Edda walked down the center of the old market street in the middle of the Tram Ward. Her iron-tipped ash-wood cane struck the paving stones with the sharp, rhythmic crack of a stonemason checking a face of limestone.
Her eyes burned behind her squinted lids, a dull, throbbing pressure hammering against the back of her temples as her pupils—accustomed for twelve years to the dim, merciful gloom of underground galleries and sputtering animal fat lamps—tightened wildly against the level flood of morning sun. But she refused to lower her head. She refused to wrap a woolen rag across her face like the frightened shopkeepers crouching in their doorways. She was sixty-one winters old. She had worked seventy-foot shafts in the Quarry when the province still had four seasons. She wouldn’t blink before the sun she had helped tear out of the machine.
Yet she looked around the market square. Then, the plain clarity of daylight made her stomach turn with a cold, hollow rage.
In the dark, poverty had possessed a kind of murky, leveling dignity. Beneath the copper lamps, everyone’s skin had looked the same pale, rotten-egg green. Everyone’s clothes had seemed to be the same uniform shade of grease-stained wool. And the decay of the town public works had been disguised by the deep, forgiving shadows that hid the cracked lintels, the rotten gutters, and the heaps of uncollected refuse.
