Mitt had seen how she was feeling. “I’ll go with her. D’you mind holding the Countess, too?” he asked Wend.
“And mine,” Navis said, hurling his reins over his mare’s head.
Maewen was too grateful almost to be ashamed at how obvious her terror must be. It felt much better walking toward the eager man with Mitt towering slightly behind her on one side and Navis pacing sedately and briskly on the other.
“Noreth Onesdaughter,” the eager man greeted her. “We heard tell you’d ride the roads this Midsummer, and you must forgive us that we lay in wait for you, in a manner of speaking, but—” Here the small group of men and women caught up and stood panting, nodding, smiling and staring. “We are all the gang head at the mines,” the eager man explained. “I am Tankol Kolsson, and I speak for the heads. Lady, will you talk to Lord Kintor, your cousin, for us? We are at our wit’s end truly and truly do not mean to be lawless the way his new law-woman says we are.”
At this all the others in the group burst out talking, too. “Willing workers all,” Maewen heard. “The land being that poor” and “No sale in summer so he’ll only pay half!” overlaid by “The mines now the main way to make a living” and “Next to nothing if you’ve a family to feed!” This was half drowned by someone saying over and over, “Then Lord Kintor would have to sell his horses and that we do not want,” and someone else saying just as often, “Pay half for what we fetch out and put only a quarter back in winter—that’s starvation, lady!” During this the entire crowd arrived so that Maewen was surrounded and buried in people all shouting, “It’s that new law-woman of his! Make him send her away!” or, “We’re only miners, lady and we don’t know what to do!”
Mines, she thought distractedly. Miners. She remembered the Kredindale of her day, and the big spoil heaps that had been landscaped with grass and trees down by the coast, with the ruins of chimneys and old mine shafts farther up the hills. There was a colliery m
useum somewhere. Maewen remembered Aunt Liss’s saying that when she was a girl, Kredindale had been nothing but coal mines wherever you looked. It looked as if it had started being like that very early on. But she had no idea what all these shouting people expected her to do about it.
“Hold hard!” Mitt shouted. “Do you mind not all talking at once!”
Into the slight hush that this made, Navis called, “Let’s get this straight. You’re in some kind of quarrel with Lord Kintor, and you want this lady to put it right.”
Amid the shouts of agreement Mitt said to the eager man, “You. Tankol. If you’re spokesman, you tell her.”
Tankol was only too ready to tell. The trouble was, he was not one of those people who could tell a thing simply and quickly. Maewen listened for a good quarter of an hour, almost glad of being surrounded by people because the sea wind was cold, even though she found the pressure of all their attention nearly unbearable. At the end of that time she had gathered that her supposed cousin had hired a new law-woman who had told him he would have to sell his horses because there was no demand for coal. There were lots of figures, too, halves, quarters, thirds, which had something to do with the wages miners earned. The main thing Maewen really gathered was that neither Tankol nor anyone else had the least desire to leave Kredindale and follow Noreth as an army.
She ought to have been relieved. She was, in a way. But she was also exasperated. If even the people in Noreth’s birthplace did not consider following her, this really did make her mission impossible. But there had to be more to it than this. Mitt and Navis seemed to be following what Tankol said. Maewen turned to them. “Can you explain?”
“A rather familiar story,” Navis said dourly, “one I thought I’d left behind with the South.”
“Isn’t it just!” Mitt agreed. “He’s saying this Kintor of yours has hired the law to help him diddle the miners. Kintor’s hard up, mind you, because folk can burn peat for nothing. And she’s told him—this law lady—that he can halve their wages in the summer and then put a bit back in the winter, without them being able to do a thing about it. If they complain to him, it’s unlawful. If they hold meetings about it, that’s not lawful either. So what are they to do?”
“They seem to have been smart enough to get round the law by having their meetings as the Midsummer Fair up here, while they waited for you,” Navis said. “But one does wonder how many miners’ wages your cousin is paying his new law-woman.”
Maewen was beginning to feel glad that she could disown this Kintor as her cousin. All the worried faces staring at her had the hollow eyes of people who never quite got enough to eat. Everyone was in holiday best, to judge from the ribbons and embroidery, but they were poor clothes, old and darned and carefully looked after. “Why don’t they want him to sell his horses?” she asked.
“Famous bloodstock,” Navis said. “Everyone is proud of them.”
“Yeah. This is the free North,” Mitt said bitterly.
“Free to some,” Tankol retorted, quite as bitterly. “You’re an Aberath hearthman, lad. You don’t know you’re born.”
Because Mitt looked about to become extremely angry, Maewen said almost without thinking. “Then why don’t you go on strike?”
Every face, Mitt’s and Navis’s, too, turned to her, perplexed. Oh help! she thought. They’ve never heard of strikes yet. Strikes were unheard of until industry started. And when did industry get going? Maewen wondered frantically. Not quite yet, she was sure. But wasn’t it quite early on in Amil the Great’s reign? Yes, because she remembered learning that Amil had encouraged industry, particularly in the North. But, oh dear, all the same. Everyone was waiting for her to explain, and she was going to have to send history in a circle, because she only knew about strikes because there had been strikes, probably because she had told everyone about them one windy afternoon in Kredindale, because…
“It means,” she said, “that you all stop work until my cousin agrees to pay you a fair wage.”
“But we can’t. We’d be turned off work,” Tankol protested.
“Oh come on!” Maewen said. “My cousin needs you to work the mines. If you all stop, he can’t sack you all because he’d starve, too.”
“But,” said one of the women, “it’s like Young Kol said. It’s not lawful.”
They were so slow and sad and doubtful that Maewen wanted to shake them. “Look. It’s not unlawful if one of you is sick and can’t get to work, is it?”
“No.” Everyone agreed to that.
“Then you all get ill at once,” Maewen explained.
This caused a startled, interested silence. Mitt broke it by pointing out what Maewen had always thought was the weak part of strikes. “They’d never get away with that in the South,” he said. “The Earl would just send his hearthmen to hang the ringleaders, sick or not. Maybe your Kintor won’t do that in the North here. But he’d have to do something. If he didn’t, they’d all be ruined, him and them together. It goes,” Mitt added, just as if he had read Maewen’s mind, “in a circle, like.”
It did. Maewen wanted to shake Mitt, too. “But there’s going to be a huge demand for coal,” she said. “Any day—well, any year now—in five years, anyway. I know. There’ll be machines—”