The Mine Lord: A Dwarven Survival Base-Builder

“What are we going to do?” Shineboot asked. He didn’t look as eager for Yorvig to be rinlen as he had before the vote debacle.

Yorvig rubbed his eyes with this thumb and forefinger. Even thinking was hard, lately. Especially thinking.

"We need food." He waited for someone to complain, but no one did.

"There are spring-roots by the river," Onyx said with a flat tone.

"There are what, now?"

"Spring-roots. Garlic, leeks, onions."

The dwarves looked at each other. They knew of these things—had eaten them plenty of times in stews. Garlic was especially loved by the dwarves. But none of them were canyon cultivators back in Deep Cut, they were miners.

"Haven't you smelled them?" Onyx asked.

Yorvig had smelled many plants growing in the dell and along the river. In truth, the surface was overwhelming to his nose, a muddle of rot and growth and soil and water. He didn't know what garlic or onions were supposed to look like as they grew, and he certainly didn't know what might be poisonous and what wasn't. All dwarves knew that plants could be poisonous—one more danger of the surface world. They were probably treading upon potential food all the time, but how to know? They'd grown up in caverns and mines.

"She's been making us eat them for weeks, now," Greal said.

Onyx flipped her head toward her brother and squinted in annoyance, then turned back to Yorvig.

"I found them," she said. "I always bought them at the market for our mother." Onyx put a bit of an edge in that last part. Greal pressed his lips together.

"How long can these feed us?" Yorvig asked.

"A couple days at most."

"We'll be sweating them," Greal said.

"It's better than starving," she answered. "And I brought seed and spore."

Yorvig had thought about that. He knew vegetables took time and warmth and sunlight, and the sooner they were growing the better.

“Sledgefist, Hobblefoot, move whatever is left in the Low Adit storeroom up here, and then make beds of soil in the storeroom for fungi.” Hobblefoot and Sledgefist would need to work together if they both intended to stay at the claim, and it may as well start now. Most fungi were for flavoring, not sustenance. A dwarf could fill his belly with mushrooms and slowly starve. There was a kind of fungus that they called bread fungus, though, because the dwarves ground it in mortar and pestle, mixed it with fat, and fried it in oil. It served as a staple of dwarven meals. Onyx had brought plenty of those spores. He looked around at the others. “Greal and Khlif, go to the top of the dell and mound soil in rows. We’ll need to plant the seeds and bulbs.” The higher the beds, the more sunlight they would receive. His mind was flooded with all they needed to do, and the sense of impossibility of it all.

“I don’t know anything about planting,” Khlif said.

Neither did Yorvig.

“You put the seeds an inch or two beneath the soil,” Onyx said, “and then water them.”

“Doesn’t the rain do that?” Shineboot asked.

“Water them if the soil is dry.”

Shineboot shrugged.

“And spread the seeds out. Let there be a couple inches between each.”

They all stared at her.

“I had a friend who was a canyon cultivator,” she said by way of explanation. Maids, being fewer, were far more likely to have friends and social contacts beyond the confines of their own trades and districts. They had all grown up in the tunnels and caverns beneath the canyons—around the aquifer lakes, salt mines, and coal seams. None of the dwarves present had grown a plant before.

“Shineboot and I will gather these. . . spring-roots,” Yorvig said.

“What about me?” Onyx asked.

“You?”

“Me. What am I to do?”

Yorvig felt his face flushing.

“I. . . what. . .”

For some reason, telling a maid what to do mortified him.

"Would you please show us these plants?" he managed.

“I will show you " she said. "Then I will work with Hobblefoot and Sledgefist. The spores will need my attention."

Yorvig nodded, though he felt conflicted about that plan. Perhaps their attentions were more annoying to him than they were unwelcome to her.

He realized he was squinting.

"Let's begin," he said.

They finished their projects: spores and seeds and bulbs were planted in their beds both beneath the stone and in the open dell by the time darkness fell. The days had already lengthened considerably. Yorvig hoped the ürsi wouldn’t desecrate the garden beds in the dell as they had done the birch grove, but he had plans for that as well. Onyx showed Yorvig and Shineboot the leeks, onions, and garlic growing wild by the river. Yorvig would never have known passing by that the little green shoots were edible, or their roots. Once pulled from the ground and held close, he could detect the familiar scents and see the shape of the root bulb, though they were smaller and tougher than what could be procured in Deep Cut. The plants grew in little patches here and there in the valley.

The next day they also accomplished much, for they all went down armed to the river. The water-level had receded somewhat. Onyx did not go in the water—that would have been unthinkable—but she insisted on holding one of the crossbows and keeping watch. The footings of the previous year’s weir remained, and to Yorvig's surprise even some of the stakes were still stuck in the rocks. Working together with muttered curses and ropes tied around their waists, they rebuilt and expanded the weir, adding branching levels and circles to better contain any fish who made their way inside. They would need a great store of oil for the winter, but the river was wide. Small fish darted about them even as they labored and shivered in the frigid water, their lips blue.

That night, Yorvig lay repeating sums in his head when he should have been sleeping. For eight dwarves doing strenuous labor, a strict ration required at least 30 pounds of meat or other strong food in a day between them by Yorvig's estimation. They had filled their bellies with garlic-and-onion soup for two days, clearing most of the patches of the root vegetables from the dell and riverside. Greal was right; their sweat stank of it. It was warm and it filled in the moment, but it didn't last. The beast they had killed on the mountainside would have lasted them less than two weeks, not even long enough to fully smoke it, but that didn't matter. Yorvig had lost it.

How could they do this? How did other claims survive?

Herds. Flocks. The claims of the western Red Ridges had such, even the smaller claims. Ürsi had been known to occasionally harry the flocks there, but that was decades ago and the ürsi were few. Their expedition had opted not to bring any livestock because they were heading far to the eastern stretches of the ridges, into wildlands not yet prospected due to the difficulty. They barely knew the first thing about herding. Trying to drive stock that far would have been almost as foolish as coming without. Yorvig had long ago come to see their former selves—just two years before—as hopelessly naive.

But no one had been there to stop them or speak wisdom. They had no one. They were but a handful of dwarves entering youthful prime, dwarves with few kin and no true distinction in Deep Cut, nameless among many. Dwarves forged their legacies by setting out and cutting their own holds.

He stared up into the dark, stretched out in the Lower Adit with Striper curled up on his legs. The sound of flowing water never ceased there. His jaw clenched. They would survive. They would carve their legacy in this ridge.

Legacy. . .

Yorvig shook away the thought of those amethyst-rimmed eyes. He had apprenticed and worked in a different mine than the others. The Hardfells had been his brother’s and cousin’s companions, not his own. He had met them during planning. But he had never met her. Would it have been different if he had? It felt hot in the adit, somehow. He sat up abruptly, and Striper hissed and leapt away as he shook his head as if he could shake the thoughts out. It was no use. Onyx’s words and tone during the vote kept replaying in his mind.

Yorvig had never been spoken to like that by a wif, let alone a maid. Then again, he had interacted with precious few—not unusual for a dwarf who had no sisters. Dwarves about their usual labor did not interact with maids and wifs. Yorvig’s mother was not well for most of his life. He and Sledgefist were both late gilke, and there was a wasting affliction of the bone in her. It was nearly the same story as the Hardfells. They were all just the sorts to try such a venture as this.

Certainly maids and wifs worked, but they tended to keep to their own society, working among themselves. Those dwarf-maids who chose to never marry a dwarf but marry a craft usually learned from others like them. Working with dwarves was an unnecessary complication.

It was an unnecessary complication here, too. He could already feel it in himself. Yorvig had been uneasy since her arrival. And maybe it made it worse that he knew he was. He didn’t like it. She was a problem the likes of which he could not fix with tools or work. And after the scene during the vote, he suspected she knew it as well.

Yorvig did not sleep that night. Instead, he went and retrieved some scrap cloth, needle, and thread the newcomers had brought and patched his clothes, working in the dark by feel.

Working and thinking.