The Great Crossing

They gave me a mop.

I want you to appreciate this. In the Rumbling Deeps — a fortress built by dwarves who considered siege weaponry a form of light entertainment — my instrument of punishment was a wooden stick with a bundle of cave moss tied to the end. It smelled like something had died in it. Something small and disappointed.

"You'll start with the Great Crossing," said Warden Grit, a dwarf so square he was practically a cube. He pointed down a tunnel with the enthusiasm of someone directing traffic to a funeral. "Second level. Report at fourth bell. Bring your own bucket."

The Great Crossing, for those fortunate enough never to have mopped it, is the main thoroughfare of the Rumbling Deeps' second level. It's where four major tunnels meet in a vaulted intersection the size of the Grand Hall, carved with pillars thick as oak trunks and lit by a hundred iron lanterns. Centuries ago, it was a place of ceremony — you can still see the faded murals on the ceiling, dwarves doing heroic things with axes and looking stern about it.

Now it's a corridor. A very busy corridor.

Specifically, it's the corridor used by the fuel miners on their way to and from the Great Forge. Every shift — and the Great Forge runs three shifts a day, because apparently fire never sleeps — a column of soot-blackened dwarves marches through the Great Crossing carrying barrels of coal, carts of coke, and the occasional confused bat that got tangled in someone's beard.

They marched in. I mopped. They marched out. I mopped. They marched back in, because the shift changed, and I mopped again. The floor was wet for approximately eleven seconds at a time before the next wave of coal-dusted boots turned it back into a charcoal mural.

It was, and I say this with the full weight of my academic vocabulary, pointless.

"Oi, Mop Boy!" shouted a miner on his way through, a dwarf with a beard so thick with soot it looked like he was smuggling a badger. "Missed a spot!"

He pointed at the floor directly behind him. The floor he had just walked across. With his coal-covered boots. The spot he had, in the most literal sense possible, just created.

"Thank you," I said, because — as we have established — I become polite when I want to scream.

By the sixth hour, I had developed a system. Mop left, mop right, step back, let the miners through, mop left, mop right, step back. It was meditative, in the way that repeatedly hitting yourself in the head with a book is meditative — technically rhythmic, but nobody would call it relaxing.

My arms ached. My back ached. My dignity had ached for so long it had gone numb and wandered off somewhere, probably to sit with my mother in the garden.

And the miners kept coming.

I began to wonder if there was a finite number of fuel miners in the Rumbling Deeps, or if they were being manufactured somewhere. A fuel miner factory, deep in the lower levels, stamping them out like coins. One soot-covered dwarf, coming right up. And another. And another.

By the eighth hour, I had stopped mopping in any meaningful sense and was simply pushing the same puddle of grey water back and forth across the flagstones like a very sad pendulum.

That's when the boredom really set in.

The dangerous kind of boredom. The kind that makes you think.