see it. There.”
It was like a little sky, trapped in the bottom of the plate: black silt, and a few bright twinkles, like yellow stars. “Is that . . . ?”
“That’s it,” Aechmaloten said, “that’s the good stuff all right.”
Kunessin thought: there’s not a lot in there, for all that work. Enough to plate the head of a small pin, if that. “Is that good?” he said. “I mean, is it promising?”
Aechmaloten laughed. “Tell you what,” he said. “If Dad and me’d ever seen this much colour back in the old days, I wouldn’t be here, I’d be home on my country estate, drinking wine and eating grapes.” Another precise flick, and a fingernail-sized dollop of mud flew off the rim. “Best I’ve ever seen, and that’s the truth.”
It all seemed to take a very long time, and it made Kunessin feel tired just watching. In the end, though, all the silt was gone, and in the bottom of the plate lay a sprinkle of yellow grit, like shiny dust. “The sock,” Aechmaloten said, and Kunessin only just managed to keep himself from laughing.
“Won’t it get trapped in the weave?” he asked.
“Burn it out, when we’re done.” Aechmaloten was completely preoccupied, hardly acknowledging his presence. He tapped the rim of the plate with his fingernail until the dust hopped across and over the rim into the sock. “There you are, then,” he said, straightening up and beaming like an idiot. “You got the idea now?”
“More or less,” Kunessin lied. “You’d better show me again.”
Aechmaloten was delighted to oblige; he was almost frantic with energy now, impatient, obsessed. As soon as the plate was filled with silt, he started twisting, tilting and shaking it, dribbling off tears of dark brown water. “Really,” he said, “you need a pan with grooves in it, so you can catch the dust easier.” He didn’t seem to be having much trouble without a grooved pan, and his hands never stopped moving until all the silt was gone, and a few more specks of dust shone against the grey tin.
“Just once more,” Kunessin said, two or three times. His feet were frozen numb in the cold water, and his back hurt from standing still.
“Your turn,” Aechmaloten said mournfully, handing him the plate as though they were in the desert and he was giving up the last mouthful of water. “I’ll shovel, you just do the sifting.”
Five minutes later, Kunessin’s wrists and forearms ached from the unrelenting effort, and he was holding a perfectly clean, newly washed plate. Aechmaloten was frowning at him, as though he’d just discovered an entirely new species. “You’re too rough with it,” he explained, though Kunessin couldn’t see how that could possibly be. “You’re not digging a fucking ditch. Here, let me show you again.”
And again, and again. Kunessin was in no hurry. But eventually he got the plate back; and this time, just as he thought his hands must be about to shake loose and fall off his wrists, he ended up with a half-spoonful of sparkly black sludge. “Right,” Aechmaloten said. “Now you want to take it a bit steady.”
Kunessin nodded. He’d been moving the dish with just his fingertips for as long as he could remember. “A bit steady,” he repeated, and Aechmaloten confirmed that that was the way to do it.
Kunessin took on a little water, which he swirled round the coast of the sludge island, teasing and smearing the silt across towards the rim, then tricking, betraying it over the edge. The island grew a golden heart - the grains seemed to be getting bigger the more he stared at them - while its black beaches were gradually eroded away by the action of his tiny artificial tides. He smiled. An island of gold, he thought; who could possibly ask for more? Present company excepted.
“There,” Aechmaloten said, “I knew you’d get the hang of it.” He was nervous, restless; he wanted to snatch the pan back and carry on working for himself. Strange, Kunessin thought. Here’s a man, apparently quite rational and sensible, who wants to throw away the soil to get the gold; and here I am, by definition supremely sensible and rational, having done the exact opposite. He considered that proposition; it was elegant, if a bit forced, but too shallow for anything except a rhetoric tutorial, and he hadn’t had to endure one of those for twenty years.
He noticed he’d got rid of the last of the dirt. “There,” he said, “how’s that?”
“Not bad,” Aechmaloten said, and as he spoke he reached for the plate. Kunessin moved it just out of his reach. “I think you may have lost a bit at the end there. Be a bit gentler.”
Any gentler and I’d be dead, Kunessin thought. “Understood,” he said, and he let Aechmaloten take the plate. “I’m not sure I’m cut out for this,” he said. “Doubt I’d have the patience.”
Aechmaloten was bending over the shovel, stabbing it into the silt like a soldier killing a prisoner. “It’s hard slog,” he said, “long, hard slog.” He straightened up. “If the stuff ’s there, it’s worth it. If it isn’t, forget it. Simple as that.”
Kunessin nodded. “And how do you know beforehand?”
Aechmaloten was loading the pan. “You don’t,” he said.
He watched for two more platefuls, and then he’d had enough. “I’ll be getting back now,” he said, and he doubted Aechmaloten was listening, or even remembered he was there. “Thanks for the lesson.”
He left him shuffling his plate, lips practically touching the rim, and walked back along the river. He kept telling himself: it hasn’t all gone wrong yet; there’s a long way to go before there’ll be dead bodies lying in the grass. That wasn’t good enough, of course. He realised he still had the sock: stupid, limp bit of cloth with some dust lodged in the toe. He threw it in the river, and watched it float away downstream, towards the sea.
Aidi and Alces had a lesson the next day. They came back bright with enthusiasm. It was easy, they said, a child of six could do it. Even the servants could do it (Aidi’s contribution to the narrative). Six months and they’d have a fortune, and then—
“Excuse me,” Kunessin said. “I’ve got to go and feed the stock.
”
Not that that took very long; not many animals left, just the draught horses, very little food left to give them. The indentured man, Cerauno, was more or less feeding them all with the venison he brought home; him and Menin, with her daily baskets of forage. They were getting stranger; wild garlic had been bad enough, even when boiled into a sort of green glue so you couldn’t immediately figure out what you were eating. The last couple of days, she’d come back with a load of strange, thin brown roots, which strained the jaw and tasted like earth, and a supply of dense, bendy fungus she’d chipped off the trunks of rotten trees. It’ll be worms next, Alces had said, meaning it as a joke. “Actually—” Menin started to reply, but luckily Dorun interrupted her, asking her to pass the salt.
All the indentured men who hadn’t gone in the sloop, apart from Cerauno the hunter, spent all day in the river. Aidi and Alces joined them, but later; they tended to wait for daylight, by which time the indentured men had already been panning for an hour by lanternlight. It was, of course, time to sow the spring wheat and barley, except that they’d eaten the seedcorn some time ago. So Kunessin started building a fence. The idea was to split the flat meadow directly behind the settlement into two pastures, one to graze and one to rest. He paced out the distance: six hundred yards. One post every five yards; a hundred and twenty six-foot three-inch posts, with straining spurs every twenty-one yards; two hundred and forty nine-foot half-round three-inch rails. Just cutting and trimming the timber would take two months, and then there’d be carting it down off the hill, before he could even start ramming in posts and nailing on rails. On the other hand, he had nothing better to do.
“I can’t see the point,” Dorun said to him, as he staggered home one evening and collapsed into a chair in front of the damp, smouldering fire. “By the time the ship gets here, we’ll be able to afford to send back to Faralia for all the lumber you could possibly want, all sawn and planed ready.”
“I don’t like sitting around idle.”
She frowned at him. “Fine,” she said. “But at the rate you’re going, you won’t have the timber cut, let alone hauled, by the time the ship could be back here with sawn wood. You’ll do yourself an injury, charging away at it like that, and it’s just a waste of effort.”
Chaere had found a bit of roof slate and a nail, and she was crossing off the days till the sloop got back. All she could think about, she told anybody who’d listen, was food; proper food, from a shop, or a chandler at the very least, and tea (she had dreams about tea, she said) instead of dreary, horrible water that always tasted of mud these days. She was right about that, at least. The river ran dirty all day (the indentured men had wanted to drain all their drinking water through a muslin sheet, just in case a few flecks of gold showed up).
Clea and Enyo fell out about something. Nobody knew what it was, and nobody dared ask; but Chaere and Dorun were on Enyo’s side, so Clea refused to do any work if it meant being in the same building as any of them. Menin tended to leave for the woods at daybreak and not come back till dusk. One evening she returned with a basket full of snails, and got very upset when nobody was prepared to eat them. Cerauno the hunter said that all the deer had left the lower woods (that, Aidi commented, or he’d killed them all), which meant he had to go right up the mountain, and then half a mile east, because Kunessin was making so much noise cutting wood that all the mountain deer had shifted to the south side. The sloop was a day late, then two days; then it was a whole week late, and people stopped talking about it.
Each evening, they put that day’s gold into a jar, which stood in the corner of the one long room of the main house. It had originally been a storage jar, made to hold flour; it was long and thin, designed to be half buried in the ground. To keep up morale while they were waiting for the sloop, and because he enjoyed being watched, Aidi Proiapsen came up with a little ritual, which quickly caught on and proved extremely popular with the indentured men. First came the ceremony of the weighing, which Aidi performed using a set of home-made scales. The day’s weight was chalked on the side of the jar, read out and contrasted (usually favourably) with the previous day’s take; then Kunessin would do the arithmetic and announce the grand total, followed by the value of one ordinary share, which allowed everybody to work out how much richer he’d become since the previous day. Finally, Aidi would stand on tiptoe, lift off the stopper, pour in the dust, take a candle and a stick of wax from whoever was acolyte of the day, and seal the stopper in place, using the tails side of his lucky six-thaler piece as a seal matrix. Since his was the only six-thaler in the settlement, it was recognised as a guarantee of good faith, and when it wasn’t being used for this purpose, it hung round Aidi’s neck on a fine steel chain.
(Where the idea came from, nobody knew; but quite soon it was generally accepted by both the women and the indentured men that once the jar was full, they’d wind up the company, pay off the shares and go home. Aidi maintained that it had been Kunessin’s idea, part of the original deal with the workforce. Kunessin denied all knowledge of it. Chaere claimed she’d thought of it and suggested it to Aidi, who put it to the other four, who ratified it. Everybody else knew she’d made that up, but nobody could be bothered to contradict her.)
One day - the sloop was two weeks late - Aidi noticed the six-thaler was missing. There was an immediate commotion. Aidi searched his bed space and his dirty laundry; everybody joined in, turning the main house upside down. A search party retraced his movements for the whole of the previous day, spending the entire morning and losing, at a conservative estimate, seventy-five thalers’ worth of production. Of the coin there was no trace, and the consensus was that the chain must have broken while he was working in the river, and the coin had probably been trodden deep into the silt, where it would never be found.
After the search had been abandoned and work was resumed, the only topic of conversation, in the river and back at the house, was the loss of the company seal. Without it, they couldn’t seal the jar, which meant the treasury was unprotected and anybody could just stroll in and rob them all. Aidi, who was feeling guilty about being careless, pointed out that this was garbage; before he’d come up with his stupid end-of-day ceremony, none of them had given a second thought to safeguarding the gold. He’d only included the sealing as a nice, showy end to the proceedings, and now he was starting to wish he hadn’t bothered. Furthermore, he pointed out, anyone with a little dexterity and a wooden toothpick could fiddle the impression of a copper ten-turner bit to look just like a six-thaler, so it had been a pretty worthless safeguard in any case.
This was news to the indentured men, some of whom instinctively patted their pockets for loose change, and there was a thoughtful silence before everybody started talking at once. In that case, they said, from now on there’d have to be an armed guard posted next to the jar at all times; they’d have to have a rota. The proposal divided the shareholders into two nearly equal factions: those who held that posting just one guard was like leaving the fox to guard the chicken run, and that there had to be a minimum of two sentries at all times; and those who pointed out that guard duty would mean a reduction in the labour force, and therefore a significant fall in production. At some stage, someone suggested that Kunessin should be the guard. After all, he didn’t work the river; in fact it was a mystery what he did all day, so why shouldn’t he do something useful; and furthermore, if you could-n’t trust the general, who could you trust? For some reason Aidi got quite annoyed at that. He’d be interested, he said, to see which of them had the guts to go and tell the hero of Eleonto, the most devastating fighting man on either side of the war, that he was a good-for-nothing layabout. He also undertook to bury the remains once the interview was concluded, assuming enough could be scraped together to be worth burying. They were, he went on, the saddest collection of idiots he’d ever had the bad luck to associate with, and if he heard one more word about guards or seals, someone was going to get a hard smack. That abruptly ended the debate, and nobody said
a word for the rest of the day. There was no ceremony that evening. Aidi took charge of the day’s take and slept with it under his pillow. The evening meal - watery venison stew bulked out with Menin’s indigestible wood fungus - was a tense, muted affair, and the mood wasn’t improved when Clea was suddenly and spectacularly sick all over the leftovers, which were to have been the next morning’s breakfast. As soon as she was able to speak, Clea launched into a furious attack on Menin, blaming her for picking poisonous mushrooms, carelessly or on purpose. Menin burst into tears and ran outside, Clea had another bout of vomiting (Alces, who’d gone up to her to calm her down, just managed to get out of the way in time; Aidi reckoned it was the neatest bit of footwork he’d seen since the war). Kunessin jumped to his feet and shouted for quiet; he got it, along with the stares of everybody in the room. He sat down again in dead silence, while Dorun picked up the serving dish and put it outside. Clea went and sat in a corner on her own, clutching her stomach and scowling at the whole room. Menin didn’t come back for a long time, but nobody suggested going to look for her.
The next day, Aidi found his six-thaler piece. It was in the left toe of his spare pair of boots. He said several times that he’d looked there twice, but nobody seemed interested. The ceremony went ahead as usual that evening, though nobody cheered when the day’s weight was announced, or when Kunessin read out the grand total. Dinner was venison stew without the wood fungus; very little of it and mostly water. All in all, it was probably just as well that nobody seemed to have much of an appetite.
The following day, just before noon, the sloop came back. It crept in slowly, listing heavily to one side, and Kunessin, watching from the jetty, saw that it was riding very low in the water. He ran to the river and called the men back to the settlement. They lined up on the jetty, waiting in silence as the sloop crawled towards them. There was practically no wind, and for a long time they couldn’t see how many men were on board, let alone recognise faces. Aidi offered to run across to the house and fetch the women. No, Kunessin answered quietly, not just yet.