Chapter 16: Mud, Then Stone
The mud came up on the third bucket after sunrise, dark and shining in a light that had shown nothing but dust for seventy-one days.
Joseph Bane hauled the rope and stopped, his boots slipping at the shaft's mouth. "Look," he said, and could not say more.
Below, waist-deep in the cut they had driven toward the burned grove, Silas Hart pressed his palm into the wall and lifted it, wet to the wrist. The earth was no longer merely cool. It wept.
"Slow now," he called up. "Bucket it careful."
They passed the bucket hand to hand in silence, as folk will when they fear a sound might frighten a blessing away. Saya took it last, set it on a flat stone, and knelt. The mud was black as river bottom. When she worked her fingers into it, water rose, brown and slow, and filled the print of her thumb.
Tomi crept close with his wooden cup. "Is it drinking water, Aunt?" he whispered.
"Not yet, little one," Saya said. "It is water remembering its way. We must give it a road."
They dug, though the sun hammered the flats white. The shaft deepened by hands, not haste. Silas would let no man swing a pick without first feeling the wall, for water hid behind stone, and stone resented rudeness. Saya ordered the shifts as she ordered the rations, fairly, sending the strongest down for the shortest spells because the air below grew close. Children carried away baskets of spoil. Chief Taklish sorted rock at the edge with the gravity of a man sorting arguments.
By noon the mud was a slick seam across the cut, and a smell rose none had breathed in weeks — iron, wet clay, and something living far below.
Then the shovel rang.
It was a clean, hollow toll, as iron strikes a church bell buried in the ground. Joseph, who had taken the turn below against Saya's counsel, froze.
"Stone," he called, and disappointment sharpened the word.
Silas went down with a lantern, though it was broad day above. He knelt in the mud and brushed the face clean with his sleeve until the truth showed: a slab of basalt, black and close-grained, set across the passage like a door, wider than the shaft, its edges lost in earth. Below its rim a cold thread no thicker than yarn slipped out, shone, and vanished into the soil.
"Basalt," Silas said. "Hard as sin and twice as stubborn. This is the seam my father marked. We are on his line — I would stake what little I own on it."
Joseph's face was mud-streaked and reckless with hope. "Then we break it today. Lemuel the trader left dynamite at the storehouse last winter. One charge in that lower crack, and by supper the water is ours."
"No." Silas did not raise his voice, which made the word heavier.
"You would let us thirst with water close enough to wet your hand?" Joseph demanded.
Saya had come down behind them, silent as falling ash, lantern lifted so their shadows stood huge upon the stone.
"Answer him plainly, Silas Hart," she said. "Not as a riddle. Plainly."
Silas set his forehead against the cold slab, as a man might listen at a door where his kin lay sleeping.
"Plainly, then. This stone is not rubble. It is a roof. Behind it water is held under pressure, in a hollow we cannot measure. Blast it, and the roof falls and buries the spring under tons of rock. Or the water bursts sideways into sand, and is lost before a cup can follow it. My father wrote of men who blasted a spring in the Dragoons. They heard it scream once, then dug in dry gravel the rest of their lives."
Joseph looked at the bright thread escaping below the slab. "So we pick at a mountain with spoons."
"We chisel," Silas said. "We listen. We learn where it is thin, where it wants to be persuaded. Stone tells, if a man puts his ear to it instead of his temper."
He tapped with his hammer, high, low, and at the centre. High, the sound was flat and dead. Low, deader still. At the centre, faint and far, the stone answered with a hollow note — and after it, a sound that was not stone at all.
A slow, heavy shifting. A sigh under pressure. Water, a great body of it, turning in its dark sleep behind the wall.
Tomi's voice came down from above, small and wondering. "Grandfather, the ground is singing."
Chief Taklish, who had drawn near unmarked, answered so all below might hear. "Then no fire shall touch it. What our fathers shut with patience, we will open with patience. Any man who brings powder near this place answers to me."
Joseph was silent, then laid his palm against the basalt and felt deep cold come through the stone.
"With spoons, then," he said at last. "But I take the first turn with the chisel."
Chapter 17: The Cave-In