B00DW1DUQA EBOK (33 page)

Somehow, without Finn knowing how, his trolley filled with ore. He tried to make it look as though he was working each time Tom roused him but couldn’t keep it up for more than a few minutes. Numerous times the whip stung across his back, but the pain felt mercifully distant. Each time he managed to work on for a little longer, until the Ironclad strode away. He panted deep breaths, as if he’d been running for miles.

He didn’t recall the trudge back to their beds at the end of the day. Tom said nothing. A little later there was another trickle of cool water in his mouth. Then he felt the scratch of his rough bed against his cheek and he knew he could close his eyes and sleep at last.

A week later, Finn and his gang of diggers were roused by the Ironclads and told to prepare for a march. The week had passed in a confusion of exhaustion and sickness for Finn, but he’d survived thanks to Tom. He was slowly recovering, gaining a little more strength each day. At some point - he couldn’t recall when - he’d fallen badly and ricked his back, making it difficult for him to stoop or even walk. Yet, strangely, that seemed to help; it gave him something to focus on so that he forgot how sick he felt. But the thought of a long march through the mines filled him with dread again.

‘You’re needed at the top end,’ said the Ironclad. ‘The wheels. Gather your belongings; we leave now.’

A murmur of delight passed through the diggers at this. Recaulking the wheels was a rare privilege. It was dangerous work, but less so than digging, and any change to their gruelling routine was welcome. Finn just hoped he could make it that far. It was miles to the wheels. Still, at least they wouldn’t be chained together. If someone fell and couldn’t stand again, it took too much time to unshackle everyone.

Soon, the gang of thirty of them were filing down onto the main cavern floor, each carrying their bundle of bedding rags in their arms. They headed towards the nearest of the supporting stone pillars. The ground fell slightly as they trudged along. Finn’s ricked back hurt constantly, jarred by each step. He sucked at the gaps in his gums as he went, a habit from when his teeth had started to fall out. Another was loose now. No-one knew why that happened, but it was the same for everyone. You could tell how long someone had been down there by how few teeth they had left. Tom barely had any.

Two or three hours into the first day of the march, they skirted around a depression in the ground. Water pooled within it. Drops of water fell from the distant roof, great fat globes of water that reminded Finn of something, the ball-bearings that Rory had made, perhaps. One of the drops fell onto the top of his head, instantly cold and wonderful. The Ironclads let them stop and drink, refill water bottles.

‘Where does all that water go?’ he asked Tom. They could talk so long as they kept their heads down and spoke in a hushed whisper.

Tom glanced across at the nearest Ironclad, checking they weren’t being watched.

‘Drainage hole. A tunnel leads away deeper into the rock. It’s filled with water; no-one knows how long it is.’

‘Has anyone ever tried to escape this way? Through the water?’

‘You don’t give up, do you Finn? Enough of this. Why don’t you just accept you can’t beat them, can’t escape, can’t change anything? Don’t even think about it.’

It was a long debate between them. Finn spent hours and days puzzling over ways to escape the mines. When he thought he had a scheme he would report it to Tom who, invariably, explained why it was unworkable. He had seen it tried, knew it was impossible.

‘I can’t just give up,’ Finn always said.

In truth he was often tempted to do just that. It was hopeless and he often despaired. Destroying Engn was utterly impossible, of course. But then some spark would reignite inside him and he knew he wouldn’t give up even if it was pointless.

‘So no-one has tried to get out this way?’ he asked.

Tom sighed. Finn thought he wasn’t going to reply at first, but then he answered. ‘Saw two people try it once. Just dived in. The Ironclads sat on their horses, doing nothing. One of the two stayed down for a couple of minutes before bursting back up gasping for breath.’

‘What did the Ironclads do?’

‘Hauled him out and made him find a boulder. They chained it to him then threw him back in.’

‘What about the other person?’

‘Came back eventually. His body did, anyway. Bobbed back up to the surface after an hour or so, blue and lifeless.’

Finn nodded, making careful note of the information. There
had
to be some way. The chutes they pushed people down were no good. His memory of crashing and clanging down from above was confused, but he did clearly recall the smooth metal sides he scrabbled against to try to slow himself down. Even if you could reach one of the chutes protruding part-way up the walls, it would surely be impossible to climb up to the surface without at least a rope let down for you.

There were doors, of course. The Ironclad guards came and went through them each day. But they were heavy iron slabs, locked from the other side and constantly guarded. They were only ever opened when a troop of Ironclads was passing in or out, and it would surely be impossible to sneak through then.

It was rumoured there was an unguarded door somewhere in the caverns, beyond which a simple flight of steps led up to the surface. People sometimes claimed to have glimpsed it in the distance, but neither Finn nor Tom had ever seen it. It was just some crazy story.

Finn sometimes dreamed about bashing through to a forgotten tunnel as he laboured away at the rock-face, a sudden blast of cold air on his face, a glimpse of sky. He knew that was impossible. They were too far underground. They could dig at this level for ever and never see the surface. Still, it was a glorious thought. Perhaps
this
blow. Perhaps
this
blow.

He knew, of course, that no-one ever escaped the mines. The only way out was into the flames of the furnace, when you were too exhausted or broken to work any more. But that didn’t prevent him puzzling over the problem constantly.

Part way through the second day of their march, one of the diggers in front of Finn staggered and collapsed. It was a man he didn’t know, quite a recent newcomer, his hair still quite short, all his teeth showing. His eyes were shut as he lay there on the ground, chest heaving rapidly.

Finn stopped to try and haul the man back to his feet. He felt Tom’s firm grip on his arm, pulling him along. ‘You can’t stop, Finn. They’ll just beat you and make you run after us. You can’t do anything.’

‘We can’t leave him there to die.’

‘We have to.’

Finn caught Tom’s intent glare for a moment. The man lay on the ground, unmoving. One of the Ironclads had spurred his horse forwards and trotted towards him.

‘You didn’t just let me die the other day,’ said Finn. ‘All those other times.’

‘No, I didn’t. Because I could do something about it. And because we’re friends. There’s nothing we can do for him, not out here.’

‘So, if I fell here and couldn’t go on what would you do then? Leave me, too?’

Tom didn’t reply for a moment. They both heard the fallen man whimper as the Ironclad kicked him to try to rouse him.

‘I’d have to, Finn. And you’d have to do the same to me. Understand?’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘You should. How would it help getting us both killed?’

Finn looked from the fallen man and up at Tom. Tom looked away. Finn saw that he meant what he said. They walked along in silence after that.

Over the next two days, they wound their way around twenty-four of the vast stone pillars, each far wider at its base than Finn’s house back in the valley. From a distance the pillars looked slender, and Finn fantasized about hacking away at one, bringing the whole cavern, the whole of Engn crashing down. But up close he could see how impossible this would be. It would take a whole gang of them years and years to do that. Gazing up them to the distant ceiling, Finn wondered if there were spy-holes up there, masters with telescopes gazing down as they had in the Valve Hall. If there were, they were too tiny to see.

They arrived beneath the wheels late on the second day. They were exhausted, barely walking, but they’d lost no-one else on the way. Graves, unfortunately, had survived. They’d met two other gangs crossing the cavern floor, each person haloed by four, five, six shadows from the enormous swinging orbs up above them. Finn had seen no-one he recognized. With all the grime and dust, it was hard to be sure.

Now, the Ironclads leading them pointed at a patch of the stone ground where they were to lie. Finn and the others trudged across, the last few paces almost too much. They fell to the floor, sitting or lying, utterly spent. Finn just hoped they weren’t expected to work without sleeping and eating first. He knew he wouldn’t be able to.

From his position on the ground he gazed up at their reason for being here. The line of six wheels filled the upper end of the great cavern. Their immense creaking and groaning had been audible for miles, slowly drowning out the normal background noise of the mines: the
clink, clink
of axe on stone, the scuffling of feet, the squeak of trolley wheels, the cries. It was said this was the oldest part of the diggings, the place the hacking out had begun all those years ago. The cavern was lower, here, floor and ceiling sloping together. Even so, only a part of each wheel was visible. Their lower curves ran inside deep channels in the ground, the course of the underground river that flowed beneath Engn. The En. The spray from the gushing, foaming waters filled the air, making every surface slick. The wheels scooped this up and, by doing so, kept the mines from flooding. The tops of the wheels were also invisible: protruding through great cuts in the ceiling of the caves, the surface-level of the machine. Somewhere up there they tipped their water into a vast reservoir: to drink, perhaps, or to feed the pipes that led to the steam engines. The wheels were a marvel to see. Finn, exhausted as he was, still out of breath, tried to work out how they’d been constructed, how they’d been set in place.

Each was wooden, held together by a spider’s web of black iron rods and plates. He could see chains driving them, looping down and around their hubs from up on the surface. They were steam-powered, clearly; the force of the river could never be enough to lift its own water up so high. From a distance they appeared to turn slowly, reluctantly, but that was just an illusion because of their great size. Up close, they rolled at an alarming rate, the great scoops shooting up into the air, dripping cascades of water. Their speed and power dizzied Finn. The nearest wheel, however, wasn’t in use. It rotated very slowly, without any water pouring off it.

‘How do they work?’ asked Finn. Tom had worked on the wheels more than once in the past.

‘They control the flow with sluice gates,’ said Tom without opening his eyes. ‘When they need to maintain one of the wheels they close off the flow to it. Then we can work on it, repair the rotten wood, recaulk them so each bucket’s waterproof.’

Finn nodded. He watched as a gang clambered out of one of the buckets of the wheel, iron tools in hands. Just that one scoop looked as big as a barn, effectively a wooden room enclosed on all four sides, with a floor but no roof. It swung freely on its own axis so the water didn’t spill out as the wheel turned. Some mechanism up on top forced each bucket to tip over at the right moment, spilling the water out to be collected. The power needed to operate the whole thing was incredible.

Finn lay back and thought of the times he’d helped his father recaulk their own water-wheel back home. It had been one of their regular late-summer tasks, when the water was low and the wheel could be stopped for a few days without anyone minding the loss of electricity. It was a job he’d never enjoyed. Still, he wished he was back there with his father now.

‘Get up.’

The Ironclad standing over them kicked the nearest digger to rouse them. There was a chorus of groans. But they weren’t being made to start work on the wheels. Instead, food and water had been brought for them. Finn staggered forward, Tom next to him, to get his share. The gruel was warm, as if it had been made somewhere nearby. But the water was icy cold, scooped up, presumably, directly from the underground river.

When they had eaten and drunk, they were, finally, allowed to sleep. Gratefully, Finn closed his eyes and, curled up on the bare, damp rock, hugging his bundle of blankets to his chin, fell into deep slumber.

The next morning they were instructed in what they had to do by one of the Ironclads, shouting at them over the roar of the water and the vast creaking of the wheels. ‘Cut away any dead wood and replace it with fresh laths. Understand? Then the entire inside of each bucket is to be recaulked. It must be completely waterproof.’

The Ironclad indicated a cauldron of black, acrid liquid, bubbling away over a fire. A path of black splashes, from countless thousands of spills, led away from it and up to the wheel. A worker ran up now, clanking an empty bucket. Spots of black spattered his head, the skin around each, red and angry. The worker climbed onto a step and ladled out more of the tar before lugging the bucket away, struggling awkwardly with its swaying weight.

The buckets on the wheel being repaired were locked in place so they didn’t rotate around their own axis. That had puzzled Finn at first but now he saw why. As the wheel turned, the scoops turned with it rather than pivoting to remain horizontal. If they hadn’t been locked the workers wouldn’t have been able to reach up the sides of each bucket. As it was they could climb in as one descended towards the floor and set to work on its lower wall while it was still horizontal enough to stand on. As the wheel turned, they could then move on to the base of the bucket and, as they rose back up into the air again, the other wall. Rickety wooden ladders had been strapped to the frame of the wheel to allow them to climb in and out.

‘Listen out for this bell,’ continued the Ironclad. ‘When it rings you are to leave the scoop immediately. Understand? If you don’t you’ll be tipped out by the turning wheel. You have until the bell rings to complete each scoop, then you start work on the next one.’