Chapter 23: Labors of Flame

Tree after tree they felled, until the winter sky was bare above them. Sledgefist devised a canthook to roll the limbed logs, and a bonfire burned as they worked into the night, two always watching, armed with bone-tipped spears. Each morning they checked the pit trap from a distance, hoping. Even this labor of clearing the dell must stop soon if the trap failed them. Yorvig feared having to venture further from the safety of the claim to hunt. The prospectors of the Long Downs had fled before the ürsi a hundred and more years before. Who could tell him how to work a claim in spite of the foe?

Yorvig’s leg continued to bother him. Instead of pain it mostly felt weak, as if it might give way beneath him at a moment's notice, and sometimes he did stumble without warning, once falling to his knee. On the second day, Yorvig found a cedar sapling, its root bulb growing atop a flat stone, long tendrils of root stretching out into the loam to either side of the rock. He tore it up and lopped off the tendrils and the bushy top, but he did not throw away the sapling staff. With his dagger he stripped the bark. It was not so long as a full spear-staff, more gnarled where many small branches had grown. Something about the thing attracted his eye, maybe the way the root bulb looked like a hooked, deformed beak. At any case, his crutch had become a nuisance, but this he could keep by his side for support when he needed it, and in a pinch the bulb at the end could give a wicked blow.

Limbing and rolling the first hundred logs into a pile was a greater task than felling them. It was on the fifth day that they heard a great scream from the river. Cautiously, the four approached. The screams came from the pit, and at first they feared the horrible sounds, unsure of what creature could make them. It turned out to be a great wild pig, wounded by falling on one of the put spikes. Yorvig hadn’t even realized such beasts roamed the woods. He knew they could be dangerous. The massive pig must have weighed four hundred or more pounds. They dispatched it with spear-thrusts to the throat, then butchered it in the pit—keeping to their rule of having two on guard at all times. It took three trips to carry the meat and organs back to the adit. They couldn’t help but smile and quip. They feasted on organs that night and the smokers burned again. The honey was too depleted to preserve any meat.

With renewed energy, they worked on. They covered the stacked logs with dirt, enough to keep them from burning when they lit the rest. They’d have to uncover the logs later to let them dry before they could turn them to charcoal. And they worked on.

At the end of the second week, even Yorvig hesitated to continue cutting the dell. The trees that lay on their sides were dense, blocking all sight. The smell of the sap and needles was overpowering to the nose. In amidst the branches, they could barely see a few yards in any direction. The trees lay upon one another, some propped up, zigzagging so that going in any direction became difficult. If the foe came upon them within that tangle, it would go ill.

The snow had melted away under a strong southwest wind blowing up the dell, and the ground was damp. But the pine was full of tar and some of it was already drying. It would burn if set. And so Yorvig called for the making of fires. They set the fallen timber alight in three places, then retreated into the adit, closing the door behind. Smoke followed them. They placed a wet piece of bandage cloth over the grating in the door. They still needed fresh air. They could see the glow of the fire even through the cloth, and soon it sounded like the wind outside had redoubled. It grew into a roar, and the rag over the grate grew warm to the touch. If they hadn't have put in a stone door, no doubt the old wooden one would have burned. Rag or no, the smell of smoke was overpowering.

“How long do you think this will take?” Shineboot asked.

“I don’t know, but I suggest we sleep in the lower drifts tonight.”

So, they climbed down the fifty foot chute into the long-unworked drifts where the amethyst had been found, and there they spent the night, still smelling the burning in the dell. For a short time, Yorvig feared he’d endangered them. The dwarves knew about ventilation and air movement, and they knew that fire devoured it, and that gases could interact with flames. The dwarven miners watched the color of their candles carefully, for gases burned in different hues. The dwarves were not so fragile as humans when it came to such things—which is part of why the human kings of Laith had enslaved them long ago—but care had to be taken, for pockets of deadly poisonous vapors could be found in the deeps, and while their sensitive noses could detect most vapors, sometimes drafts of evil air could move quickly.

They awoke in the morning, or in Yorvig’s case multiple times throughout the night. The smell of smoke was thick, but they could breathe the air even as they ascended the ladder to the adit drift. Yorvig pulled away the now-dry cloth from the grate and peered out. Smoke filled the dell like a haze, and he could not see more than twenty or thirty yards. What he did see was was blackened earth beneath the haze. The branches of those trees they’d felled were burned away, leaving only charred husk-like trunks, and in cases where they’d been piled thick, not even that. Embers still glowed on stub ends. A swirl of breeze lifted the pall and showed him the edge of the clearing they'd cut. A few tree jutted up to burnt ends ten feet into the air, and some towered higher, stripped of green needles and branch and left blackened. The ferns and bushes and other undergrowth were gone.

Shineboot wet the rag again and put it over his face as he went out to check on the smoke-hives. He replenished the fires within with wood from inside the adit, then he returned. Yorvig hoped the smoke-hives hadn’t turned into ovens, charring the meat. He should have thought of that before. Thankfully, Shineboot reported that he didn't think the meat was lost, since the hives were near the pond and away from the greater flames.

“What do we do now?” Sledgefist asked.

“We mine ore,” Hobblefoot said, a note of satisfaction in his voice.

“We continue the drift until the smoke clears," Yorvig answered.

“Why continue the drift?”

“Because if the fire worked, we’ll be able to see the whole dell and the lower ridges from the High Adit. It’ll be the safest way for us to come and go.”

“We’ll need a new ladder,” Shineboot said. Yorvig thought of the leaning tree he'd cut.

“It’s not going to be a ladder.”

If the weather had been drier, the dwarves might have burned hundreds of square miles. As it was, the fire had ascended up the sides of the arms of the dell, but had not burned downward on the other sides. Near the river, the fire crept outward for a short ways, up and down stream. A flaming tree had crashed down into their pit trap, but the trees were less dense along the rocky riverside, and the ground was wet. The fire had burned out.

With the pigflesh and the odd fish to feed them, they mined onward. The year had long turned, but the winter still held sway. One day, Hobblefoot stood at the end of the working drift, going over his calculations again.

“That’s it. We turn here,” he said.

And in another week, they broke through, daylight streaming in as they squinted at the brightness. Hobblefoot’s calculations were around 20 inches off, and Sledgefist jibed.

“You checked my sums,” Hobblefoot said, “and made no changes.” That quieted Sledgefist. Yorvig walked to the edge of the High Adit and looked out at the dell. The smoke had long cleared. Black jutting remains of trees rose up. The birch hadn’t made it through the fire, but he could see a few maples near the far side of the dell that might survive. More importantly, he could see all the way from the steep top of the dell down to the river, and it would have been hard for any ürsi to hide—or at least hard for any number of them to hide—except just beyond the embankment of tailings that formed the berm of the pond. The berm was bigger than ever after their winter of work, stretching most of the way across the dell. The pond had expanded with it.

“Now we can work the lode!” Sledgefist said.

“No,” Yorvig said.

“What now?”

“Charcoal.”

“The wood is still green.”

“The wood we covered is green," Yorvig said, and pointed out at the blackened wood in the dell. “All of that, not so much.” The fires had left many trunks and logs heavily charred. It would not produce as much charcoal as it should, but it may produce enough to get started. They needed drills and pick blades and more chisels and wedges if they were going to do make much progress.

Sledgefist groaned. He knew Yorvig was right. He just didn't like it.

Now that they could see further, only one of them stood on guard as they worked in the dell, chopping down the stubs of conifers and rolling logs into three great heaps in the center of the dell. After days of labor, they piled the soil thick upon the heaps. Each heap had an access at one end opposite a small clay air inlet. The loam in the dell was not deep, and they had to scrape a swath of the dell down to the bare rock in order to cover the heaps of timber with thick soil. They kindled fires in each of the buried piles of wood, then covered the access over with more soil, leaving only a narrow clay chimney.

Slowly, over the next days, the mounds sunk in on themselves as smoke rose from the small chimneys and leaked through the piled soil. The key was to keep the air-flow within slow, so that the wood smoldered and in doing so turned to charcoal. It took five days before they reckoned the work of the fire was done. They broke open the mounds, feeling the heat wash upwards.

While it was not what was to be expected of truly seasoned wood, they had charcoal—and some tons of it. They hoped for far more after they broke open the mound of greenwood they'd made before the fire and let it season, but this would give them a start. They shoveled the charcoal into a great heap near the Lower Adit.

Their next step was to build a mud brick bloomery. The design they used was the simplest. It was a five foot round open-topped tower made of mud brick and spread and sealed with another layer of clay. It looked like a tall mud pot as much as anything, narrowing towards the top. At the bottom were two narrow openings, one bigger than the other.

Next they brought out hematite ore from within the claim—ore they had struck before they’d even found the amethyst. They all knew the basic operations of these tasks. No dwarf with half a wit of sense would have gone into the wilds without such knowledge, though more experienced practitioners of wilderness smelting could have no doubt pointed out more than a few errors in execution. They began by heating the ore in a regular fire until it began to warm, the hints of color seeping in. Fissures opened in the ore, and they used hammers on stone to break it.

They started a wood fire in the bloomery, and once it was burning they added charcoal until the narrow opening at the bottom glowed bright orange. They ensured the air was sucking in through the back. Then they began slowly adding more charcoal into the top of the bloomery, followed by a layer of the broken warmed ore, then more charcoal, and so on until they reached the top.

As space opened, they shoveled in more coal at top and bottom, carefully watching the color of the flames—for the color was heat, and gradations of heat. They knew the shifting colors of different metals in the forge and those of flames and embers. Each had a different meaning, appropriate for different times and different labors. But within the bloomery they wanted hot, white flame. Thankfully, they saw the color they sought. Once, the side of the bloomery cracked and began sucking air, but they smeared on more wet clay. The cool clay protected their hands as they sealed the crack, but even so the heat flowed over them, threatening to singe their beards.

This was primitive, indeed, and they could only hope for a rudimentary smelting. Much better smelters could be constructed, but they had to start with a bloomery, seeking the basics. It felt good to feel the heat on a cold winter day, though, and they stood together, watching the color of the flame.

“If the Hardfells bring drills, I’ll weep,” Sledgefist said with a chuckle.

“They won’t bring drills,” Hobblefoot said.

Yorvig suspected Hobblefoot was correct. Drills were heavy, long, and cumbersome to travel with. Trekking through the wilds of the far Red Ridges, the Hardfells, Warmcoat, and Savvyarm could bring many other practical items with the strength and energy one drill would require. That is, if the Hardfells even came. Yorvig still wasn't sure.

After the bloomery had burned from sunrise to sunset, they went inside to rest and slake their thirst in the safety of the stone. They wished for ale or beer after such labor, but all they had was spring water.