"Faces? Oh, you mean those things Old Gory painted." The burly woman hefted her pickaxe with ease, tossed the waterskin into the basket on her back, and led them up the slope without even breathing hard.
She wasn't reluctant to talk about the painting on the rock by the village entrance. In fact, she was almost casual about it, nearly making Kraft doubt his judgment from the night before. "After that, he seemed like a different person. He went on all day about how they could come back and things like that. Then he started painting and leading people into the caves."
"But don't you dare say anything bad about him or those paintings in front of other people. Some folks really believe that nonsense, and they won't listen to reason."
Her thick hand wiped the sweat from her brow. The salty moisture seeped into the dead skin and calluses, dampening the raw, reddened cracks left by tools that didn't fit her hands.
Even in a place where women had to shoulder plenty of physical labor, few took up a pickaxe themselves like their landlady did. There were a few others like her in the village, too. By contrast, there seemed to be fewer men than in the other village of comparable size they'd visited. A few faces still had the look of childhood, and were only a few years older than Yvonne; the rest were elderly men too frail to work.
"What happened after that?"
"When the old mine collapsed, Old Gory lost his son." She wiped the sweat from her palms on her sleeve, turning over the old story as casually as she tended to the cracks in her hands. "It's a bit farther up. These days, if you want to dig out a few chunks of ore,