Dreamwalker's Bride - Chapter 203

Chapter 203: The Miner
The copper mines were backbreaking labor. Every moment breathing in this damp, humid hell, deep in the earth, was torture.

Ford cursed his miserable existence. He probably would have grown to a better height had he not been living underground, hunched in the darkness, for the last eleven years of his life.

And they told him he was lucky! The mine owner had taken pity on him, an eight year old orphan. His mother dead of disease after being impregnated by some foreigner, his uncle who’d been raising him crushed in a mine collapse. He was given his uncle’s job so that he had a way to feed himself.

Otherwise, he would have been shipped off to the orphanage. And Foundrel orphanages were far worse than the mines.

There was plenty of work to be had back then. The war with Foundrel’s neighboring nation across the river had taken many lives. His uncle could just have easily been killed in battle as in the depths of the earth.

Ford resented all of it.

Deeply, in his bones, he hated every moment of his life. His wages were barely enough to pay for the food and lodging the mine charged him for. He had so little saved up that it would be spent if he took even a day off for illness.

The mines had lifelong employees simply because there was no way to earn enough to be free.

The one exception was a very odd man. The foreman.

Between each shift, the workers would clear out. The foreman would go down and check the work done before the next men were allowed down. Supposedly, he was checking for evidence of impending cave-ins for safety, but it did seem a waste of time to have only one man down there instead of more.

Of course, Martin liked his alone time, he said. He sneered and yelled and was generally a cranky old man.

His yelling wasn’t quite as effective as one might have thought; his foreign accent drove an even deeper wedge between the foreman and the rest of the workers.

One rumor was that he’d fought on the other side during the war. That was an unforgivable transgression to anyone who’d served in the army. Since Ford was too young to have been involved, he didn’t care nearly as much.

He mainly wanted to learn how Martin made so much money so that he could do the same. Ford was sick of living in the dust. In the dirt and mess of the copper, with the risks of cave collapses and toxic gasses and all manner of other dangers.

It was a life fit for slaves, not free men.

The concept plagued him. He felt a slave. He was told when to wake and when to sleep, when to work, and never to rest. He was never given enough money to allow him to leave, and so wasn’t he trapped here against his will? Was that any different than slavery?

In theory, he could walk away. Simply refuse to go down into the mine, leave his ramshackle room in the broken down bunkhouse he shared with a dozen other miners. The single ones, of course; married men were provided tiny, two-room homes of their own at a larger expense.

Marriages were rare; few women were desperate enough to marry a miner and live in borderline starvation.

He certainly wouldn’t see fit to condemn a woman to the fate his mother suffered, though she’d never married. She was a miserable creature who lived every day in depression and exhaustion, trying to earn extra coins by doing laundry for others.

Ford sometimes hated his mother for having him. For falling for the charms of some man from abroad. Life didn’t seem worth living most days, and yet spite kept the young man going. Spite got him out of bed in the morning when others gave up. As appealing as it would be to lay there and die, Ford viewed it as an abominable sort of weakness.

He wouldn’t give up. Someday he would rise above it and find a way to be wealthy. Live an extravagant life to make up for this hell of a childhood he’d endured.

Knowing the mines better than most, and certainly better than anyone else his age, Ford closed his eyes for a moment. He pictured the timbers as they had been when he’d first come down for his shift, many hours before.

Opening them again and turning his head, on which a hat holding a stubby candle perched, he examined them. He was in some of the the deepest parts of the mine today.

The cost of timber was rising, and so the mine owner had been spacing them out further. Digging without the same amount of support that was normally due.

Ford could see the subtle bowing. The nearest beam had a narrow crack that was nearly invisible in the dim light, as it ran along the grain of the wood.

“RUN!” Ford bellowed, coughing out the dust that had accumulated in his lungs over the course of his shift.

He made a beeline for the central shaft, and those miners who knew him followed. The floor was slick with water that was normally pumped or drawn manually from the depths to make the mine survivable.

His call had echoed, and others had begun to realize what he had seen first. An ominous creaking and an initial echoing CRACK only barely preceded a rumble which shook the earth.

Men raced up the ladder, faster than squirrels as they scrambled towards the far-above sky. The rumbling continued as Ford battled for his place on the path to fresh air. He had warned the others, didn’t that merit him some priority?

But no, he was shoved aside, and fell into a puddle as the rumble grew louder, closer. The collapse which had begun in the furthest corner of the tunnels was drawing ever nearer.

“LET ME UP!” He screamed in desperation. He was still young. Younger than most. Surely the old men could perish more peacefully, having used up their years.

Ford had more to do. Much more.

And so, tempting as it was to stay laying in the cold water glaring up at the world until he perished and let his miserable life end, he rolled up to his feet and tried again to take his place amongst the survivors.

Just before the roof caved in.