Pit Town
Admiral Biscuit
A train woke me up. For a moment, I thought that it was the afternoon train, the same one I had arrived on, but the room was too dark for that.
It could have been the southbound train, but I thought that that arrived later in the day. Not that there was a rule that there could only be two trains, of course.
This wasn’t a passenger train. It was a long train of coal cars, slowly making its way towards the main line. The gates I’d seen yesterday that protected the sidewalk were down, and I could see the gate tender standing there. As I watched, she waved to the crew of the locomotive, then went back to scanning the sidewalk just in case someone was so oblivious as to bump into the side of the train.
Given my experience back on Earth, that was actually a reasonable worry.
I watched as the entire train snaked by and the gate tender winched the gates back up, then made her way back to the train station.
There wasn’t much point in going back to bed, so I decided that it was time to explore.
It turned out that there wasn’t a whole lot to the town. Besides the inn, spa, and bar, there was also a general store, a small cafe, a smithy, and a library, all of which were currently closed. Small towns just didn’t have the 24-hour cycle that cities did.
The side street was lined with simple homes. Most of them looked hastily constructed, yet they were all well-landscaped. A couple even had small orchards in the backyard.
Just a ways out of town, the farms began, and those buildings generally appeared more substantial. At a guess, this had started off as a small farming town and then the railroad had come and it had turned into a bit of a boomtown.
As I surveyed the four blocks that made up the town proper, I thought back to the railroad clerk asking if I wanted a return ticket and I think that he had known what I was going to find out here. Maybe I should have at least looked at a travel guide before choosing my destination.
But then I remembered the mares I’d met the night before and their offer to give me a tour of a coal mine, and that wasn’t something that was likely to be on a travel brochure. In that regard, at least, I’d done well.
The pub didn’t have its hours posted. Probably ponies who lived in town already knew, and for visitors, it was either open or not. Surely there had been a time in human history when stores didn’t post their hours, either. It was something that I’d never really paid attention to in Manehattan, since there always seemed to be something to do or someplace to go.
I went back to the hotel for breakfast. They, at least, were open.
Their selection was porridge, bubbling away in a large kettle over the fireplace, bread, with various selections of jams and jellies and cheeses, and fresh timothy grass. Nowhere near the selection I’d come to expect in Manehattan, but what they lacked in variety they made up for in quality. It was easily the best porridge I’d ever had, and the bread was amazing. The loaf weighed about as much as a brick. It did have a bit of a grass flavor, but that was easily offset by the creamy butter and serviceberry jam they had.
My five new friends hadn’t come to the dining room yet and I wondered if I should wait for them.
The hotel had a copy of the Manehattan Dispatch in the lobby, but it was yesterday’s. I was about to ask about that when I realized that it had probably arrived on the same train that I had. So if there’s a war, towns like Greenock won’t know until a day later. Well, the late afternoon, anyway.
I seemed to remember reading once that the eruption of Mt. Krakatoa was the first quickly-dispatched news article in history. And even that had taken some time to get down to the man on the street.
And the ponies did have a telegraph system. Plus, for really pressing news, they probably had a system of pegasus messengers who would fly from city to city.
Basically, the Pony Express.
***
It was almost noon before we set out to the coal mine. Besides the spa, the mares had also gone shopping, and their wagon was loaded up with all sorts of dry goods from the general store, along with a couple boxes of beauty supplies from the spa. Those had been bought on mine credit, Longwall told me.
“How far is it, anyway?” I should have thought to ask that before we left town. It’d be just my luck that it was ten or twenty miles.
“Three, four hours.”
“We’ll be there in plenty of time for dinner,” Longwall said.
“And if you get tired, we can move our stuff around and pull you in the wagon,” Lignite added.
“I thought you were joking about that last night.”
“Nope!”
Gytta nodded. “We carry foals to town in the wagon all the time.”
“There are foals at the coal mine?” I had sudden visions of past human labor practices.
“Where else would they be?”
“Yeah—what do humans do with their foals? Do you kick them out of the nest like birds do?”
“No, but we don’t let them work in coal mines. Any more,” I hastily added, lest one of them be a student in human history.
“How else are they going to learn how to do it?”
That was actually a surprisingly reasonable question. I was all ready to give some explanation about how it wasn’t right to let kids risk their lives in a coal mine or use kids because the labor was cheaper, but I hadn’t really thought about it from a training perspective.
I still wasn’t sure that that was a proper thing to do, but I thought I ought to keep my mouth shut until after I’d actually had a look at the mine. There was no sense in offending my new friends before I even knew what the situation actually was.
Besides, I’d already learned that pony morals were a bit different than human morals.
***
I refrained from ever once asking ‘are we there yet?’ and I made it without riding in the wagon. That was more a matter of pride than anything. I think if they’d been unencumbered by it, they would have left me in the dust.
Aside from sore feet, though, the trip passed quickly enough. We had a lot to talk about, things that we’d never mentioned at the bar last night. I found out that I was right; Greenock had just been a small farming community before the railroad had come through, and the railroad was also what had allowed them to expand their mine and improve Pit Town.
Longwall explained to me that the tracks I’d seen the coal train on had been the wagonway that was in the railroad’s name; they’d converted it to actual railroad tracks a couple of years ago, and were working on putting a line in to Mumbles. She said that if I’d gone further north I would have seen sidings full of flat cars with rails and ties. Lignite said that it was fun to watch them work and that there were some really lonely stallions at the camp.
That was something I didn’t feel that I’d needed to know.
Pit Town was a collection of simple stone houses with thatched roofs, arranged in two rows along a central street. The mine shaft was at the end of the street, and the railroad came in from the north. The tracks had been dug down into a cut, so that wagons coming from the mine could be dumped right in, which was a nice, simple arrangement.
A steady parade of loaded wagons came out of the mine, returning a few minutes later empty. The second wagon I saw get unloaded was pulled by a bright red pony with a blonde mane, one I was sure I’d recognize from a distance if I saw her again, so I kept watch to try and get an idea what the turnaround time was. We were all the way in town and I had to stop watching since we’d arrived at their house—I hadn’t seen her return yet.
“So some ponies pull wagons and others mine coal?” If there were foals in the mine, it would make a lot more sense to have them loading the wagons rather than pulling them.
“We take turns, mostly,” Lignite said. “It’s boring doing the exact same thing every day.”
“Except for Assay,” Longwall said. “She likes pulling wagons.”
“’Cause I’m clumsy with a pickaxe, everpony knows that.”
“You are the only pony I know who can hit yourself with the pickaxe.”
“It’s a point of pride.” She grinned. “The five of us work as a team. Those four share all the mining jobs, and I pull the wagon.”
“How come you weren’t pulling it on the way here?”
“It’s my day off.”
That was reasonable.
“If you wanna look around,” Longwall said, “you can. We’re gonna unpack the wagon and put things away and then make dinner, and then after that we’ll go look at the mine, like we promised.”
“It’s going to be pretty late by then, won’t it?” And then I felt like a real idiot, when I remembered that we were looking at a mine.
“Funnily enough, the mine’s just as bright any time of the day.”
“You do have caves and mines on Earth, don’t you?” Lignite frowned. “You said you did.”
“I just forgot that it was dark inside, that’s all. Do you want any help?”
“Nah, we know where everything goes. Won’t take very long to put it all away. Assay, why don’t you show Joe around?”
“Okay.” She turned to face me. “What do you want to see first? We can go visit the loading dock, or the mine office. That’s kind of boring, though. It’s mostly paperwork. Oh—I bet you’d like to see our gem pile. Every now and then when we get enough good gems, we send a couple of carloads out with the coal.”
“Yeah, let’s look at that.”
***
I didn’t know a lot about mining, but I knew that all mines wound up taking out material that they weren’t actually looking for. Unless they were particularly lucky and had a seam of coal that was exposed on the surface which they could just follow down, they had to dig their way in, and all that dirt had to go somewhere.
The overburden was sorted into two piles. One of them was ordinary rocks and dirt, and looked like the pile you might see in any quarry. The other pile was like something out of a comic book: it was a mound of gems that was taller than I was. Every color of the rainbow, ranging from pebble-sized to a few that were nearly the size of a watermelon. I hadn’t seen any security ponies anywhere, and it seemed obvious that my tiny little bucket of rubies had little chance of being stolen. Any pony who wanted gems wouldn’t waste their time with that bucket; they could literally get them here by the wagonload. If this had been Earth, they wouldn’t have even bothered with the coal in this shaft, no matter how good it was.
“Where do they come from?”
“The ground?”
“I get that. But—there must be lots of gems, or else these would be worth something. Back on Earth you could polish them up and make tens of millions of dollars.”
“Why? Gems are everywhere. They’re pretty, and some of them are useful, but a lot of them are fairly useless or commonplace. That’s what we keep in the pile here. Dragons like them, though.”
“Dragons?”
“Yeah. They eat them like we eat plants. And they hoard them, ‘cause they’re afraid that they’ll run out and starve if they don’t have enough gems.” She snorted. “I’ve heard that they horde practically anything that they can get their talons on. So we trade most of the commonplace stuff to the dragons in exchange for pure metals.”
“Pure metals?” My head was spinning.
“They breath fire, you know. And can swim in lava. So it’s easy for them to purify metals. It’s a lot harder for ponies to do it, ‘cause you’ve got to build a really big furnace. About the only metal they won’t do is gold, ‘cause they want to keep it for themselves.”
“So you exchange gems for steel?”
“Yeah. Pretty smart trade, really. That pile of gems could be traded for enough steel to make another set of rails all the way back to Greenock.”
It still didn’t seem like a fair trade to me, but then I remembered that a planet had been discovered which was made largely of diamond. Someplace like that, diamonds would be nearly worthless, and things like steel might be quite valuable.
“It all gets sorted out in Manehattan,” Assay said. “I’ve been there—a whole bunch of unicorns look through everything and decide where to send it on to. It’s kind of neat to watch for a little while and then it gets boring.” She tilted her head towards the loading dock. “Wanna watch wagons get unloaded?”
I wasn’t sure how exciting that would actually be, but she was enthusiastic about it. I took one last look at the hill of gems, just to fix it firmly in my mind. That was something that I didn’t think I’d ever see in my life again, and followed her to the loading dock.
***
The loading arrangement was clever. The tracks had been built on an incline, so every time a railroad car got full, they’d release the brakes and let the train roll one car further ahead, then start loading that car.
The coal chute was attached to the loading dock in such a way that the ponies didn’t even have to back up. There were slats across the platform that the coal fell through, and a painted mark on the boards where a pony would stand to be on-target. It was obvious that they didn’t actually need that mark; of the mares and few stallions I saw unloading, not one of them bothered to look down at their hooves to see if they were on the mark.
An assistant—who was a foal—tugged a lever on the wagon, and the body tilted, dumping out the coal. He had a hoe that he’d use to pull any stray bits out, and then he’d trip a release and the wagon body would drop back down.
Every now and then, he’d kick a few lumps of loose coal into the chute before the next wagon arrived.
“Pretty neat, huh?”
I nodded. “How many teams do you have down there?”
“Usually a dozen or so. Any more than that and it gets too crowded. Sometimes if we’re working a narrow seam or side shaft, we don’t pull very many wagons up and stockpile it underground, and then spend a couple of days bringing it all up. Right now, though, we’re on a wide seam, so it’s working really efficiently. Kind of like harvest time on a farm, but we mine all year long.” She sighed. “Don’t tell Longwall I said this, but it used to be more fun before we had a train. We take turns having a couple days off now, but it used to be that we’d shut down the mine for a few days once or twice a moon, and just have fun. I liked that a lot better than the rotating schedule we have now. Maybe once they get the tracks built to Mumbles we can go back to that.”
“So the mine is always running?”
“We all get festival days off,” she said. “And Hearth’s Warming and I really shouldn’t be complaining. Is there anything else you want to see before dinner?”
“Is there a hotel here?”
“Nah, you can stay at our house. You can sleep in Lignite’s bed. She won’t mind.”
“I don’t mind the floor,” I said. I didn’t want to impose, and I wasn’t sure by what Assay had said if Lignite was going to be in the bed, too.
“Whatever you prefer. Alright, if you’ve seen everything, let’s get back home. Maybe dinner is ready.”