Chapter 3: The Cliff

Yorvig remembered sitting with the Hardfell brothers in a miner’s stewhall in Deep Cut.

“We’re not going,” the eldest, Greal Hardfell, said. Greal was an adherent to that scandalous sect of young dwarves who insisted on using their hidden names in public, causing outrage among the older dwarves of Deep Cut. Despite that, he was a competent miner and a skilled gem-cutter what’s more. The sect referred to themselves as the Named of Strength, believing in the power of their true names to guide them in life, but for some reason only if they claimed their names by being open about them.

It was strange to Yorvig, but they had grown up together in the same old Deep Cut drift with Sledgefist and Hobblefoot and the rest, and they had not forsworn their friendship when the two Hardfell brothers took to the new fad.

“What do you mean?” Yorvig asked. They were supposed to leave in just three weeks.

“Yet, at least,” Khlif, the younger brother said.

“If we delay, we risk the onset of winter. We don’t know how far up the river they staked the claim.”

“Look,” Greal said, wiping his mouth after the drink he’d just taken from his pewter mug. “We may still come. But not until we see some shine.”

“But you promised Sledgefist!”

“No,” Greal said. “I told him that if the enterprise was producing quality gems, I’d come and cut on site, for a share. I never said I’d come before then.”

“That’s not how he said it to me,” Yorvig answered.

“I know, but I did not feel like arguing with him. You know how he can be when he gets an idea.”

Yorvig stared at Greal. The dark-featured dwarf was hardly one to complain about a stubborn idea, adherent as he was to the Named of Strength.

“They will have struck. Between them, they’ll have struck. There’s ore and gems in the Red Ridges.”

The Hardfell brothers glanced at each other, sharing a wordless thought.

“There is no rinlen,” Khlif said. It was the dwarvish word for “captain.”

Yorvig made a confused face, scrunching his forehead.

“They have both Sledgefist and Hobblefoot.”

“Two rinlen are not better than one,” Greal said.

“You know the saying,” Khlif added.

Yorvig did know the saying: Many miners, but one captain.

“Let them bring us a sample this summer, or in the fall. We can go together next spring, then.”

“But they won’t, they’ll wait for you this year.”

Greal shrugged.

“Next then.”

Yorvig leaned back, his drink forgotten. That meant it could be two years before they departed for the mine. He’d have to hire himself out to mine coal or salt until then, but who would take a journeyman miner on a two year oath? Five was considered short.

“I’m going,” he said.

“Don’t be daft,” Khlif answered.

And there he was, lost in thought staring at a tailings pond full of rotting pines. They hadn’t struck yet. If Greal had come, he’d have found no cutting to do. Sledgefist and Hobblefoot had been so eager, so sure they could find a good seam near the surface. They’d have a pile waiting for Greal by spring, they’d said. Greal’s skepticism was not unfounded, but Yorvig had eaten up the older dwarves’ assurance. He sighed and headed into the adit for the night. He hadn’t even begun to dig a sleeping alcove.

There were so many things to do. They needed to be able to cut chimneys and vents, which meant they needed drill bits—long sharpened rods of iron with the steeled bit heads used to punch through the rock with sledgehammers. But to make bits and drills they needed to smelt ore in a bloomery, then forge it, then dig out new passageways and chambers to relocate their forge and smeltery inside.

And all that was far too much work for a claim that had not yet struck.

The next morning, Yorvig stepped out of the storeroom where he’d been sleeping on the stone and met Hobblefoot in the adit.

“Good waking,” the dwarf said. Hobblefoot had what they called “early streaks,” which meant that lines of dirty gray had begun to grow through his beard at a young age. He was only 56 or 57 years old. This week, Hobblefoot was responsible for foraging.

“Good waking,” Yorvig answered. He noticed Hobblefoot was carrying a fishing net on a long pole. No one had said anything to him directly about the weir, but when Yorvig and Hobblefoot stepped out of the adit, the older dwarf headed to the southwest, following a shortcut to the weir Yorvig had beaten during his labors there.

Yorvig didn’t much mind that no one had said anything about the weir. The dwarves had a saying, and it translated roughly to: “Best is the praise of another in absence.” It wasn’t the way of dwarves to speak praise directly, but no doubt the others had spoken of it together, if they thought of Yorvig’s labors as worthy. “Let another’s lips praise you,” was another saying his father had often repeated. In other words, don’t talk about your own work. As happy as he was with the improvement, it would in no way supply all their needs. Five working dwarves required a huge amount of food, and hunting and trapping and gathering from the surrounding forest would always be a constant necessity, growing harder the more they depleted the local wildlife. If they did strike there and decided to stay, they would have to cultivate—another huge labor.

Yorvig had his tools and rope with him, harnessed to his otherwise empty pack. Since the others hadn’t yet approached him about assigning tasks, he wanted to take advantage of the day and inspect the dell, himself. Sledgefist and Hobblefoot were certain that this was an ideal location. He wanted to be certain too before he poured out his sweat in delving. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them. . . Yorvig stopped himself from finishing that thought. He didn’t want to think of the implications. He thought of them anyway.

They’d never try to trick him, he knew. But they might trick themselves.

The dell was formed around a vernal spring that flowed with meltwater or rainfall down the side of the mountain. It joined the artesian well there in the basin of the dell and flowed toward the river. At this time of the summer, the exposed cobbles and rock of the vernal stream were dry. The dell grew narrower further up the ridge until it disappeared into the wooded face of the mountain. At its widest point near the river, the dell was a little shy of five hundred yards across. The mine adit was located against the curve of the dell’s northern edge, where exposed sandstone was too steep even for gnarled pine to grasp. There was a seam there, two folds of rock joining with a line of mineralizations at the confluence. Without doubt, it was the same seam that the others were mining below.

There was a clatter from behind as Warmcoat shook the top sluice, moving the sediment from beneath the larger bits of stone he had just dumped there. The flowing water would carry the lighter materials down into the next sluice, and the next, stratifying it. The heavier minerals like gold would fall to the bottom, caught in the slats in the wood. It was the same concept as panning for gold flakes and dust, just bigger, using the flowing water for the bulk of the labor. Having an active true spring was a boon to the claim, but it didn’t matter if there wasn’t anything to strike but quartz and iron alone.

The tailings pond had backed up right to the edge of the rock face north of the adit, so Yorvig had to go all the way around, then begin climbing higher up the dell. He scrambled through the pine trees that clung more to the rock than the thin layer of loam on the slope. He pulled himself up with his hands by branches and exposed stone as much as walked. At a few points, he pulled his pick out and used it to help drag himself upward. The dell grew steep quickly. A few times, he stopped to dislodge some of the surface scree and loam to get a look at the true rock below. It was still mostly sandstone, but there were intrusions here and there, mostly quartz but he also saw an igneous shaft running at an angle through the slope, nearly black. Such were the remains of the great cataclysm that had lifted and bent these hills. A few hundred yards up the slope, something on the western wall of the dell caught his eye, a dark streak in the rock.

When he managed to shuffle over to investigate, he saw that the rock wasn’t truly discolored. In fact, it was lighter than the surrounding stone. It was just an inward vertical fold, looking darker to the eye by the shadow of it. He tore away some of the moss with the end of his pick. A glint of quartz caught his eye. More quartz. Quartz of itself was not too exciting, but some veins of quartz contained gold, silver, copper. . . And they already knew from the trace deposits in the stream that there was gold somewhere along this ridge.

He used hammer and round-chisel to break off a chunk of the quartz that he could fit comfortably in his palm. He picked it up and examined it closer. There were no telltale inclusions, though he saw sand imperfections, which is about what he’d expect from quartz picked from a sandstone wall. His eyes drifted upward along the seam in the cliff, and about fifty feet above, he noticed something else. From a distance, the tops of the conifers had blocked the view, but here he could see a second seam, a horizontal one, crossing the vertical seam. Where the horizontal seam ran, the stone just beneath it jutted out, making a narrow shelf. This was the advantage of exposed rock faces like the western wall of the dell—it showed veins and seams and all the frozen movement of the rock. But greater things could always lurk unseen beneath a thin layer of loam or moss.

Yorvig headed further up the dell, hoping to find the seam where the slope rose to meet it. He had to make his way another thirty yards before he found where it met the slope. He wanted to reach the junction of the two seams; who knew what confluence of minerals and ancient energy had joined there during the cataclysm? While Yorvig’s folk knew that aeons ago a great cataclysm had rent the world, they did not know much more except that it must have been hot and powerful beyond imagining.

Reaching the joint was not possible. The stone beneath the horizontal seam jutted out a few inches, but not enough to walk upon. Above the joint, the rockface continued up, broken only by occasional, crumbling shelves, then sloping up as a steep pine-covered arm of the ridge above. Yorvig sighed.

It took him another hour before he managed to position himself on that tree-covered slope over the location of the joint. He’d secured the end of his rope on the sturdiest pine available, with the other hitched in a familiar miner’s harness of square knots and loops that secured him from shoulders to hips. He walked backward to the edge and looked down. The pine he’d chosen was a couple yards to the side of the joint. Though he couldn’t see the joint itself, he had stripped branches from a tree in front of it and peeled away the bark, leaving a white streak of inner tree-flesh to gauge the location at a distance. Stepping back, he released the rope through his hands and slowly let himself begin the walk down the near-vertical rockface. He was able to pause and rest on a few of the shelves between himself and the joint, but it took less than ten minutes to lower himself parallel to the joint itself, and then walk sideways across the rockface. He planted the toes of his hobnailed boots on the narrow ledge, then secured the rest of the rope in a few neat coils around himself. There wasn’t much left over. He could have alerted the others and had someone else spot for him, but he didn’t think they would have stopped from their labor. Sledgefist would try to discourage it, or outright forbid it, saying they’d already surveyed the dell. Yet dwarves in the mines were used to such dangers, and if he died, at least he wouldn’t have to listen to the others berate him for his adventure. He didn’t come out to the wilderness without intending to risk.

There was less moss on the rock this high up, but the tops of some of the pines still rose above him. A crow cawed angrily. He took a moment to look around. He could see almost the whole dell, here looking less like a great dimple in the ridge than two great protective arms of stone reaching down toward the river. A breeze blew against his face, and he took a deep breath, smelling the strong scents of loam and sandstone and moisture.

The seam glinted with hints of quartz, and he steadied himself against the rope and slid his hammer and a round-chisel out from a satchel at his side. After considering, he placed his chisel and struck, releasing the sharp tang of quartz-smell as the old weathered face flaked to reveal the brighter stone beneath. It wasn’t long before he dislodged a chunk of stone from the seam. It was a conglomerate sample, varied faces of quartz against the sandstone matrix, but there were other mineralizations there. He held the sample up to the light. Like a dusting across the quartz, speckles of color glinted there. He tasted it, smelled it, and picked at it with a fingernail. Some of it was pyrite, he could tell. But maybe not all of it. And pyrite was an indicator mineral itself. No matter where he’d seen such a sample, he’d want to mine the spot further.

Had the others not come to this place to test during their survey of the dell? There was no sign of previous work. The spring flowed out at their chosen adit, sure, so it made sense to dig there. . . but he hadn’t seen anything in the seam they’d dug quite as promising as this. It was an easier place to dig, the bottom of the dell at the base of the cliff—certainly easier than here, fifty feet above a steep slope. Sure, make a base camp at the water. . .

It would also take a lot of effort just to start the mining process here. Someone eager to begin may not be so eager to try this site. An access would have to be created before any serious work could be done.

Yorvig worked late into the night. He wanted to avoid running into the others, though anyone could have heard the strikes of chisel and pick anywhere in the dell if they’d stepped out. He didn’t know how long the others’ tolerance of him pursuing his own designs would last. Sleep came almost instantly when he did lie down in the storeroom, and left just as fast. When his eyes opened, he was already thinking about the work. He’d slept in his clothes and he rose fast, grabbing his tools and stepping out into the dim adit drift.