Dismissed, I picked up my load and took it over to the carts. It took all my strength to lift it over the wooden side and pour the firestones out. I left my basket on the piles of other empty ones waiting for tomorrow, and started walking home.

I crouched over the bowl of lukewarm water on the stones outside our tent, and splashed the greying liquid over my face and arms. My swollen cheek stung where the whip had cut. I pretended not to notice. The steam from the bowl rose in silver drops into the chill evening air, rose too in a mist from my hands and arms. I leaned over the bowl and peered at my reflection, wondering whether on this day I looked suddenly older, more mature. The murky ghost of my image stared back, shadowed, with its dull halo of hair.

I had never truly seen my face. If Lesharo had not told me, I would not have known that my eyes were blue and grey like smoke, and that my hair, when I had washed it, was the lighter shade of flame. He had told me, too, that I had a solemn look and did not laugh enough; but when I smiled, he said, my face was all light, and beautiful. He lied, I think, because he was my friend. I did not know my face; always the reflections in the water were too dark to see.

The sky was thick with the smoky shadows of the night. I did not know then what the stars were, or the moon. I had never seen them. Always in our world there was cloud, a dark wintry haze of smoke and floating ash from tens of thousands of fires. Our skies during the day were vaporous and grey; at night they were as black as the inside of the mine.

I stood leaning over the bowl, staring hard at my reflection, disappointed. Then Mishal, my youngest brother, jostled me aside. He was seven, and had worked in the mine only two years.

“Mother calls you,” he said in high, imperious tones, plunging his hands into the sooty water. “The water’s filthy! You’re supposed to wait till after me.”

I dried myself on the frosty towel already used by my other four brothers and my parents, and draped it around Mishal’s blackened neck. “First here gets the clean water,” I said, lightly.

He kicked backwards with his foot, and missed. “Men before harsha,” he said. “That’s the law.”

I made a rude gesture with my hand, not to him but to the mansions of the Chosen, high on the opposite mountain slope, and to all the men who made the laws. Then I turned and went into our tent.

Mother was squatting by the fire making wheat cakes on a flat buttered stone in the embers. The smoke rose in ragged circles, tossed by the night breeze that came in through the joins in the black goatskin walls. We were luckier than most; our tent was erected against a low stone wall, and was protected from the icy northern gales. But tonight’s breeze was from the south, and brought with it the smells and smoke from the whole camp. It brought too snatches of song, music from flutes and pipes, and the occasional throb of drums. Those I loved. We Quelled rejoiced in our music, and all the oppression of the Chosen could not beat it out of us.