CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
In which Súldil uncovers corruption and more corruption.
From the neighboring countryside, the upland is deceptive.
The limestone ridge where the mithril mines at Daeroth lie looks no more hostile than any of the low hills characteristic of Eriador. Only when you approach this ridge directly from the south or west do stark crags suddenly rise in your face, quite unlike the gentle swell of the Downs elsewhere. On the southern side are the gorges—ancient caves and unpredictable waters which plunge underground or rise in a ferocious spate during sudden rain. On the kinder northern edge, small hamlets cling to the steep slopes, joined by precarious tracks that jerk up and over the contours among patches of pastureland.
From the east, the terrain hardly seems to rise at all. The route to the mine is unmarked; anyone with official business comes provided with a guide. For casual visitors, the settlement is deliberately difficult to find.
Riding in from the frontier side, woodland and farmland give way imperceptibly. Almost without warning, you lose sight of the countryside below, and the road crosses a cold, featureless plateau. It leads only to the mines; there is nothing else there. Traveling its bare length is a lonely experience. Throughout this region, there is a tendency to grayness, as if the wide river Gwathló makes its surging presence felt, even inland. This high-flung narrow road strikes purposefully across the limestone outcrop for ten miles, and with every mile the emptiness of the landscape and the tugging of the wind attack the spirit with melancholy. Even in high summer, the long upland is stormed by desolate winds, and even then there is no blaze of sunshine, only remote clouds endlessly shadowing the deserted scene.
#
I worked in the Daeroth Mine for three months. After the Giants' Rebellion, it was the worst time of my life.
I maneuvered my way through all the sections of the mine. From the open seams and pits where ore was clawed physically from the ground, back indoors to the clay stacks for the first smelt—the hottest work in the world—then promotion to the cupellation hearths, were bellowsmen strained to blast the mithril, separating it at white heat from the refined lumps. There I worked the bellows first, and afterwards as a picker, gathering the mithril from the cooled earth at the day's end. For a mine slave, picking was the prize job. With luck and scalded fingers, you could scratch up a drip or two for yourself. That put a light back in your brain: escape!
Escape, back to the southlands where the civilized laws of Elessar and his forebears still held sway, where Dwarvish smiths had not yielded their rightful place in the depths of the earth to mercenary contractors drunk on power over desperate men. Escape to a life that was still hard but worth living. Escape!
Every day there was a body search, but we found our own foul ways around that.
Occasionally now, I wake, bolt upright in my bed, in a drowning sweat. My wife says I never make a sound. A slave learns: lock in every thought.
It would be easy to say it was only Tinweriel's death that held me on my track. Easy but foolish. I never even considered her. To recall such brightness in that murderous hole would bring increased agony. What forced me on as I inched through my search was sheer self-discipline.
Anyway, you forget.
There is no time for leisured recollection in a mine worker's day. We enjoyed no hope for the future, no memory of the past.
We woke at dawn—that is, while it was still dark. We snarled blearily over bowls of gruel ladled out by a filthy woman who never seemed to sleep. We marched in silence through the shuttered settlement while our white breath wreathed around us like our own ghosts. One or two lucky ones pulled caps down over their filthy heads. I never had a cap; I never have any luck. In that cold hour when the light seems half-excited and half-ominous, when the dew soaks your feet and every sound carries through the still air for miles, we stumbled to the current workings. We began. We dug all day, with one break during which we sat empty-eyed, each withdrawn into his own dead soul. When it was too dark to see, we stood head down like exhausted animals to be searched for stolen ore. We marched back. We were fed, we dropped into sleep. We awoke in the dark the next day. We did it all over again.
I say "we." These were criminals, sentenced to hard labor by a cruel magistrate. Some had indentured themselves in order to provide for starving families. Others were men made desperate by the famine left in the wake of the Giants' Rebellion. From the first, there was no need for me to act. The life we led made me one of them. I believed with my entire being that I was a runaway thrall named Chirpy. I was bruised, muscles torn, hair matted, fingers cracked, cut, blistered, blackened, begrimed with my own and others' filth. I itched. I itched in parts of my body where it was a challenge making fingers reach to scratch. I rarely spoke. If I spoke, I swore. My headful of dreams had been drained off like an abscess by the punishment of my present life. A poem would have filled me with staring scorn, like the senseless lilt of a foreign tongue.
I learned to swear in seven languages; I was proud of that.
#
It was while I was a picker that I stumbled into glimmerings of organized theft. In fact, once I started to identify the signs, I soon found corruption ran so rife throughout the system that it was difficult to distinguish the petty fiddles every individual put his hand to from the major fraud that could only have been set up by the management itself. Everyone knew about it. No one talked because at every stage, each man involved took his small cut. Once he had, he then stood guilty of a capital offense. (There were two punishments: execution, or slavery in the mines. Anyone who had lived among the thralls and seen our conditions knew that execution was the preferable fate.)
At the end of December, as a Midwinter treat, Iorthon turned up looking prosperous with a hide whip pushed through a huge brown belt, to see if I had discovered enough to let me be pulled out. When he saw my dull-eyed state, his honest face grew grim.
Iorthon extracted me from the furnace, then drove me some distance down the track, cracking at me with his whip for show. We crouched out of doors in a bank of wet bracken where we were unlikely to be overheard.
"Súldil! It looks as if you need to get out quick."
"Can't go. Not yet."
By this time, I had slid into a sullen mood. I no longer believed in release from my labors. I felt my life forever would be scrambling around the cupellation hearths in nothing but a loincloth, with my shaved hair frizzling on my mucky head and my hands red raw. My only challenge was how many mithril scratchings I could steal for myself. My mental and physical strength were both so depleted I had almost lost interest in the reason I was there. Almost, but not quite.
"Súldil, are you cracked? Going on with this is suicide."
"That doesn't matter. If I pull out too early, I won't want to live with myself in any case. Iorthon, I have to finish it." He was starting to grumble, but I interrupted urgently. "I'm glad to see you, old friend. I need to smuggle out information in case I never get a chance to make a full report myself."
"Who's this for?" asked Iorthon.
"The king's chief minister of the treasury."
"Calaer Maglion?"
"You know him?"
"I know of him. They say he's all right for a bureaucrat hand-picked by the king. Look, laddie, there's not much time. It will look suspicious if I hang about. I'll find him, wherever he is. Just tell me what I have to say."
"He should be at Fornost." Calaer had promised to locate himself there, within reach if I managed to send messages. "Tell him this, Iorthon. There's flagrant corruption all through the mines. First, when the rough ingots leave the smelt for cupellation, they are counted out by a weasel who can't actually count. He scratches marks on a tally stick; sometimes he 'forgets' to make his nick. So what the contractor Dunsig declares to the government as his overall production is fraudulent from the start."
"Hah!" Iorthon let out this exclamation like a man who assumes he has heard almost everything, but who is not surprised to learn of some new dodge.
"Next," I continued, "every day, a few of the rough ingots are held back from the cupellation hearth. It's surprising how many, but I guess the number has crept up gradually over many years. This has the effect that the mithril yield per ingot appears less than it really ought to be. I gather the declining yield was explained to Minas Tirith as geological variations in the ore being mined. In case Elessar has anybody of intelligence looking at the figures, it's customary to slip in extra ingots some weeks and claim the Dwarf-trained minerologist has discovered a better seam."
"Delicate touch!"
"Oh yes, we're dealing with experts here. Will you be able to remember all this hogwash?"
"Have to try. Súldil, trust me; go on."
"Right. Now, regarding the ingots of pure mithril which are produced at the cupellation hearth. Some get lost—this is natural wastage." (Iorthon scoffed admiringly again.) "Then, when the lead bars that have had their mithril extracted go back for a second smelt—"
"What's that for?"
"To remove any other impurities before carting them out for sale—Aulë's hairy bollocks, Iorthon, don't let's knot ourselves up in technicalities, this is complex enough as it is! Calaer will know what the procedures are—"
Iorthon shushed me to calm me down. I was sweating with the effort of ensuring that I told him everything. Frowning, I pressed on: "After the second smelt, more ingots disappear. Apparently it's permitted to the overseers, as a privilege that keeps them sweet."
I fell silent. I was so unused to talking that presenting the details in an ordered form had tired me out. I could see Iorthon watching me closely, although after his first attempt he had made no more suggestions for restoring me to the arms of civilization prematurely. My choice of partner had been an intelligent one; I could see he understood the implications of what I had said.
"How do they get away with it, Súldil?"
"It's a completely enclosed operation; no outsiders are allowed."
"But they have the supporting settlement in Daeroth," he argued.
"Yes, where every baker, barber, and blacksmith comes under license, specifically to supply the mine!" I huffed. "They're all human, and on arrival they are all suborned."
"So what do those young dreamers at the fort think they're playing at?"
There was a small fortress overlooking the settlement, an outpost garrison of the royal army which nominally supervised the mines. I almost-smiled at Iorthon for his assumption that immediately after he himself retired, all military discipline went to the dogs.
"That's the lieutenant in you talking," I said. "No one can blame them, really. All operations are subject to inspection, of course."
"Both commanding officers and men should be regularly changed," squawked Iorthon.
"They are. And I've seen details coming down from the fort to peer around. I imagine that they're hampered by the fact that ingots all look identical; how can they tell whether what they are shown even contains mithril?"
"How can anyone tell?"
"Ah! The ingots that are stolen before cupellation are specially stamped: an outline of a dove, four times."
"Súldil, you've seen it?"
"I've seen them here—and tell the minister Calaer that I've seen one like that in Minas Tirith." (It was still lying in Loeneth's bleaching vat.)
Minas Tirith! I lived there once…
Our stolen conversation was about to be disturbed. My present life had taught me to smell trouble in the wind like a forest deer. I touched Iorthon on the arm to warn him, and our faces closed guardedly.
"Ho, Iorthon! Has that vermin admitted to anything?"
It was Oerndir.
This Oerndir was an obscene bully of a foreman, a real specialist in administering tortures to the mine slaves. A slab-shouldered sadist with a face marbled like a side of beef by his depraved life. He had picked on me mercilessly from the moment I arrived, but owned just enough working ooze in his chickpea brain to be wary, in case one day I went back to some previous life and talked.
Iorthon shrugged. "Nothing, tight as a virgin's apron string. Shall I leave him a bit longer? Is he of any use to you?"
"Never was," Oerndir lied.
It was quite untrue. They had worn me to a runt by now, but I had been well fed and sturdy when I first arrived at Daeroth Mine. I scowled at the ground while Iorthon and Oerndir pretended to negotiate.
"Take a thorough squint at him," Iorthon urged the foreman scornfully. I stood there looking pitiful. "Another few weeks of fog and frost up here, and he'll be pleading to go home. But I won't get much back for him in his present state—can't you fatten the bastard up a bit? I'd be willing to go halves on any reward…"
On this welcome hint, Oerndir promptly agreed that he would have me transferred to lighter work. When Iorthon left, with a curt nod to me as his only possible goodbye, I had ended my stint as a picker and was about to be made up to driver instead.
"Your lucky day, Chirpy!" Oerndir leered unpleasantly. "Let's go and celebrate."
Avoiding the privilege of being selected as Oerndir's unwilling partner in sexual dalliance had so far occupied a lot of my ingenuity.
I told the brute I had a headache, and was violently kicked for my pains.
#
Driving seemed quite straightforward. We used mules rather than oxen, because of the hills. A cartload comprised four ingots. They were a dead weight, and transporting them was fiendishly slow.
I was tucked in behind the leader at the front of the train. The excuse was that a new boy didn't know the way. Really, until you proved yourself trustworthy, it was a precaution against escape.
No one would ever be trustworthy who worked in the depths of the mines. Still, I had learned by then to look as much like an honest simpleton as anybody else.
There was one final check to stop anyone thieving the Reunited Kingdom's loot. Upon leaving the mines, we drove past the fort, where the soldiers counted every ingot and drew up a manifest. This manifest remained with the true-silver all the way to Minas Tirith. There was one good road out of the settlement, the road back to the frontier. Every cart capable of carrying bars had to pass along that road, for the crossways were too narrow and too rough to bear the weight. That meant every single ingot that ever left the mine was registered on an official manifest.
Our destination was the military riverport along the Mitheithel, just south of the Ettenmoors. Heavy barges drew up the River Hoarwell for the ingots, which then hauled southwards to the Last Bridge and then, under guard, overland across the mountains. Most of the true-silver went along the route through the Gap of Isengard, where the dense military presence from both Gondor and Rohan guaranteed its safe arrival in the White City.
I knew the riverport already.
Nothing had changed. The place where Erhorion and I once spent two drizzling years in a customs post. It was still there, still manned by teenage soldiers with the dye brilliant in their brand-new cloaks, striding about like lordlings, ignoring the sad thralls who brought in the kingdom's treasure. These lads all had pinched faces and runny noses, but unlike our private weasels in the mines, all of them could count. They checked off our manifest, counting the ingots carefully into their pound; when the barges arrived, they counted them back out. Valar help the contractor Dunsig if anything ever failed to match.
It always matched. But it would. After we first drove the wagons out along the road from Daeroth, we always stopped for the drivers to relieve themselves at an upland village just before the main road. We stopped at this village whether anybody needed to or not.
The manifest was altered while we were there.
#
Now the end lay in sight for me
After three trips, I worked my way far enough down the regular line of wagons to be able to see what happened once we left that bundle of wattle shacks where a corrupt clerk doctored the paperwork. As the main line turned east toward the mountains, the last couple of carts silently peeled away south, toward Weathertop. For the thieves to traverse the Weather Hills might appear foolish, but it was a straight route to the Greenway and, eventually, the North-South road. After the renewal of Tharbad by Éomer of Rohan, that route was no longer actively patrolled.
I was back on form now. I had a clear goal: winning sufficient trust to be put to driving one of those carts that slipped off south. I was desperate to discover where they went. If I found the offload point, I could pinpoint the ship or caravan that brought the stolen ingots to Minas Tirith. The owner of the transports must be involved in the conspiracy.
I was old enough to recognize the risk that my nerves might fail. After three months of hard labor and cruelty on the worst diet in Eriador, I was in poor physical and mental shape. Still, a new challenge works wonders. My concentration revived; I kept my nerve under grim control.
What I overlooked was the Daervenian luck.