39

In the Barrens, underground, lamplight flickered. Nallo ceased cutting on the face of the tunnel immediately and crawled with mattock in hand back past the second lamp and toward the bottom of the shaft. She crouched under the hole, a hand gripping the rope in case she needed to tug for a lift out. Down the tunnel, the flame dimmed, pulsed twice, and flared to a steady flame. Behind her, Mas was using the back of his spade to tamp down the debris in a bucket, seemingly unconcerned. He’d done similar work before. He had an instinct for danger.

“Doesn’t it get to you?” If she thought too much about the space in which they crouched, she’d scream.

“Neh. We’re getting four times the rate of buyout toward our debt contracts as the ones working aboveground. Even the lads taking the extra shift of militia training only get half rates of what we do. It’s worth it. I might stay on after I’ve paid off my debt, work for coin.”

“They’ll be working on these irrigation channels for years.”

“So they will. I can make a tidy sum, hope to start a house of my own.” He moved up beside her with the bucket. “Let me get this hooked up. You want me to do cutting?”

She refused to show weakness, although her shoulders and legs and back ached. The supervisor had told her this was man’s work, best fit for short men so the tunnel roof didn’t have to be cut very high, but a strong woman could fit into narrower spaces than most men. She had proved her worth. Wiping sweat from her brow, she returned to the face of the tunnel. Behind, the winch creaked as the full bucket was hauled up. Mas began to fill another.

She cut with the mattock, checking her direction by lining up on the two lamps. He shoveled and filled. Later, they switched out. Increasingly they heard the faint hammering vibrations of the team working in their direction from the shaft ahead, but they remained yet a fair distance apart. The winch reeled up full buckets and lowered empty ones. The work would have been monotonous, if not for the memory of the fall that last week had buried two men, and the water that had drowned the boy from Old Fort before that, and the old man who had asphyxiated when they’d sunk their first attempt at a mother well.

The second shift was lowered on the rope. Nallo and Mas chose to walk out along the conduit toward the mouth about half a mey distant. The gentle pitch and clay floor made the journey an easy one; shafts offered light and air about every two hundred paces. Mas was a scrawny older man, toughened by years of hard labor.

“You going to try for the militia, Nallo?”

“Neh. I’m too tired after my shift to do any drilling. The Qin don’t want women in the militia units anyway. What about you?”