Chapter 35: End of Winter I

Spring had come at last, and the snows the winter and the long blizzard had left behind on the island were beginning to melt.

It had been going for half a moon.

The white mantle, thick as a man is tall in places, was running off in meltwater, and the ice along the frozen shores was bound to crack before long.

Which meant water. Some great deal of it.

It came off every roofless hall and down every broken stair and along every gutter, the whole plateau murmured with it from one far end to the other.

Inside a few days the plaza had become a shallow lake.

The accumulated piles of snow on the north walls went grey in a matter of days and sank in on themselves and the air, for the first time, smelled of something besides cold stone.

It smelled of mud, which in actuality was not much of an improvement.

Hiccup stood at the top of the stairs running to the old halls and watched the men come and go out of the caves that had been their shelter from the harsh winter.

Toothless was up on the roof, front paws over the edge, flat on the warm stone in the first proper sun of the year. Hiccup was pretty sure the dragon was having another nap.

You sleep too much, buddy.

Toothless just purred at his bitter remarks, as usual.

In any case. The caves under the eastern slope were not actually caves. Instead they resembled cellars of the abandoned citadel, cut and pillared and roofed, running back under the hill further than anybody had walked.

They were cramped, humid, and they smelled of too many people living on top of one another, and they held heat the way nothing above ground did.

The decision to step away from the caves had been Oddr's.

It had been some four moons of living inside those cellars. Long moons sleeping in rows with the wind screaming somewhere past the rock, spaces too cramped to put anything and no privacy at all.

Hiccup had inadvertently spent the winter listening to them down there.

Every discussion, silly argument, every bitter remark. Every long, nightly session of hushed and secretive love making by the ex-slaves, that too.

He rolled his eyes.

Sometimes my ears can turn into a curse.

Or a blessing. He had also listened to every child who would not stop crying, every cough, and every fever, and had been there to help as best as he could. He liked to think he had helped save lives.

He knew exactly how close some of them had come. Winter was harsh.

It was good that the snow was finally going.

They had spent all morning hauling furs and makeshift pots and the little they owned up into the light, setting it down in the wet plaza because there was nowhere else to put it yet.

"Ninety-six," murmured Oddr, who had seen him sitting alone, lowering himself onto the step beside him. "In case you were not counting."

"I was."

"Of course you were," The old man groaned as he settled. "Plus the dozen or so babes coming."

"Sixteen."

Oddr paused, looking at the plaza below for a good moment before his eyebrows shot up. "Sixteen?"

Hiccup chuckled, his finger pointed.

"Ask the one with the red hair, and a couple of others. They have not told anybody yet." He shrugged. "I can faintly hear their heartbeats about a month before pregnancy shows."

Hiccup realized the smug grin on his face may have been out of place, it made the old man bark a laugh.

"Well, that is a strange thing to be able to do, man dragon." Oddr chuckled with enormous relish, nudging him with his elbow, "Sure none of them are yours?"

Hiccup rolled his eyes.

Does this old goat only live for teasing me?

"Only joking, only joking." The grin sharpened.

He stood quiet a moment, for a second he dared think the old man would just shut his mouth and stay quiet. Then he opened his mouth again, almost giggling.

"I forgot. You have eyes for one particular blonde somebody. Our Hiccup would never, ever have a side fling. Have I got that right?"

Hiccup turned his back on him. "You are a wicked old man."

For some reason that had Oddr laughing until he had to hold his own ribs.

Whatever.

Hiccup got up with haste, dusted himself off, and went back to work.

The caves had kept them alive, and yet the caves were not a home.

That was the whole of the problem, everybody had arrived at it by the end of the winter without need of explanation.

There is no way so many people can spend every winter of their lives cramped in a hole.

As said, there was no privacy, no space, no way for a family to be a family, and by the third month living in such close quarters had bred resentment.

They needed houses.

Actual houses, with walls and doors, that a person could shut behind them and call their own.

How lucky was it that they were standing in the middle of thousands of them. That was the strange gift of the place. Nobody had to build anything.

The abandoned ruins were here.

Sure, sure, some parts of the ruins were that, ruins, in fact whole streets on the northern side were gone, some of which had their stone melted down, or their walls crumbled. Hel, some didn't exist, the bedrock itself gone scarred and displaced with everything reduced to rubble.

Still, most of it, the great tedious majority of it, was standing exactly as it had been left.

Meaning, most of it was in relatively good shape. Not livable, at least not yet, not without some heavy repairs and much-needed scrubbing and furnishing, but it was a start.

That was why on that first morning of thaw, they began moving.

Hiccup took the people who would have to do the work and showed them what they had.

Oddr came, and Haaland, and both of the masons, and another few older men the settlement had begun deferring to for their judgement. Eivind had also come, with some scrap of charcoal already in his hand.

They started at the eastern colonnade, where a wall had come down at some point in the last few centuries and left a clean cut standing open to the weather.

"Look at the joins," Hiccup kneeled down as he signaled.

They looked at the joins.

"No. As in actually look. Come get up close."

Dwarf got up close.

He got up close the way he got up close to everything, which was by dragging over whatever happened to be lying about and climbing onto it. In this case a fallen block that came to the knee on everybody else, which put the seam roughly level with his nose.

Because of course, Dwarf was a dwarf.

He stood about level with the middle of a man's chest, with a mason's shoulders, a mason's forearms and a head that would not have looked out of place on a man half again his size.

Nobody on the island knew what his actual birth-given name was.

In fact, he had handed them the name himself, walking up to a fire full of strangers and announcing it before any of them could think up something worse.

Which was actually a sound move.

Some still preferred to refer to him as the half-man. He answered to both and preferred the shorter one, on the grounds that it was one syllable and he was a busy fraction (of a man).

In any case, he looked intensely at the joints on the stone.

Then he took his knife out.

Then he spent a long time trying to get the point of it into the seam between two blocks with a CLACK, CLACK, CLACK, and failing. The whole group stood there for a good dozen minutes, wet with mud to the ankles watching him fail.

"There is nothing between them," he announced at last.

"No."

"No clay. No mud. Not a scrap of packing."

He said it casually as he turned around. Yet his face betrayed a hint of bewilderment. He was an experienced mason after all. Working rock was his thing, and this should have been easy.

He put his hand flat on the wall and looked again.

"What in the name of every god is holding them up? These are not even mortared!"

"Well, that's what I wanted to show you," chuckled Hiccup. "Those stones aren't held together by anything. They are just cut to fit with each other. Every single one of them. Every block in this city was shaped for the exact hole it sits in and no other."

Dwarf looked at him from his lower vantage point, all incredulous and bewildered.

Stood silent for a long moment, staring at them all in circles as if this was some kind of prank they were playing on him.

"Here I thought that a kid turned dragon was the most atrocious thing my eyes would ever need to see." His small hands flailed around, "That's minimum a thousand years of work!"

Hiccup huffed, amused. "It may have been a great deal more than that."

He was kidding here, no one knew exactly how old this place was.

Either way, he walked them down the colonnade and showed them the drainage next.

Those were grooves cut into the pavement, so shallow you would never see them unless somebody made you look. All of them running toward one channel, and the channel running into a grate, and the grate running underneath to somewhere else.

"Where does it go?"

"Under us." Hiccup tapped the flagstone with his heel. "There is another city under this one. Drains. Whole tunnels of them, running the length of the plateau and out below the western cliff."

He straightened up, half turning to them.

"That is why nobody has got sick this winter. You have been drinking out of the upper spring and pissing into these grates for many months, the two are different systems, I'm sure of that."

He shrugged.

They continued walking soon thereafter.

And Haaland, who had spent more years in armies than he cared to count, where bad water often killed more men than swords ever did, went very quiet.