The miners are in a fraught, deteriorating state, and will require great pauses between their interrogation sessions — rest, feeding, the inevitable breaks to breathe. Much of what they say will be contradictory and incoherent, drenched in trauma that prevents them from remembering much of what they are asked, at first.
Their names are Knud and Sten. Hobbies, they do not understand. What sort of ridicule is this, to care for their... leisurely life, when they are not released to their families? Why are they not released, will they ever?
This line of thought seems to send one in a solid meltdown, the victim of accruing anguish. The second, older, looking in his mid-thirties, stays clearer-minded. He has a son, he says, a boy of three. He wants a message delivered, indeed. He wants his son to know his father lived well and justly and without fear. That he went — they went to their work in the mines, and did not abandon their families, but the weather turned without notice, and snows buried them in. They made every attempt against the ice and piled snow, they used their hands, their wisdom, their axes.
They'd had no forewarning of the snow. Had not prepared for an expedition spanning days. They did not bring food, commensurably. What few supplies were available or could be foraged were depleted within days, even rationed. One of the older miners — and here, the younger miner catches his face in his hands — passed first. Some of the survivors thought... to not waste his remains.
But they could not bring themselves to cannibalism, no matter how deep the hunger struck, how it hounded them at nights, whispered to them. How they ached and turned and saw their days numbered, tallied only through the change of the scant light they could peer through ice thicker than an arm's length, at their exit.
Another man died. Erik. Then, they were only six, and weak, and Knud — the younger man, finally peering between his fingers — heard them first, when the two dead stirred. At once, as if they hadn't died at disparate intervals, and they seemed to feel no pain at all, no need, no urges. No... hunger. No thirst.
And they asked of the remaining miners, in their dark, What will you give, to make the hunger stop?
And one man said, and Sten does not remember whom, it was not Knud, Knud stood beside him, they were out in the forest and he saw Knud in the moonlight, his eyes were dark, and Erik's blue like summer sea, and —
Knud takes over to say, it does not matter who asked. It does not matter who answered. They had nothing to give. Their axes were blunt now, their food consumed. They only had their worn bodies and their hunger.
no subject
Their names are Knud and Sten. Hobbies, they do not understand. What sort of ridicule is this, to care for their... leisurely life, when they are not released to their families? Why are they not released, will they ever?
This line of thought seems to send one in a solid meltdown, the victim of accruing anguish. The second, older, looking in his mid-thirties, stays clearer-minded. He has a son, he says, a boy of three. He wants a message delivered, indeed. He wants his son to know his father lived well and justly and without fear. That he went — they went to their work in the mines, and did not abandon their families, but the weather turned without notice, and snows buried them in. They made every attempt against the ice and piled snow, they used their hands, their wisdom, their axes.
They'd had no forewarning of the snow. Had not prepared for an expedition spanning days. They did not bring food, commensurably. What few supplies were available or could be foraged were depleted within days, even rationed. One of the older miners — and here, the younger miner catches his face in his hands — passed first. Some of the survivors thought... to not waste his remains.
But they could not bring themselves to cannibalism, no matter how deep the hunger struck, how it hounded them at nights, whispered to them. How they ached and turned and saw their days numbered, tallied only through the change of the scant light they could peer through ice thicker than an arm's length, at their exit.
Another man died. Erik. Then, they were only six, and weak, and Knud — the younger man, finally peering between his fingers — heard them first, when the two dead stirred. At once, as if they hadn't died at disparate intervals, and they seemed to feel no pain at all, no need, no urges. No... hunger. No thirst.
And they asked of the remaining miners, in their dark, What will you give, to make the hunger stop?
And one man said, and Sten does not remember whom, it was not Knud, Knud stood beside him, they were out in the forest and he saw Knud in the moonlight, his eyes were dark, and Erik's blue like summer sea, and —
Knud takes over to say, it does not matter who asked. It does not matter who answered. They had nothing to give. Their axes were blunt now, their food consumed. They only had their worn bodies and their hunger.
And then they woke.