Several times they entered into wooded valleys full of smoke, and followed the traces of dragged logs across the ground until they came to gunpowder-mills. Here, tall whip-thin trees, the trunks hairy with miserable scrawny branches,*were cut and burnt endlessly until they became charcoal. This was taken to a water-powered mill to be ground to dust and mixed with the other ingredients. Men came out of these mills looking all drawn and nervous from never really knowing when they’d be blown up, and the Doctor supplied them with brimstone and saltpeter from the wagons. Teaching Jack that wars, like great rivers, had their wellsprings in numerous high remote valleys.

Eliza was beginning to see some of the enormous trees of Mum’s f?ry-tales, though many had blown down and could be viewed only as fists of roots thrust into the air still clutching final handfuls of dirt. The air up here was not still for a moment-it was never rainy, cloudy, or sunny for more than a quarter of an hour at a time-but when they were out of those smoky valleys, it was cold and clear. Their progress was slow, but one time the sky cleared as they came through an open place in the woods (it was clear that Harz was a rock and the forest no more substantial than the film of hop-vines that sometimes grew on an ancient schlock-heap), and then it was obvious that they’d risen to a great height above the plains and valleys. Those schlock-heaps like cowls of robed men in a procession. Patrols of black vultures chased and swirled about one another like ashes ascending a flue. Here and there a tower braced itself on a mountain-top or a conspiracy of trees huddled. Crows raided distant fields for the farmers’ seed-corn, and flocks of silver birds wheeled and drilled for some unvoiced purpose on invisible breezes.

So the Doctor decided to cheer them up by taking them down into an old abandoned copper mine.

“Sophie was the first woman to enter a mine,” he said helpfully. “You, Eliza, might be the second.”

This mine’s vein (or the vein-shaped cavity where the vein had once been) was close to the surface and so there was no need to descend numerous ladders in some deep shaft: they pulled up before an old semi-collapsed building, rummaged in a skewed cabinet for lights, sledded down a ramp where once a short staircase had been, and there they were in a tunnel as high as Jack’s head and an arm’s length wide. Their lights were called kienspans: splits of dry resinous wood about the dimensions of a rapier blade, dipped in some kind of wax or pitch, which burnt enthusiastically, and looked like the flame-swords wielded by Biblical standouts. By this means, they could see that the mine-tunnel was lined with logs and timbers: a hefty post-and-beam lintel every couple of yards, and many horizontal logs, as thick as a person’s thigh, laid parallel down the tunnel so as to join each post-and-lintel with the ones before and after it. In this way a long tubular wooden cage was formed, not to keep them in (though it did) but to protect them from a stalled avalanche of loose rubble pressing in from all sides.

The Doctor led them down this tunnel-the entrance quickly lost from view. Frequently, side-tunnels took off to one side or another, but these came up only to mid-thigh on Jack and there was no question of entering them.

Or so he thought until the Doctor stopped before one. The floor all around was strewn with curiously wrought planks, half-moon-shaped pieces of ox-hide, and tabular chunks of black rock. “There is a wonder at the end of this tunnel-no more than half a dozen fathoms back-which you must see.”

Jack took it for a joke until Eliza agreed to scurry down the tunnel without hesitation-which meant that according to Rules that applied even to Vagabonds, Jack had to do it first, in order to scout for danger. The Doctor told him that the pieces of ox-hide were called arsch-leders, which was self-explanatory, so Jack put one on. The Doctor then demonstrated the use of the planks, which miners used to protect elbows and forearms from the stony floor when creeping along on their sides. All of this settled, Jack lay down on the floor and crept into it, wielding the plank with one arm and the kienspan with the other. He found it reasonably easy going as long as he didn’t think about… well, about anything.

The kienspan, lunging ahead of him, shed sparks against the end of the tunnel and dazzled him. When his vision settled he found that he was sharing a confined space with a giant black bird-or something-like the ostrich-but with no wings-pawing at the ore, or maybe at Jack’s face, with talons bigger than fingers-its long bony neck twisted round almost into a knot, an arrowhead of a skull at the end, jaws open with such… big… teeth…

He only screamed once. Twice, actually, but number two didn’t count because it came from smashing his head on the ceiling in a poorly thought-out bid to stand up. He scurried back a couple of fathoms, working on blind fear and pain, stopped, listened, heard nothing but his heart.

Of course it was dead-it was all bones. And the Doctor might be a human oddity in several respects, but he wouldn’t send Jack into a monster’s lair. Jack retreated slowly, trying not to make his head ache any worse. He could hear the Doctor talking to Eliza: “There are shells scattered upon the mountains! See, this rock has a grain like wood-you can split it into layers-and look at what’s between the strata! This creature must’ve been buried in mud-probably the fine dirt that rivers carry-smashed flat, as you can see-its body decomposed leaving a void, later filled in by some other sort of rock-as sculptors cast bronze statues in plaster molds.”

“Where do you get this stuff? Who told you that one?” Jack demanded, a bloody head popping out between their feet, looking up at them.

“I reasoned it out myself,” said the Doctor. “ Someonehas to come up with new ideas.”

Jack rolled over on his belly to find the floor loosely paved with rock-slabs bearing imprints of sundry other Book-of-Revelation fauna. “What river carried this supposed dirt? We’re in the middle of a mountain of rock. There is no river, ” Jack informed the Doctor, after they had gotten Eliza on her way down the tunnel. Jack waited with her traveling-dress slung over his arm while she inched down the tunnel in her knickers and an arsch-leder.

“But there used to be,” the Doctor said, “Just as there used to be such creatures-” playing his light over impressions of fish with fins too many and jaws too big, swimming creatures shaped like grappling-hooks, dragonflies the size of crossbow-bolts.

“A river in a mountain? I don’t think so.”

“Then where did the shells come from?”

FINALLY THEY TRAVELEDto the rounded top of a mountain where an old stone tower stood, flanked by schlock-heaps instead of bastions. A half-wit could see that the Doctor had been at work here. Rising from the top of the tower was a curious windmill, spinning round sideways like a top instead of rolling like a wheel, so that it didn’t have to turn its face into the wind. The base of the tower was protected by an old-fashioned stone curtain-wall that had been repaired recently (they were afraid of being attacked by people who, however, did not have modern artillery). Likewise the gate was new, and it was bolted. A musket-toting engineer opened it for them as soon as the Doctor announced himself, and wasted no time bolting it behind them.

The tower itself was not a fit place for people to lodge. The Doctor gave Eliza a room in an adjoining house. Jack put the fear of God into all the rats he could find in her room, then climbed the stone stair that spiraled*up the inside of the tower. The tower did its part by moaning in wind-gusts like an empty jug when an idler blows over the top. From the windmill at the top a shaft, consisting of tree-trunks linked one to the next with collars and fittings hammered out of iron, dropped through the center of the tower to an engineering works on the dirt floor. The floor, then, was pierced by a large hole that was obviously the mouth of a mine-shaft. An endless chain of buckets had been rigged so that the windmill’s power raised them up from the shaft laden with water. As they went round a giant pulley they emptied into a long wooden tray: a mill-race that carried the water out through a small arched portal in the tower wall. Then the empty buckets dove back into the shaft for another go-round. In this way water was drained away from some deep part of the mines that would normally be flooded. But up here, the water was a good thing to have. After gathering a bit of head in a system of trenches outside, it powered small mill-wheels that ran bellows and trip-hammers for the smiths, and finally collected in cisterns.