Chapter 50: Soil and Seedlings IV

While the men worked the fields and the houses, the streets were the women's work, and believe, it was foul, nasty work.

After centuries with nobody in them, the state of those streets was appalling:

Fallen slate and rotten timber and drifted leaves, packed down into a mat a foot deep in the gutters, dead carcasses, bones, ash...

It took about a week to clear a single block of that enormous dead city.

Then, having finished that, they started on the clothing, which was somehow worse. The reason was, everything they wore was slave rags, or the clothes taken off the dead slavers, which had been to many few pieces of clothing to allow frequent... change.

Yeah.

The furs had to come out.

Every hide off every animal the hunting parties had taken since the autumn. Every scrap of fleece. Every square inch of anything salvaged out of the sunk galleon that could be cut and turned.

Plus about a dozen women who knew how to work a needle, sitting outside the long hall from first light and making clothes non stop.

Hiccup came down on the twelfth day with an armful of bone needles he had spent an evening filing out of an elk rib, because they had been snapping the wooden ones.

He got about four paces past the end of the first bench.

"Well," laughed one of the older women, graying hair, without looking up, "if it isn't Hiccup."

He winced. "...I brought needles."

She gave him a quick glance, "Course you did, sweetheart."

She inspected one, grunted approval, went straight back to her work, though the frequent rasps of her voice made it obvious she was not done with him.

Please do not bring it up.

Please do not bring it up again.

Sadly, his prayers were not listened to.

The old woman looked him up and down over the top of her sewing.

"Well then, are you finally going to stand still long enough for me to measure you, or are we all going to keep pretending you own clothes?"

"I own clothes," he groaned.

"You own one black robe you only wear when you are not working. Which is never."

"I'm literally wearing it now!"

She frowned, noticing the fact that he was in fact, wearing it now. After a minute or so she licked the thread, pointing the needle at the robe in question.

"That is not clothes, boy. That is a costume. You want my advice-"

"Not especially-"

"-you'll let me put something on you." She paused, which meant what was coming had to be serious. "Listen. If you keep wandering up and down with your chest out, those girls at the water line are going to start tearing lumps out of each other. I have not got the cloth to be patching them up as well."

That made it very much worse.

The whole bench came apart at the seams. Some of them had to put their work down.

In the end he let her take his measures for the forsaken shirt.

The smokehouse stood half an hour's walk into the woods on the northern side of the island.

Which was a good thing, because otherwise the smell of it would have driven people out of their homes.

It was a big hut.

Hiccup had expected something the size of a shed and had found a long low building of timber and thick bark, about fifteen paces end to end, walls packed, roof low, one door at each end.

"Hey, lad! Finally decided to show up, did you?" The goatherd barked a laugh from somewhere inside it. "Come in, come in. Mind your head. Ah... Mind your horns. There we are."

Hiccup ducked under the lintel.

Inside rank after rank on poles that ran the whole length of it, hung the fish.

Easily hundreds of them.

All split down the spine, opened flat, and hung in pairs over the poles. Tier above tier above tier, up into the smoke where you could not see them any more.

Cod, haddock, some salmon, and whatever else the rafts had been pulling out of the shallows.

The fire was a long trench of alder smouldering under damp turf at floor level, giving almost no heat in exchange for a very great deal of thick white smoke.

"Now you are here, you can tell me something honestly."

The goatherd was already walking him down the rank, one hand out, touching fish as he went the way one would count coins.

"How much salt did we use?"

"Barely any. We have not got any to spare." He shrugged. "The young lads boil seawater down on the shore whenever the weather lets them, and it is a full day's fire for a bowl of it, so it goes on what we mean to keep longest. The rest is smoke and wind and prayer."

Hiccup looked up into the roof, where the racks went on into the murk.

With the first seed sprouting, food in the long run should be a solved problem.

He leaned back against a post.

But even the fast crops will take until summer to give anything, maybe autumn if things go south. So food between now and then is still very much a problem.

Especially with most hands on the fields. A hundred people. First harvest four moons off at the very best, more likely five, no guarantee of it.

There was nothing else coming.

The seals had been the first hope and the first disappointment. They had taken a dozen off the rocks in the autumn and the rest had worked out groups of humans were a danger, now there was not a seal within a mile of any stretch of shore they could walk into.

The deer and the elk in the north woods were worse, because there the problem was that hunting worked.

They had gone at those herds hard all through the winter, because it had been that or bury people, and it had been the right call. But he had walked those woods since. The tracks were thinner. The animals were younger.

The fish were a different matter though. They had the whole northern sea to feed themselves.

"Give me the worst way it goes, imagine there is no harvest at all. The barley fails, the oats fail, we get nothing off that hill until next spring."

He looked up into the racks.

"How much has to be hanging in here for us to live through that?"