A Four Moon Series: Legacy of Blood

If he must die, let it be me...

                The tents strung together like a small galaxy of mostly failing stars, spiraled outward from a central fire with each canvas prism capturing less firelight and heat. Beside the fire six boys sat tied back to back trying to sleep and save their strength for another day's march south. Some whispered prayers and others wept silently. They knew where their captors were taking them and they trembled in the night despite their proximity to the flames. They knew each step brought them nearer to Las Minas and 10 years of forced labor in the silver mines high up in the mountain. They would not be alone. Hundreds of boys just like them worked in the mines. Others, particularly wealthy families, paid a ransom to keep their boys safe, but these were not sons of the Wapiti city nor the desert Islands. They were sons of salt-fishermen, and their parents had nothing to trade. Once they were beaten, they surrendered their boys, rather than see their entire families slaughtered in front of them. As it had been for their own brothers, so it was for their sons. These were the terms, without exception. It was a cruel and terrible fate for those who were taken, and for those who remained.

Simeon remembered what it meant to sit weeping as these boys did. He watched them from above, as a lookout for any who might follow them down the Silver river, knives or spears heroically clenched in their fists. It was rare and pointless to see families come after their sons, but especially impossible tonight. The sky was clear and a round fourth moon shot silver arrows across the windswept dunes that splintered into a thousand smiles on the river, sparkling with such brilliance Simeon squinted to peer into the shadows beneath the trees on the far side bank. No one would cross unseen tonight. And so, unoccupied by his watch, Simeon's thoughts remained with the boys below and their loud sniffling.

They have no idea the darkness that awaits them, Simeon shivered to release the cold feeling that latched onto his shoulders. It was the same chill he knew too well, a chill that brought him once again into endless tunnels, trapped in the narrow mine shafts deep in the mountain. In a few days these boys would be sold and dragged by their ankles beneath the walls of Las Minas. Once inside the camp, they would be branded like cattle, shackled at the ankles, and put to work beside another who would teach them the rules. For as long as they survived, the boys would spend their days crawling on their stomachs in mine shafts too narrow for a man, so small that a boy could only pull himself forward or push backwards between the rocks. The shafts were barely wide enough to crawl, the tunnels pressed on all sides so that it was impossible to turn around. One pushed the chiseled stones back through the legs, each boy passing back the debris until it reached the larger central cave. Once in the cave, teams shoveled the rocks into buckets and minecarts which were then wheeled out on iron tracks into the courtyard for sorting. Each tunnel excavated by dull hammers and miniature pickax gnawing at the mountain with an insect-like roar of tapping, clinking, and snapping. Ten years of eating slop and shitting in a bucket, almost every hour spent in darkness with only a quick glimpse of the sunset at days end. When those around him stopped breathing, suffocated by the dust and minerals trapped in their lungs, or poisoned by gases in the air, their bodies were dragged out of the mines by the chains on their ankles and cremated in the smelting pile in the courtyard that burned day and night spewing a toxic smog that poisoned the trees and grass around the mines. Almost everyone died before their term ended. For some it was exposure and hunger, for others it was a hammer tumbling down the shaft into their head, or a whip from the Temos (their soulless operators), or pockets of methane gas that poisoned them by the team. Yet Simeon endured and earned a reputation as good luck, often finding rich deposits. Others fought to work beside him, hoping his fortune would pass to them. And eventually most of these boys died and were replaced by others with the same hope, just as these boys weeping together in a circle around their campfire would take the place of someone else who had hoped for freedom. He looked down at their three pairs of heads.