Chapter 17: If Your Oaths Mean Anything, Listen Now

He lay awake that night, trying to plan. He still needed his crutch to get around, though a sense of warmth had begun to return to his foot, and the pain was subsiding. Still, he couldn’t reveal the presence of the upper strike yet, for fear that the others would know he had been hiding it. The guilt weighed on him. Nothing about the deception felt good, and he reminded himself constantly that he only hid the strike in order to preserve peace. He needed enough strength and an opportunity to feign making a fresh strike. Any dwarf who saw his cliff-side adit as it was would know the lode had already been discovered.

Striper wound her way between Yorvig’s legs and the legs of the stool as he sat, brushing her long coat against him. It was the day after he had become rinlen, and he was meeting with the others.

“We should smoke the meat for two more weeks, I think,” he said. It might be more than necessary, but he didn’t want to risk it. “And we need to deal with the bees.”

They could hear the low hum of the bees still trapped within the section of log that sat inside the adit. Sledgefist’s neck was still pocked with angry red lumps.

“We could drown them out,” Shineboot said.

“It’d spoil the honey, too,” Yorvig answered. “I don’t think there’s another way. We have to open up the hive with plenty of smoke and scoop out the comb. But we’ll need something to store it in. If that log is full of comb from top to bottom, we need ewers to hold at least thirty gallons along with the comb. So we need to make them.”

“We could hollow out lengths of cedar, maybe. It’ll take time,” Hobblefoot said.

“It will be less time than we’d spend hunting for food to replace the honey. That is what we do today, and tomorrow if need be.” If they let the bees remain inside the log, they would slowly eat the honey, and if they sealed it completely to suffocate them, their brood would rot inside and foul it.

When dwarves put their minds to it, they are capable of incredible progress even in heavy labor. Sledgefist and Hobblefoot took axes and brought down two thick cedar trees which they cut into three foot lengths. They brought the first two sections to Shineboot and Yorvig before the adit door, and Shineboot and Yorvig set at them with hammers and sharpened chisels. Cedar was a strong wood and good for making vessels, as it resisted rot and repelled insects, but it was not so tough as stone, and Yorvig and Shineboot made rapid progress. Still, the carving took longer than the cutting and soon they had enough lengths and Sledgefist and Hobblefoot joined in on the carving. They worked for twenty hours, but by the end, they had eight tall cedar pots with fitted lids, each able to hold gallons of comb and honey.

The next day, they dragged the log out of the adit, and mounded smoking leaves and needles just upwind of a weak breeze. They let the smoke drift over them, then they set to the labor. They did not use axes. Chisels for wedges, hammered on opposing sides were the tools for the job. Wrong tool, wrong result, the dwarves said. The goal was to pop off the upper portion of the tree trunk, enough to expose the hive within but not enough to let the honey run out. It was easier than it should have been due to the hollow. With a few well placed wedges running down opposite sides, the tree trunk gave a crack and the top broke away. With each hammerstrike, the hum of the bees had risen in volume. When Hobblefoot kicked the top section away, breaking comb as he did, the bees rose only to be inundated with the thick drifting smoke.

The pots were lined up and ready, and all four dwarves reached inside, lifting out comb laden and dripping with the “bee-gold,” and “the swarm hoard,” as the dwarves called it. They laughed, even despite the stings from the handful of bees not sufficiently drowsed by the smoke. Hardly would a strike of jewels have been more welcome to them there in the wilds. They ended up filling the seventh pot almost to the brim by the time the inside of the log was scraped clean. They sealed the lids with bits of melted comb out of which they had sucked the honey, licking sticky fingers and palms. Seven jars of honey lined the storechamber wall. It would come in handy, not only because it was food itself, but because any meat or fruit submerged in the raw honey would be preserved for longer even than smoking would preserve meat. When the smoking was ended, they would submerge even the smoked meat in honey, confident in a supply of food for the winter ahead. Already, the dwarves could see their breath in the cool mornings, and yellow leaves were falling from the birch trees.

“Can we mine again, now?” Hobblefoot asked in the morning. There was an edge of sarcasm in his tone, but Yorvig ignored it. It was unnatural, being rinlen and yet the youngest and least experienced, but they could all put up with the farce until they chose Warmcoat or Savvyarm, either of whom would stand a better chance at gaining the respect of Hobblefoot and Sledgefist, being unrelated and closer in age and experience.

But they’d sworn an oath, and for this winter at least Yorvig would hold them to it.

“Not yet,” he said. “We need more light.”

“We’ve got oil.”

“Enough for two weeks, maybe, but not enough for later.” He continued on before either Hobblefoot or Sledgefist could comment. “How many times have you had to stop working to make more candles? And how long do the fir candles last? Fifteen minutes if you cut them long? That’s seventy-two candles for a long shift.”

Fir or pine-resin candles were made by cutting off the branches of conifer trees close to the trunk and slicing out the resin-infused heartwood of the branch. The resin in the wood burned well, and a long slice of the resin wood could burn slowly by itself, casting off an aromatic, smokey light. They were lightweight and easy, but a single conifer might only produce a few hundred decent candles-worth of resin-wood in the branches. There was more resin in the heartwood of the trunk, especially once it had lain and dried, but it was painstaking to get to it.

“We have oil,” Hobblefoot said again.

“And how long will you have it once the river freezes and you have to dig through ice and sit there for hours hoping for a fish?”

Since Yorvig had constructed the weir, their supply of fish oil had grown. Thankfully they had a small cast-iron cauldron, which was one of the most important supplies they'd brought to the claim. Whenever they cooked a fish, they also double-boiled all it’s offal and organs and strained the oil into wooden vessels. This was a far better oil for light than animal fat. Reeds or thick grasses from near the stream and river were stripped for the inner pith to use as wicks in stone carved oil lamps. The wicks lasted much longer this way, but with winter coming, they needed to put up more light sources than that in case the river froze and fishing became more difficult. They could use animal fats to supplement the oil, and even spare the honeycomb for wax, but it would be wise to have a supply of fir candles. The winter months were not short, and they would need the light.

“Wait, is the river going to freeze?” Shineboot asked. He, like Yorvig, had rarely seen ice. Sometimes in the dead of winter any water left in a pail in the sky-facing canyons of Deep Cut may have a film of ice atop it, but not any underground.

“We are farther and higher here,” Yorvig said. “We know it snows here." Those in Deep Cut knew this from the word of traders from claims in the western Red Ridges.

“So, it might happen,” Hobblefoot said with more than enough edge in his voice.

“Easy. He’s rinlen for now, like it or not,” Sledgefist grumbled, a protest more to gibe at Hobblefoot than to support Yorvig.

“Each time we have to stop and go prepare lights, we waste time and energy,” Yorvig said. “Today, we prepare enough light to last the winter.”

It was nearly impossible to transport a sample of the luminescent fungi that lit the halls and holds of Deep Cut with the varied hues that tinged stone with color and glinted in gem and jewel, and it took long to cultivate it. They had tried to propagate a carried specimen in the storeroom, but it would take a long time to even know if it survived. Even in Deep Cut, miner’s eye did not grow well where the dust and disturbance of new mining choked it out.

For the next two days, they felled fir and pine and cedar, limbed them, and sliced the resin-wood into long slivers. Each long sliver would provide light in the dark winter, a single flickering flame smelling of pine tar to illuminate ore and fissure and fault in the mine as snow fell on the surface above. In the storeroom, the stack of resin candles grew, rising nearly to the ceiling along one wall. And as the days went on, Yorvig put more and more weight onto his leg, walking back at regular intervals to tend the smoker fires. A feeling of pins and needles often tormented his foot—especially at night—but it was lessening.

“I go to check the weir,” Shineboot said as evening arrived, carrying the long net down the now well-trodden path towards the weir. Yorvig nodded at him where he sat with hammer and chisel, splitting lengths of resin-wood into small slivers. Sledgefist and Hobblefoot were lost to sight in the trees, but he could hear the fall of their axes. Limbed trunks lay about the edges of the tailings pond, and the dell seemed a lighter place without their shade.

The rest of the trees could be used for making charcoal the next spring. The dwarves would need little firewood; they were not overly susceptible to heat or cold so long as they had shelter from rain and wind. Temperatures varied little beneath the stone.

After a time, Yorvig heard thudding footfalls behind him. He turned and saw Shineboot running through the trees, his eyes wide and his mouth open.

“Ürsi!” he said in winded terror when he saw Yorvig. Yorvig looked back down the trail, expecting to see the beasts on Shineboot’s heels. The dwarf reached him and bent over, puffing.

“They’re at the river, but they smell us. Us or the smoke. They’re looking this way. I think one started to come up the creek!”

“Did they see you?”

“I don’t think so. I ducked when I heard them by the weir.”

“How many?”

“I counted five. Hunters I think. They had a beast on a pole.”

“Sledgefist and Hobblefoot. Get them now. Have them cut three sapling poles. Fast!”

Shineboot ran into the woods, and Yorvig rose, bearing most of his weight on his good leg, ignoring his crutch. He stared south into the trees. It was too late to put out the fires. Of course they could smell the smoke, maybe the meat, too. He should have put the meat into the honey as soon as they’d gotten it into the jars. That might have been enough to survive the winter, unless the ürsi could smell the dwarves themselves. The ürsi could probably hear the echo of the axes. The dell was like an amphitheater pointing toward the river. He should have known better.

He heard Sledgefist’s voice in the trees, exclaiming something that he couldn’t make out. A moment later, his brother crashed through the dried ferns and discarded branches at the edge of the pond.

“Chargrim, get inside!” he said far too loudly.

“Do you have the saplings?” Yorvig asked.

“Get inside!”

“Get the saplings, now!” Yorvig snapped, drawing his dagger from behind his back. They didn’t have time for this. “Oath!” he said. That word was enough to at least get Sledgefist into action. Yorvig didn’t know how much time they had. He set to work with his dagger. The ürsi may come cautiously and slow, or rush like ravenous beasts after trapped prey.

Shineboot and Hobblefoot brought the saplings, Sledgefist tailing behind red in the face.

“Limb them,” Yorvig said, grabbing one of the three poles and slicing away with his dagger. “Then sharpen the ends.” They would have no time for affixing blades or even fire-hardening. This would have to be quick and ugly. The saplings were soft, but they had them pointed in moments, each spear about five feet long. Though the ürsi that Yorvig had encountered had not worn armor, some of their scraps of hide might resist a thrust from an unhardened stake. But the dwarves had strong arms.

“Now inside!” Sledgefist said. “We can hold them.”

“Not all of us,” Yorvig said.

“What? This is no game, Char!"

“If your oaths mean anything, then you will listen now and not argue.”