Chapter 47: Soil and Seedlings I

The island had not been idle while they were gone.

Which was a good thing.

The first strip was already cleared when the ship sailed. Centuries of scrub and bramble and half-buried stone had come out of it a handful at a time, and after that the weeds, and after that the few young trees that had started creeping onto the fields.

Then the tilling.

They broke the top with the few repurposed tools they had, turning it over a foot at a time so the frost and the air could get down into it.

By the time the ship came back with the seed, the hillside past the headland was not a hillside any more.

It was the beginning of an actual field.

Turned, raked, and lying open and black in long even lines. Waiting.

The men had not stopped there.

With the fishing crews gone south, and the boats drawn up, and nobody left who knew how to work the shallows, a good thirty pairs of hands had suddenly had nothing to do with themselves.

So another pair of strips had been cleared to bare soil and were most of the way through the tilling, and there was a third with the scrub off it and the stone still to shift.

The hunchback farmer walked the length of all of it every evening, with his hands behind his back.

The sowing began barely an hour after the ship touched the southern shore.

Barley went in first and highest.

A little short of thirty sacks of it, up on the top three strips where the wind comes across the shoulder of the hill, because barley does not mind wind the way other things do.

The old farmer was immovable about that.

Oats below it. A little over nineteen sacks into the deepest of the soil.

Rye on the poorest ground at the western end. All eleven sacks, which was less than half of what had been asked for, and it went where the soil ran thin over the rock, because rye will come up in dirt that nothing else will touch.

After that the rest, in beds rather than strips, close to the path where they could be watched. Turnip and beans and the two sacks of peas. Onion. Garlic.

The southern beans Hiccup swore would take in the summer heat.

The vine cuttings, some forty of them, into a sheltered corner with a great deal of ceremony and no expectation whatsoever of anything for four years.

Last of all, the herbwife's crate.

The medicinal herbs went into a walled patch of their own, beside the old halls, on ground a handful of the women had prepared themselves and which nobody else was allowed to touch.

The argument about how many strips to work that year had happened before any of it, back in the hall.

Five strips.

The old farmer was certain that five was the number.

"One terrace, worked properly, will feed this settlement and leave grain in the barn. Two worked badly will not feed anybody."

He had a way of talking about fields as though they were people he had known a long time and did not entirely trust.

"Eight is greedy. Eight is-"

"Eight," repeated Hiccup.

"Eight?" The farmer could not decide whether to laugh at the boy or grieve for him. "With what hands?"

Hiccup frowned, "We will have more hands."

"You will have more mouths, which is not the same thing. They will arrive hungry, and they will not know a hoe from a hole in the ground, and there is not an ox on this rock."

He shook his head.

"Listen. A field you cannot tend properly is not a field. It is a gift to the birds and a nursery for every thistle on this island. Plant what you can tend. Not one furrow more."

Hiccup rubbed his eyes.

They had been at this the better part of an hour and he could already see it becoming the next hour.

Right. Enough.

"Listen."

He put both hands flat on the table.

"I am not saying your instincts are wrong. They are not. You know many things about farming and such, and I may not. If it were only about this year you would be right, and I would shut up."

The farmer opened his mouth.

"But you are missing the point here, and I have made up my mind. So let me say the whole of it, then you can shout at me."

The farmer shut his mouth.

"This settlement is going to grow."

He leaned back, the way you say a thing you have already checked.

"Not maybe. It will. Sooner or later there will be more people standing on these ruins than there are standing on it now. Some of them will wash up the way you did, half dead and off a wreck, some of them might have been slaves, same as you lot used to be."

He paused.

"And most of them I am going to go and free myself."

Nobody dared interrupt, though there were frowns.

"So when it happens. When it is not a hundred of us on this island, when it is many times that and every one of them arrives hungry. What exactly do we feed them with?"

Hiccup spread his hands.

"Stubble? Good intentions? We cannot conjure a field in a fortnight. You have spent an hour telling me so."

"So you would rather break our backs now."

"I would rather break our backs now than bury people later."

He shrugged.

"The work happens before you need it, or it does not happen at all."

The old farmer chewed on that, he did not like it.

"What about next year?" he tried. "Next year you will have last year's stubble and last year's people, and by then you will actually know what you are doing-"

"Next year we will be many more hundred."

That stopped the conversation altogether.

He lost it in the hall that first day. Went away, and came back the following morning with terms. What exactly he offered got settled in pieces over the following week.

Some of it was about the order in which the houses on the upper street would be finished.

Some of it was about who got first call on the boats once the fishing started properly.

A good deal of it was about the dragon, and what the dragon would be doing between now and midsummer, which was a card Hiccup had been holding since the word ox first came up.

Reluctantly.

By the end of the week they had agreed upon seven fields.

Oddr watched the whole performance from a stool with his hands folded on his stick.

"He did not argue you into it," he told the old farmer afterward as they walked. "The lad is good with words."

From that day on there were never fewer than thirty people working the terraces, and that was already too many.

The houses still had no doors. The streets were still choked with fallen stone and the timber crews had to walk north for every beam. Somebody had to fish, and somebody had to cook.

There were also sixteen women carrying children. Some could still work; others could no longer lift anything, and by midsummer most would be able to do very little at all.

Every scrap of clothing any of them owned had come off a slaver's back or out of their own years in a hold, and all of it was coming apart at the seams.

The field work alone took the better part of a moon.

Hiccup had assumed, in the way a man assumes about work he has never done, that sowing a field meant walking along it and throwing seed at it.

He was corrected about this at some length, and not gently, by a squat man out of the fjords with forearms like mooring posts.

So it went in by hand.

One furrow at a time, walking backwards down a line, there was no way to hurry it and no clever trick that made it faster. Too shallow and the crows had it inside a day; too deep and it would exhaust itself and the seedlings would never come up at all.

It should be said, because the men working those strips would have said it if anybody had asked them, that Hiccup was down there first and left last.

Every day of that moon.

He worked and repaired the stones that held the terraces together. All of it, on all seven of the fields, which was the job nobody wanted and which he could do at a rate that made grown men stop and lean on their tools to watch.

Walking a strip with a hide sled behind him, piling the tumbled stone onto it as he went, dragging it back up to the wall it had come out of, and coming down for the next run.

What took a gang of eight the whole morning took him about as long as it took to walk the length of the field.

Then, when he was done with the wall he broke the hard ground at the eastern end, where the tools were useless, with an iron bar, alone, for days.

He carried the water up for the beds. He carried the seed down.

Somebody worked out, eventually, that he must have been doing roughly the work of a dozen men and then going home to spend half the night on something else since he didn't sleep.

That was the whole reason the extra work never turned into a grievance.

There is a particular sourness that settles on a work gang when the person who insisted on the extra work is not doing any of it.

There was none of that here.

The opposite settled instead. Men who had come out grumbling in the dark went home in the evening arguing about who had shifted the most stone that day, and turned up the next morning earlier to argue about it further. The younger ones began racing him at things nobody could win at, and losing at them cheerfully. By the end of the second week the whole hillside had a mood on it that had not been there before, a rough good humour, the kind that comes off a crew that has decided it is doing something.

It is very difficult to complain about a man who is out-working all of you.

There were other things, and they arrived one at a time, each of them obvious in hindsight.

Ground that has lain fallow for centuries is rich.

It is also carrying years of weed seed, and the moment you turn that soil over and let the light into it you have not planted a field.

You have started a war.

A war that lasts until harvest, and it is fought by hand, bent double, one weed at a time.

Manure was the other one.

Thirty-two animals and twenty ducks or so, for seven massive strips, was, in the old farmer's professional assessment, "a joke, impossible."

A proper farm runs on what comes out of the byre through the winter. They had one winter's worth of nothing.

What they did have was... the cliffs.

The northern faces had been a rookery of wild dragons for a while now, and the ledges below the nests carried a good depth of what dragons leave behind them when they eat fish.

And so sack after sack of dragon dung came down on the sled.

One foul load at a time, until the smell became the norm, rather than the exception.

It worked out better than any of them expected.

They still had no ox, though. So the ground itself had to be broken by hand. Thirty people breaking the earth a foot at a time with the few tools they had.

The block came out of the ground in the third week.

It was part of the old retaining wall on the terrace. A cut course-stone the length of a man and better than half as thick, which had slumped out of its seat and rolled down into the soil, and which had to go back up, because the wall it had come out of was holding the terrace above it in place.

Half a dozen men had been on it since the morning meal.

They had it up on rollers and two levers under it and a rope round it, and they had got it most of the way up the ramp of packed earth they had built for the purpose.

It had taken them until nearly midday, and it was going well right up until the rope went.

Hiccup heard it about to go.

The sound of fibres letting go one at a time, like dry grass in a fist.

He got there before the second lever came out, which meant he arrived at roughly the same moment the stone did, and he put both hands under the down-slope face of it and pushed.

It stopped.

There was a man's leg under where it would have gone.