Black Spring by Alison Croggon Page A

lessons were opening a new world, and I was making friends in the village and no longer missed my old home so fiercely. Damek and Lina remained close (which made a great deal of difference to the atmosphere of the household) and were the king and queen of our small domain. In the long, luminous twilights we ran free like young goats, kicking up our heels and pursuing our petty squabbles.
    As in the South, Lina was the most daring of us all. The only person who could check her impulses was Damek; if he made a rare objection to one of her suggestions, she would wrinkle her nose but would accede. Most of our games were harmless, but sometimes we did things that now make my hair stand on end.
    A couple of miles from the village there was an ancient tin mine, long played out, which was one of our favorite destinations, in part because we were all warned to stay away. We played games among its crumbling walls and lit fires in the stone chimney, but what fascinated us most of all was the shaft, a black square hole that plunged straight down into the earth. Once there had been a ladder, but all that remained were a few rusted iron spikes stuck into the shaft walls, with red streaks staining the rock below.
    Sometimes we all lay around its rim, trying to see how deep the hole was. The light petered out fast, leading to a bottomless blackness. It gave me a windy feeling in my tummy to look down, so I never dared to go too close to the lip, but others were braver and hung their heads over the edge, peering in.
    “If you got to the bottom,” said Damek, “you could look up and see stars in the sky, even in the daytime.”
    “You wouldn’t be able to see anything, because your head would be broken and you’d be dead,” said another boy.
    “I bet there’s bones down there,” said Lina. “Human skulls and animal bones. Or maybe it just goes on forever, and everybody who’s fallen in is still falling.”
    That thought made me crawl back a little farther.
    “I bet I could see something if I could get closer,” said Lina. “Why don’t you hold my feet, and I’ll have a proper look?”
    I shrieked with dismay, but my playmates thought this was a grand idea. Neither Lina nor Damek nor anyone else took any notice of my objections. After some discussion, it was decided that Damek should hold Lina’s ankles and lower her into the shaft. Their only concession to safety was that someone else should hold Damek’s waist, in case he slipped.
    I stood up and watched this operation with my knuckles in my mouth, fearing at any moment there would be a dreadful accident.
    Lina’s voice floated up, echoing in the shaft. “Can’t you get me any deeper?”
    The boys shifted slightly, their feet slipping on the turf. Damek’s shoulders were straining with effort.
    “You’re very heavy,” he said, panting. “Can’t you see anything?”
    “No,” she said. “It’s just the same, really, only darker and colder. I don’t think there’s any bottom at all.”
    Damek announced that if she didn’t come up now, he would drop her, and the boys pulled back, landing Lina on the edge of the mine like a big fish. It was only then that I realized I had been holding my breath the entire time.
    Lina stood up, all her clothes smeared with mud, her eyes sparkling. “That was fun!” she said. “Imagine if you had let me go! I might still be falling.”
    Despite Lina’s report, nobody else was keen to repeat the experiment, and soon our attention was diverted to safer pursuits. That night I had horrible nightmares about falling down a hole, but that was the worst effect of our adventure. All the same, the memory of Lina’s recklessness still gives me goose bumps.
    We were all busy with chores. The summer had been unusually golden, and there was a fat gathering-in for the winter. We laid out quartered apples and peaches to dry, and pickled mountains of cherries and walnuts and beans, and fattened pigs were brought in and slaughtered and turned