Chapter 49: Soil and Seedlings III

The houses came a long way faster than the fields. That surprised Dwarf more than it surprised anybody else, apparently.

He had spent the better part of his life laying rubble and mud into walls that fell down inside a decade.

Then he had washed up here, and found out he knew absolutely nothing.

As in, nothing at all.

This stuff was simply crazy, the people that had made this place were simply out of their minds.

Truth be told, he had never been anybody. He had no great works to his name, and no name worth saying twice. Just thirty years of being another man's little funny slave, in another man's yard, on another man's wall.

Then his master, who he had a relatively good relationship with, had died. Then he was on a slave ship, then a beach, then in... In this fucking crazy place.

At some point, he had simply decided he would not be wasting this chance.

And it had been hard. That much was true.

And it had been a moon of stumbling into the right answers by way of a great many wrong ones.

And yet, it was working now, and it showed. The half man had not stopped grinning about it. His crews had ended up picking this street on purpose.

It was not the grandest abandoned houses in the ruins. Not the ones nearest the plaza. Instead they were the ones where the roof held. Where the walls stood plumb. Where the double wall and the stonework had not split.

There were far more of those than any of them had expected.

It was a fact, most of the buildings inside that enormous abandoned, mysterious, and definitely not suspicious city had come through the centuries eerily untouched.

Which meant ruins was the wrong word for the place, and always had been.

They had simply been left.

Either way, it had been clear from the first morning that the work in front of them was not building, as the dragon man had advertised, in his infinite wisdom.

It was repair, and repair is a fraction of the labour.

The roofs came first.

Most of them needed nothing more than the slabs lifted, relaid, and the ridge packed tight again. A few had a support beam gone soft underneath, the timber crews were still walking north for those.

The hard part was none of that.

The hard part was that the men who built this city had not stacked their walls.

They had fitted them.

Which was not the whole reason why they were crazy. But it was reason enough:

Every block in that place had been cut in the particular shape of the hole it would fill. Like those little puzzles he had seen nobility play. Shaped on every face to lock into the six or seven blocks pressed around it.

Every piece keyed into its neighbours, the whole thing holding itself up by the shape of its own pieces and it was a complete nightmare.

Magnificent, in the wrong direction.

The moment you had to replace one, you were in a great deal of trouble.

You cannot square off a fresh block and drop it in. It has to be cut to match the hollow that was left behind, and that hollow has angles and steps and hooked faces on it that some man worked out an indeterminate number of ages ago, and is not available to explain.

Dwarf spent his first fortnight crying over this, actually.

He would measure, cut, have it hauled up, and find it standing proud by the width of a fingernail on one face. Take it down. Cut again. Find it slack on another.

Ten blocks wasted in the bat of an eye.

By the end of the moon he was doing it in a few fewer attempts.

"It is not masonry," he announced, grandiosely, standing up on a bench on their improvised common dining hall. "Masonry is stacking. This is carpentry. In stone. Done by men who plainly hated their apprentices."

Then came the doors, which meant hinges, the common enemy of humankind.

Then the hearths.

Every house had one, cut into the wall to provide warmth, with a flue that ran up through the stone. Small problem though: Every single one was choked solid with centuries of nest and soot.

It was disgusting.

So, as most problems do, the solution was found in the most innocent of places.

Child labor.

The filthy job fell to whichever children were on standby and away from bird duty. The children were all giggly and happy to help until they saw what the job actually consisted of.

Then they just stopped being happy and giggly anymore.

Not his problem though.

Dwarf was a very busy man now. Shutters, floors, drains in the bathing rooms, which ran down into those magnificent sewers under the street.

A whopping dozen houses had been finished by the end of that moon.

Another few had repaired roofs on and no doors.

Which meant that of their objective, cut into the stone in the plaza at the end of the winter, that cringe 'a home of their own for every family' goal, had a third of it already standing.

At this rate it would be finished before the snow came back.

Which raised a quiet question nobody had quite sat down to answer.

Family.

That word was important.

There were about a hundred people. Most of them young. Some decent number of them women of an age to be thinking about it.

More importantly all of them free for the first time in years, some of them for the first time in their lives.

So you could imagine... Living on a warm, safe island, with a great deal of hard labour in the day to raise the mood, and absolutely nothing whatsoever to do at night.

Yeah.

The result was not difficult to predict.

A handful had come off that galleon already pregnant. Some couples among them. Only a handful. Slavers do not tend to sell husband and wife together, and had no reason to care.

The rest of it had happened here, most of it had happened early. In those first foul weeks, when nobody knew whether any of them would see the spring, and a person who wanted somebody to hold on to did not spend too long thinking about long term consequences.

Which meant nearly every couple was young, new, and had been welded together in the worst month of their lives. That on top of everything that had already happened down in those caves over the winter, which was where most of the pregnancies had come from in the first place.

Almost none of them were married.

Not out of defiance.

It was simply that there was no priest on the island, no chief, nobody at all who had authority to say the words. So a thing that everywhere else in the world comes with a ceremony here came with a shrug and a shifted sleeping mat.

The women carrying children got a roof first.

There had been some of those a moon ago and there were more now.