Chapter 48: Soil and Seedlings II

The weight as enormous as it was, was not impossible to lift.

He set his feet, coiled his legs, and pressed the balls of his feet down into the earth.

Then he was standing there holding several hundredweight of cut stone against his chest, with half a dozen men staring at him and nowhere in particular to put it down, because the entire point of the thing was that it had to go up.

Fuck.

It dawned on him that dead lifting this block of rock had not been the smartest decision.

Still, he took a breath, worked his grip until both palms were flat under the belly of the block, and pushed it straight up off his chest.

It went past his chin. Past his eyes.

His arms locked out and the block came to rest above his head, flat side down, resting on nothing but his hands. The whole man-length of it up there like a table lifted over a crowd.

The men underneath scattered.

Then he was walking along the ramp with a wall of stone held over him, the load turning very slightly as it went, the packed earth visibly compressing under each step.

At the top course he tipped it forward, took the weight down onto his shoulder and then onto his forearms, and lowered it into its seat.

The next days flowed in a similar fashion. Wake up at midnight, work until sunset, sleep.

He got the block onto one shoulder, repetition had taught him to do it properly.

Flat against flat, one arm hooked over the top, and set off along the second terrace toward the western end, because that was where the wall was worst and that was where it was going.

Which is how he came off the hill and got his first proper look at the fields.

This time there was a plume of dirt and dust standing off the far end of it, moving, and under the dust was a very familiar shape going flat out down the length of the field with something dragging behind him.

Well, they actually did it.

It was Toothless who was running around up and down the strip, and the thing on Toothless was a harness.

The whole assembly was buckled together with iron that had very recently been bar stock.

To be fair, it was not a good plough.

Hiccup could see a couple of things wrong with it from where he stood. It was also cutting a channel the length of the entire strip in the time it took a man to jog along with it.

At the end of the run Toothless swung wide, kicked round with that ridiculous economy he had, and came back up the field on the next line with his tongue out, his wings folded flat, his whole body driving the harness as if he had been bred for it.

It was strange.

To say the least.

Hiccup himself had agreed to lending the dragon to break the earth some weeks ago, as part of the terms, and he had meant it. As part of the terms.

It couldn't be helped, since there was no other way to work the ground efficiently.

In fact. He frowned. That word was the only reason any of what he was watching down the field was happening.

Nothing else on this hill would have set a strap on Toothless.

Thing was. He had also privately assumed it would be midsummer before anybody managed to build a thing a Night Fury could actually pull.

Guess he had been wrong.

The old hunched farmer explained later: "Your bud Eivind drew it. He sat down with a stick of charcoal that same evening, had the whole thing on a board by morning, he handed it to the brothers and went off somewhere else."

The old farmer's mouth twitched.

"He has not been back down here since. That brat said the harness was a solved problem."

"How did you get Toothless to wear it?"

Hiccup was genuinely curious.

"Oh, he did not wear it. Not to start."

His dry mouth twitched again.

"That took three days. First day the beast looked at it. The next he let the lads lay it over his back and then the dragon walked straight into the sea with it. The next day somebody turned up with a bucket of fish, put it down at the far end of the field where the dragon could see."

The farmer shrugged.

"He gets paid in fish, actually. Your dragon is smart, boyo."

After that, the old farmer went his way, probably to have his lunch, and down the field Toothless finished the run, dropped his head, and shook himself hard enough to rattle the whole rig.

Then looked back up the hill, directly at Hiccup, with an expression of such transparent and enormous smugness that there was no mistaking it for anything else. As in look at me go.

Hiccup raised an eyebrow.

Do not look so pleased with yourself, you lizard. You are pulling a plough for fish.

Toothless's ears went down and back, clearly offended.

Hiccup shifted the stone on his shoulder and let out a long tired sigh as he squeezed his eyes with a free hand.

He had been dreading this, if he was honest.

He had agreed to the harness sober and clear-eyed, yet had spent every day since chewing on the picture of it. Toothless in a strap.

Toothless doing a beast's work for men who were still, most days, a little afraid of him. He had rehearsed the apology he was going to owe the dragon, and had privately prepared himself for a week of sulks and a cold shoulder at the fire.

Instead he was down there having a good time and showing off to the hill, he even had his own club of fans now.

This was just...

Stupid.

The girls were at the water line. Hiccup saw them from a thousand paces out and felt his whole soul try to leave through his back.

It was, without doubt whatsoever, the worst part of his day.

About a dozen of the younger women had been put on the boats a moon back. Scrubbing out the hulls where they lay drawn up on the shingle, scraping the thwarts, sluicing the bilges with sea water.

The ones between fourteen and twenty-two.

They worked hard all day and conducted the entire settlement's social business in the gaps.

They were loud.

Loud in a perturbing kind of way. They talked over each other at a speed even he struggled to follow and found things funny for reasons that were never explained. Every single time he came past, something kept happening, some joke or something that must have been hilarious.

The smile strained on him. He had to force it, because he was exhausted by this bullshit.

He could have gone the long way round. Except with several hundredweight of cut stone on one shoulder, that would prove difficult, even for him.

So he came past them with the block on his shoulder, trying his best to not make any eye contact. They were quiet as he came up. Deliberately, obviously, and suspiciously, quiet.

Not that it lasted long.

One of them made a sound she was very obviously trying to contain, and the whole thing came apart into giggling.

Hiccup stopped.

He turned round.

All of a sudden, twelve girls were intensely occupied with their buckets. One of them had her entire face hidden behind a wet cloth. Another pair were holding each other up.

...What.

Why are they like this? Do they have a problem? Did I ever do anything to them? What is it. Do I perhaps have something on me-

Wait.

He paused. His brain trying to process what was. What he. What the.

He looked down at himself.

... Ah.

Then it landed, in the subtle manner an anvil would, that he had not worn a shirt in public since... well, since ever, really.

There were reasons for that.

Yeah. In fact, there were extremely sensible reasons for that and he could have listed them all. He did not feel the cold. Every stitch of cloth on this island was years old and needed by people who did. He had been sweating through stone dust since morning.

Also, the last shirt he had owned, he had burned himself that winter, on the grounds that it was stiff with blood and torn most of the way off him anyway.

He had never replaced it and had never thought to.

The only actual piece of clothing (save his pants and what was underneath) was that long black wool robe. And he only wore that because he liked the look of it.

Not subtle, are you.

It had genuinely not occurred to him that anybody would be deliberately looking.

He glanced down again.

Well, he was, and this was the first time he had actually taken stock of it, quite a lot larger than he used to be.

Larger, yeah. That was the best way of putting it.

The forearms were the obvious part, because they were in front of him, grabbing this damn stupid piece of wall. But it went further than that, and he found himself following it up.

Shoulders, which had widened to the point where he sometimes had to turn sideways in a narrow doorway.

The chest and the back, which had thickened out of all recognition somewhere between the pirates and last month.

The sheer bloody height of it, actually, which he had mostly noticed by hitting his horns on lintels.

All of a sudden, it made sense.

Hiccup looked at his own arms, then at the girls, and then at his own arms again. He had absolutely no idea what to do with his face.

That must have been a fine thing to watch.

Because one of them, a particularly pretty one, kept stealing looks up and down, and that got her a light elbow on the ribs from the others, and the giggling started all over again.

Are they-

He stood in the middle of the path with several hundredweight of masonry on one shoulder and felt his ears go hot. Bewildered.

Are they flirting with me?

Is this- is that it?

It was, on the face of it, absurd.

He had gone around killing grown men with his bare hands. He had domesticated dragons, emptied a slaver galleon unarmed, and survived an encounter with a literal evil mountain.

For the love of Thor, his closest friend was the unholy child of lightning and death itself.

So how come a dozen girls at a water line were, apparently, all giggling about it.

No. No, no no no no.

He shook his head, flustered again at being reminded of the gods damned kiss. The kiss that devilish, brazen, temptress of a woman stole from him, his first kiss!

ARGHHHH!

How was it possible? He had completely forgotten about it! Why did he need to be reminded again!

Nuh uh. Absolutely not. No walking away now.

He turned and set off up the terrace at a pace that was frankly indefensible for a man carrying a wall, which produced a fresh gale of laughter behind him that he heard every single note of, because of course he would.

At the fire that evening he looked up from his bowl and she was already looking at him, dead in the eye, sly smile and tentative eyes and all.

Th- This woman just- just has no shame!

She had heard. Obviously she had heard. She must have heard! Twelve girls at the water line was the most explosive means of starting gossip, for the love of the gods, of course!

She did not say anything. She had no need to.

She simply kept holding his eyes across the fire and let one corner of her mouth go further up, slowly, into the most transparently villainous expression he had ever seen on a human face. And Hiccup, couldn't help but be reminded again of the kiss.

About how fast she had done it. How completely unbothered she had been about doing it in front of the entire crew.

I- If she keeps this up.

He gulped, his mouth dry.

I- I might actually end up doing things to her.

The first seedlings of barley came up some eight days after they went in.

Not much of it. A pale green fuzz along the top three strips, a hand's breadth of shoot standing out of the black soil in rows so straight they looked deliberate, which of course they were.

The oats followed three days later. The rye took longer and came up patchy at the thin western end, exactly where the old farmer had said it would.

Somebody spotted the first ones at dawn. A few minutes later everyone was standing along the top wall looking down at a field that had gone very faintly, unmistakably green.

Hiccup stood at the end of that line a while.

Because this had been one moon of the hardest work any of them had ever done. Turned, sown, harrowed, guarded from the birds by a militia of eight-year-olds. And now, at last, growing.

It kept coming.

Thin pale rows of it, straightening out of the soil, a little further along every morning.

Which was when the weather, having been merely fine for a week and a half, decided to turn into a complete and utter drought.