The mines

“Sneaking into this mine,” Runt thought, as he dragged the bucket up the slope, “was the worst decision I ever made.”

His shoulders screamed with fatigue. His legs felt like jelly. His head ached. His throat and eyes burned from the sulphurous orange fog. Worse, though, was how the fog and fire seeped inside his brain. Even in the quiet times, when the joeys rested in the darkness of an abandoned tunnel, with his eyes shut and ears blocked, still Runt could see and hear the lake of fire. It appeared in his mind as he tried to sleep, a circular burning wheel, roaring and hissing and seething and scorching. If he opened his eyes he saw the lake as a lingering afterimage in the dark, like staring at the sun. Runt suspected he was slowly going insane.

It was impossible to tell how long he had been down here for. It felt like months. Runt looked across at Brain, also puffing and panting as the joey struggled to drag its own bucket up the slope.

“Without Brain, I’d have been dead in the first five minutes.” Runt thought bitterly. The longer this torture continued, the more he wished for it.

“Runt needs to come with me,” Brain had said to Scab after that first lunch together, “this weird born Runt wasn’t made right, if you know what I mean. Soft in the head. The poor joey is just as likely to wander into the Sun Lake if nobody’s watching. I’ll look after them.”

Scab allowed it and Runt followed Brain everywhere after that. Joeys, it turned out, did a lot of jobs around the mine that the adult gorgons were too big to manage, or too busy to bother with. For example, the bucket Runt dragged up the hill needed to be swapped for an empty one. That was a job for a joey.

Runt thought back to the first time he saw a gorgon mining a tunnel. The hairy beast sat at the rock face and, using its claws, tore off massive lumps of rock. Then, they ate it, one chunk after another. The sound of this was horrific, like dogs devouring a bag of bones. The rock slowly disappeared into the belly of the gorgon.

Fragments of shattered rock often splintered off as they chewed. Once, as a gorgon chewed on a large chunk of black, glassy rock, a long sliver of it fell to the ground. The gorgon, like always, completely ignored Runt. The boy slowly bent down and picked it up. The rock was long, thin, and sharp on one edge. Ever since his spear was taken, Runt had looked for something like this. He slipped the dagger-like rock into his pouch before completing the job he was there for.

The buckets held scraps of waste. A joey’s job was to change the buckets whenever they filled up. Every now and then, as the gorgon chewed, it would frown, pause, and spit into the bucket. Runt still remembered the first time he witnessed the glint and clang of a gold nugget hitting the side of the bucket.

The gold, then, was nothing more than waste to the gorgons. They spat out nuggets like watermelon seeds and grumbled when there were lots. According to Brain, in the old days the gorgons simply spat the metal on the ground, until the tunnels glittered with golden gravel. Then, at some point, they learned humans valued the yellow metal. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, as the saying went. After that the gorgons kept a bucket handy.

The novelty of lugging around buckets of gold very quickly wore off. Gold, it turned out, weighed an awful lot. If it weren’t for Brain, Runt would not have coped.

“Here,” Brain would say, “you’ve got the heavy one. Let me even it up.” The gorgon always shook most of the nuggets out of Runt’s bucket and into their own. Still, every trip was agony.

At first, Runt assumed the gorgons mined the tunnels for coal. The gorgons ate it, the joeys ate it, and they burned it as a source of light in places the lava glow couldn’t reach. If a gorgon struck a seam of coal, they would yell out to the others. Then, like a swarm of ants, gorgons would descend and tear into the rockface until the seam was stripped. They carried the coal in their pouches off to every corner of the cavern leaving the original gorgon there to continue chipping away at the rockface looking for the next seam. The coal, then, was important. Later on, though, Runt discovered what the gorgons were really looking for. Once he discovered the real treasure everything began to make sense.

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Runt was replacing a bucket down the end of a tunnel at the time. The tunnel extended some distance into the rock so that the lava’s glow was muted and gloomy here. Gorgons didn’t usually mine much further because they became sleepy and unpredictable in the dark.

Runt sighed at the sight of the bucket of gold sitting by the gorgon’s feet. His shoulders groaned in anticipation. The gorgon ignored him, like always, and continued hacking into the rock. It was the sudden silence, the absence of the skull rattling crunch, that made Runt realise something strange was happening. Looking up, he saw the gorgon arch its spine. The tunnel was suddenly lit with a bright yellow glow.

Runt took a few hesitant steps backward, unsure and afraid, before the gorgon turned around and shouted “Yellowcake! Yellowcake!” Its eyes burned a bright yellow, so bright that the tunnel glowed. The lump of stone in the gorgon’s hands contained veins of a glittering yellow mineral. In a similar fashion to the coal swarm, several gorgons rushed down to the tunnel, but this time they all stood back, saying nothing, and simply watched, and waited.

A message must have been sent around the cavern because, not long after, an important looking gorgon wearing a crystal necklace pushed its way through the pack of onlookers. The Collector had arrived.

The onlookers now talked in hushed whispers as the real work began. The Collector and the miner slowly and methodically broke apart the rock chasing the veins of yellow. Every flake of the glittering powder was carefully separated and placed into a small container. Once the chunk of stone was thoroughly broken into gravel, and every scrap of yellow dust dutifully gathered, they turned to the rockface.

The Collector and the miner ran their hands over the surface, brushing off dust, and peering at the rockface intently. The miner cried out in delight when it found more. Tiny veins of yellow twinkled in the dark and, presumably, continued on into the depths of stone.

A new kind of work commenced, now. Instructions were barked and many gorgons left to gather materials. The Collector was clearly pleased with the events. It turned, noticed Runt, smiled and scruffed his hair, before marching off purposefully.

“Lucky day! The tyrant will be pleased.” The original gorgon miner said, beaming at Runt, who merely nodded in reply.

Runt dragged the bucket of waste away and continued his work. Over the next several hours the tunnel was mined extensively as they followed the yellow veins deep into the dark heart of the mountain. They dug so far that gorgons brought coal to burn for light. The Collector returned, this time with barrels, which were slowly but surely filled with the glittering yellow powder. The work continued until, hours later, the gorgons all left in a group. The veins had run dry and the mine shaft, too deep and dark for gorgons, was abandoned.

At the next quiet time, when the joeys were allowed to crawl into another of these abandoned tunnels and rest, Runt asked Brain about the glittering powder.

“Yellowcake.” Brain responded, yawning as the darkness did its work. “Some call it the blood of the dragon. It’s very rare, and extremely valuable. The gorgons who make the journey, and go Outside to collect wood under the Great Dark, use it for protection. Gorgons get sleepy in the dark. And if a gorgon eats the yellowcake they stay awake no matter what. It makes them stronger, too, which is important because it helps them survive the dangers Outside.”

“They say the Outside is an enormous, strange, and terrible place.” Brain continued. ”Out there, the cave goes on forever. There’s no walls. And no ceiling. Instead, there’s something up there called the sky. It’s just air, all the way up. No rock above your head. Can you believe that? And, more confusing, they say the Sun Lake sits in the sky, not in the ground. But what stops the lava falling down? That’s what I’d like to know. It doesn’t seem real to me. I can’t even imagine it. They say the Sun Lake floats across the sky but then sinks somehow and, once it does, there’s nothing but the Great Dark. There’s barely any light at all apart from a silver disk they call the moon. But that’s not enough light to keep the gorgons awake. So where does the Sun Lake go during the Great Dark? How does it move? What brings it back? The Outside sounds strange and terrible to me.”

Runt’s face flushed red and he was suddenly glad for the gloom. Brain, oblivious to his friend’s guilty silence, continued explaining the mysteries beyond the cavern.

“Of course, we could go to the Outside while the lava is in the sky so the gorgons would stay awake. But that’s dangerous, too. There’s all sorts of monsters out there. Monsters like you wouldn’t believe. So we mostly make the journey under the Great Dark. There’s less monsters, then. And that’s why we need the yellowcake. It means the gorgons can stay awake. And it makes them strong to fight off the monsters.”

“Oh,” Brain said, yawning again, “the other reason for the yellowcake is they use it in the nursery. I’ll show you next time we do some work in the hive.”

Seconds later gentle snoring began to echo down the tunnel. After resting, a gorgon would come past with a torch and wake the joeys so they could repeat the misery all over again. Runt did his best to fall asleep and wondered, not for the last time, if there was any chance of escape, and whether he would see his friends ever again.