There had been the day that the cook had fallen ill and the bread had burned and been thrown out by the helpers rather than saved to feed to the children over a period of days—he’d just come off the sluices in time to see the bread in buckets waiting to go into the pig trough. He’d rounded up the rest, and they had all snatched themselves burned loaves before they could be fed to the pigs. They’d gone to sleep quickly that night, stomachs tightly packed with the bread. There was the day he’d stumbled across a cache of apples—probably stolen by one of the house servants—and had eaten his fill. And of course, the day, once a year, when the village priest visited to inspect, a day when they all were washed, given decent clothing, and fed an enormous meal of bread and soup.

His mouth watered just thinking about the soup, and his stomach growled. This afternoon, maybe he could slip off to the piggery again and get at one of the buckets of scraps before they went into the trough. Demmon had found half a meat pasty in one once, the foul bugger, and gloated about it. He was always snitching things and not sharing. And he was always scanting on the work, too, never putting props in his seam, leaving it for the next shift. Served him right he’d got caught in that cave-in. Share around, that was the rule. That way if the grub you snitched was bad, nobody got too sick to work, and if it was good, you all got a taste. Share the warmth, share the rags you snitched so that everybody had some cover, ’cause if someone got cold-sick, it meant you all had to make up for him.

The only thing you couldn’t share was the work in the seam. There was only room for one in the little tunnels that riddled the rock like wormholes.