Chapter 36: End of Winter II

The more you looked, the more impressive the architecture of the city got.

The bathing rooms, with their outflows already cut and joined to the drains below.

The water channel that came in off the upper spring and ran past every house on the street. The walls, the door frames, the stairs, and every other thing one might take for granted right up until he has to make one himself.

However, the best of it was the insulation.

Hiccup took them into one of the better-preserved houses, climbed the stair onto the terrace, and showed them where the outer skin of the wall had fallen away and left the grey crumbling material packed into the cavity behind it.

"Two walls," he pulled some of the fuzzy grey material. "One inside the other, and this thing in between."

Dwarf grabbed some too and rubbed it between his fingers. "What is it?"

"I do not know. I have burned it, soaked it, ground it and left it under water for a month."

He said it cheerfully.

"It does not rot. It does not burn well. It holds heat better than anything I have ever worked with. I have been trying to work out how to make more of it for years."

Some of them nodded as they passed the insulation around, noticing for the first time that the inside of the house was warmer than the street, and that with no door in the doorway and no fire in the hearth.

"So," nodded Haaland. "Can we build like this?"

"No."

"No?"

"No, not a chance." Hiccup rapped the wall with his knuckles. "We could not cut a few hundred of these blocks in a season with the right tools, and we do not have the right tools."

He shook his head.

"But most of the houses on this block are almost whole. So our goal shouldn't be to build anything, but to repair them instead. That should be more than enough for everyone."

He took out the small map of the city he had drawn on his first year.

"On this block alone."

He looked up the length of the street.

"Just on this block there are more houses than we have families. A great deal more. Enough for them, their children, and their children's children, and we would still not fill the street."

"So that's it. Repairs. Are the walls all that need work?" hummed Dwarf.

"It's less than you think." Hiccup ticked it off. "Some clearing too. Half of these rooms are full of centuries of rubbish and fallen stone, but none of that is skilled work."

Skilled work did not require the few masons and carpenters among them, so it could be done fast.

"However, the roofs do, and that is going to be a problem, as you can see, the roofs are also made of stone slab. See those cracked ones? All those will need to be cut and replaced. I'm trusting both of you with that job."

Dwarf looked up where his finger was pointing, then down, then up again.

He took his time answering.

"So what you are telling me," he finally hummed as he exchanged a questioning glance at the other mason, who just shrugged, "is that on this entire island, of a hundred beautiful souls, there are exactly two of us who know how to work stone."

"...Yes."

"And one of them is me." He pointed at himself. Then exchanged another worried glance with the other mason. Then another look at all those broken stone slabs.

"Yes."

"Well."

He got down off his block, looked at Hiccup dead in the eyes as he grabbed him by the dwarf equivalent of the collar.

"I expect heavy payment for my work, dragon wannabe. Heavy coin, heavy compensation, oh and I also need a brothel built somewhere." He paused looking around, "Sometime."

Brothel?

For a second he didn't place the meaning of that 'brothel' word. Then all of a sudden he realized what it was, and the moment he did, his hormone fueled mind just flashed him with an image of her with so little clothing.

His ears blushed red. Stumbling as he blurted out whatever.

"Ye- Yeh- I mean, yeah-"

The half-man didn't let him humiliate himself though, instead going straight to business.

"How many are cracked?"

"O- On this block? Five or seven. Elsewhere it gets worse."

"What about the rest?"

"It's everything, doors, shutters, floors. Anything wooden rotted away centuries ago." He shrugged. "That is timber, the north forest is full of it, any man with an axe can be taught to hang a door in a morning. I can hang one myself, more or less."

Nobody had a better idea, which had to count as unanimous agreement.

They talked it round a while longer, and settled with the masons how fresh slabs might be cut out of the debris, who to put where.

Then they got to it.

Eivind, who was apparently good and fast with numbers, was put in charge of walking every house on the block and writing with charcoal what each one needed.

He was mostly done in a few days, and by the end of the week they had a list.

And so the goal for that first spring was cut into slate and laid flat in the paving of the plaza where every person on the island would see:

A home of their own for every family, before the next snow.

Quietly, everybody in the settlement took up a task.

The masons claimed the roof slabs and any men strong enough to be useful around stone. Several timber crews went north into the forests for doors and shutters and came back rambling about how bad the mud was.

The women made brooms out of birch twigs and bound cord.

They worked through the streets in a long slow line, sweeping out untold years of rotted leaves and the last of the dirty snow, and then started on the insides of the houses, room by room.

Toothless spent most of that week asleep across a doorway on those streets, apparently in everybody's way, being stepped over a couple of times.

Nobody put Dwarf in charge of anything.

It was just that he had the personality for the job.

He was the one who knew which blocks in the rubble were worth cutting and which were rotten through. After the first fortnight he was also the one who knew which man was worth putting on a chisel, who had lied about how steady his hands were.

He was also very up front and blunt with things, which Hiccup appreciated.

The timber crew started coming to the half-man about door frames, because the door frames had to sit in stone. The few smiths started consulting him for the details on their jobs.

He had opinions about all of it, delivered fast, almost always delivered funny, and correct often enough that arguing with him became tiresome.

By the end of that first moon the whole of it, masons, timber, the forges and the tool store, was going through one man who came up to the middle of your chest.

Nobody had put him there. It had just become the shortest path. He was answering so many questions a morning, so it was not at all surprising when the half-man became the hinge the whole operation hung from. Whether he meant to or not.

Though, again, Hiccup was fairly sure Dwarf had meant to.

One evening on the plaza, with most of the older men standing round the day's tally, Haaland ribbed the whole thing, saying something along the lines of I see the head of the artisans is standing tall, as though the post already existed.

Dwarf did not correct him.

In fact, the half-man had been salivating for somebody to offer him a glorious title for his efforts... He looked at Haaland, who was put out that his joke had not made anyone laugh, shrugged and simply thought Should I perhaps kiss this man?