第12章 The Cloth at Night

The cloth stall stood at the north end of Foldmarket and stayed open until the Hourhouse shut the north gate. The narrow-gauge line ran behind the stalls all night, and the coal came down it in four-ton wagons from the flats, and the wagons went up on a rope from the pit head to the yard behind the Hourhouse, and the whole thing was worked by nine men and the nine men were prentices and journeymen of the coal company and the leadmen were paid by the hour and not by the week. Ryam had been one of the nine for five weeks, because the Hourhouse had told the south ward that the number was short. The yard worked on lamps and a bell. Down came the empty, up went the loaded, and the loaded ones were heavy enough that a good rope gang got eight an hour out of the yard and a bad one got five, and the difference between eight and five over a night was a man and a half. He was on the loaded, at the bottom of the shaft, with a wedge on the rope and his shoulder under the slack while the wagon swung. "DON'T." The voice came from above. He had a rope-walker's warning and the warning came out of the dark under the shaft, and he took his shoulder out of the slack and stepped back and the empty came down on the other rail, three feet to his left, and went past him in the dark like a thing with its eyes shut. The second empty was coming down on the loaded line. It was a hundred yards behind the first and coming fast, and Ryam was standing in a shaft bottom that was ten feet wide with a loaded wagon in it and a bell that had not rung. "Loose!" he shouted. "Loose at the shaft!" He did not have the Voice. He had three-and-a-half of the five and the worst of it was his Reach, and everything the man above him had to do to stop what was happening happened in a country he had never been able to reach into. He got it by weight. He put his back against the ore bin at the shaft mouth and his feet against the wagon and he took the whole weight of the loaded wagon on his body and turned it four inches, four inches on to the rail, and the gate on the other side of the yard went in on its own, half open, and the empty came down the line it was on. There is no more in a Hold than there is in a man. He had four inches and four inches was the whole of the difference between the yard being a place where four men worked and a place where somebody's brother was a hole in the ground. Then the gate, then the bell, then the little gate on the north line, and then nobody. He stood in the shaft bottom with the ore bin cold against his back and the rope creaking and four inches of rail in front of him where there had not been any, and he put his hands on his knees. The yard went still above him and stayed still for a minute, and then the little gate on the north line clanged shut by itself on the other end of the track, and then the bell rang, and then there was nobody. The empty had gone the whole way down on the line that it had been on. Four inches and a hundred yards and nobody had touched it. Two of the nine came down the ladder on the north side of the shaft because they wanted to see it and could not have looked away from where they were standing. "Four inches," said the youngest, who was fifteen and had the coal company's rate of seven an hour and a mother in the Grey Stile. "I saw the beam swing. It swung four inches. How did you see it?" "I did not see it. I felt it." "Can you teach me to feel it?" "No." Ryam said the true thing before he could put the sensible thing in front of it. "I have been lifting slate for three months and I have been lifting coal for five weeks and the bar in the testing cellar was nine feet and it weighed about what I weigh, and I have never once put my body between a thing that weighs what I weigh and the place it is going, because I did not know I could, and if I had not known I could the yard would have had four men in it and one of them would be a hole in the ground." The two of them looked at the rail and then at him. "Nobody tells you," said the younger one. "Nobody does." "So you just find out. In a place where you are standing in the wrong yard and there is no one to tell you." "Yes," Ryam said. "That is the arrangement." "Four inches," the youngest repeated. "I could not move four inches of anything. My father could not have moved four inches of anything." "Your father's band was two hundred and nine," said the older one, who was not a father at all, and then he shut up because he had said the number out loud in a yard where the count was still open. After a while a lamp came down the shaft on a chain. It was Halric Verrick, holding the lamp himself, and he stood on the wagon step and looked down at Ryam and then at the gap. "How much did you have to move?" he said. "Enough." "That is not a number." "Four inches," Ryam said. "The gate on the far side was open half. If it had been shut the empty would have come down the loaded line and there would have been a hole in the yard and it would have been my hole, because I was standing in it." Verrick put the lamp on the wagon floor and got his weight onto his heels and looked at the gap for a long time. "Get out," he said. "Get out and go home and sleep and do not say the name of this yard to anybody, not tonight, not for a week. Tomorrow the yard will say the gate was open and that is all it will say, because if the gate was open the gate was open, and a gate does not open itself." "Then the boys will say the gate was open and they'll be saying a lie into the faces of the men who were standing under it." "The boys will say the gate was open," Verrick said, "and the boys will be right, because the gate was open, and because the alternative is a hung man, and I would have to hang one. Do you understand me? I have to have one. It is not a moral question with me. I have to have one." He picked the lamp up. "I am going to be very good to you," he said. "I am going to be very good to you because you are nineteen and you are going to be dangerous in about four years, and if I am good to you now it will be cheap." He went up the shaft on the rope and Ryam stood in the bottom of it in the dark and heard the wagon move away overhead, and he could not have moved yet if he had wanted to, which was the answer to the question Verrick had come down there to ask. ---