Chapter 52: Opening the Waterways I

For a while the lack of rain did not matter much, weather was arbitrary at times, and so a few days without rain was not a big deal. In fact, spirits were as high as they had been since they came ashore.

After all, the hard work to secure their survival was coming to a close.

Or was it?

Some days without rain was a gift.

Some weeks?

That was a dry spell. It was a crisis. By the seventh day the green had stopped getting taller, the ground rows had gone pale and hard, it started to crack in places.

Hiccup went down every single day.

It looked thirsty, he had seen it from the sky just yesterday and it looked more thirsty now, in a way he could not un-see once the farmer had shown him what to look for.

"It is not dying yet," groaned the old farmer.

"But."

"But it has stopped growing. Which is the first sign, a plant that stops growing so soon does not simply start again when the weather turns. It will come back small stalk, a small harvest."

The farmer crouched and pushed his fingers into the soil. They went in about a knuckle before they stopped. They came out dry.

"It must be the Gods are punishing us for our greed.", the hunchback chuckled nervously.

If it was an insult meant for him, Hiccup didn't catch it.

"The last rain we had was a fortnight back and it barely wet the top of it," Hiccup murmured, biting his nails as he thought out loud. "It is only spring, so if this is a dry year then we have to find a way to water this harvest manually..."

It would be a dry year.

Just a week and a half under the spring sun had the barley going yellow at the tips.

It was strange to all of them. Most had lived their whole lives this far north, and none of them could remember a spring this warm, or a season with this little rain.

Hiccup kept turning it over through gritted teeth.

In a sense this was all his fault. He should have seen something like this coming, and he hadn't. He had to find a solution, and had to do it now.

The first approach to a solution for the drought was to carry the water. There was nothing else to do, the wells came up out of the plateau behind the old halls.

The water had to be hauled in improvised buckets and carried down the cliff path to the terraces on the shoulders of anybody who could carry it. Two buckets a yoke if you were strong. Just one if you weren't.

It took the full might of half a hundred people to wet all seven strips.

And it was ridiculous, it did not work.

That was the part that had began to eat at people's morale. Not the labour, but watching the ground drink the water in about as fast as it could come out, and see it go pale before one had finished straightening up.

By the end of the second week they were seriously considering sacrificing the other fields and focusing all their efforts only on three of the seven.

"A finger of rain over seven strips." Eivind's voice was flat. "That is what they need. That is a small ask. That is one bad afternoon of drizzle."

He turned the hide round tired of days of back breaking labour.

"It is somewhere past ten millions buckets now!", somebody protested.

"We did four hundred today," chuckled Eivind. "Today was our best day. We have done about fifteen hundred all week, and yet not one of the top strips has had a drop poured onto them."

"So we are losing."

"We were never winning. We were just delaying the inevitable."

Eivind put the hide down.

"I am sorry. That is what it is."

They had tried all the obvious things, every one of them had already been thought of by somebody.

They had even tried carrying water on the Night Fury. Somebody rigged barrels in a sling and had Toothless carry them up from the shore when they used fish as bait, it was magnificent.

It was also not enough.

The barrels had to be filled by hand, by bucket, which was the same bottleneck except with Hiccup's dragon bolted onto the end of it.

Even two barrels did little.

Some suggested to use the geyser on the eastern side of the island for to water the fields.

It seemed like a good idea until the stench of iron and eggs it emanated reached them, and saw how no vegetation grew around it. Using this would kill the crops faster than their drought would.

Not to mention it was coming out of the ground hot enough to scald.

"We cannot keep doing the watering ourselves all spring," groaned one of the fishing brothers, watching a line of exhausted men come up the path with their arms hanging.

"We physically cannot'. If it does not rain properly insid' the week we lose the barley. We'll be eating fish and turnip through the winter all over again."

Nobody contradicted him.

They had run out of any better ideas.

Then Hiccup disappeared for a full day.

They searched for him everywhere. He was not at the terraces, not at the forge, not at the library below ground.

Toothless was up on the wall with his chin on his feet looking bored, which meant that wherever the boy had gone, he had gone on his own legs.

Hiccup came back a little after dusk. They smelled him before they saw him.

"Whoa." Haaland pinched his nose as he backed away from him, frowning. "You fucking stink, boy. Where in the seven hells have you been?"

I need a bath. Hiccup noted. It was difficult to tell how bad it was, since he'd been on it all day.

Still, the bath would have to wait.

Hiccup turned and motioned them after him. "Get Eivind, and the masons, and bring torches. Enough for a couple of hours." They traded their glances, scowls on their faces.

"I have found a solution."

The stair was behind a door in the lower levels of the old halls. Hiccup had walked past it maybe a hundred times. He had only opened it once, this morning, actually.

It went down a long way.

Dwarf counted the steps aloud as they descended them and lost track somewhere past fifty hundred.

The stone steps had been cut for full-sized men, which meant the half man was taking each one at rather more cost than the rest of them. He complained about it the whole way down, steadily, elaborately, someone had to carry him to have him shut up.

"Whoever cut these," he groaned, somewhere around the hundredth, "was a giant, a sadist, or paid handsomely by the step."

The air changed as they went.

Cold and then warmer, and then still and full. It was clear there hadn't been airflow around here for the last several lifetimes.

Then the smell arrived, about fifty steps before the bottom. It was nothing alike the clean mineral cold of wet rock.

It was thick. Something between a stagnant pond and a barrel that has been shut too long, except wetter, except worse, a rot with weight to it that seemed to coat the back of the throat on the way in.

Underneath the green sat a stench, sickly and organic, spoiled meat left too long in the sun, and underneath that again something sulfurous. It made some of the men gag outright and one of them sit down hard on the step, hand clamped over his mouth.

This finally answers where the smell was coming from, thought Hiccup.

He had smelled this before, over the last few years. Faintly, in certain streets, on certain still mornings, coming up out of the grates.

He had assumed that it was the drains.

It was obviously not just the drains.

It was this.

Centuries of rain falling down onto the sewers and running down here, carrying with it leaves, drowned rats, dead bird, every scrap of rotting timber, and ash, and soot that fell on the city would eventually find its way here.

Centuries of it going in and nothing at all coming out... the gates that let the water leave had rusted shut long ago and the whole thing had been quietly stewing ever since.

The stair ended in an archway, and after that the torchlight was not bright enough to find the ceiling.

They were standing on a edge of dressed stone at the top of a massive pit, except more than a pit, it resembled a cliff. The wall went down into the void below them. Cut with the same insane precision as everything else they had seen on the island.

It curved away on both sides into the void, which was the only sign it was a pit they were staring at, and not the chasm of the underworld itself.

Haaland picked a stone and threw it off the edge.

They all listened.

It landed almost at once.

PLOP.

The echo of it went out, and out, and kept going, round walls they could not see.

"Sweet gods," Dwarf exclaimed.

"It is a cistern," pointed Hiccup, though the word 'cistern' felt way too small for this. "The whole plateau is the catchment. Every street gutter in the city leads into here. Every one of those little grooves in the paving."

"How big is it?" somebody asked.

By then it was no secret that the half-dragon's eyes could see in the night.

Someone held the torch out over the drop and pointed down at the far edge of it, only for its light to get lost on its way to the far end.

"You could float some fifteen galleons in it. That is how wide."

...

Nobody spoke for a good long moment. Somewhere a drip fell from a roof they could not see, the sound of it bounced round the walls for a generous amount of time.

Eivind was the first to speak, Eivind had gone straight past the awe and arrived at the practical.

"Where does it come out?"

"That," grinned Hiccup, "is the good part."

They followed away from the pit and onto a spiralling corridor that ran even deeper, which brought even more stairs.

At least this time around, it wasn't that many.

The dripping and the stench between them made it perfectly clear that the enormous thing on the other side of that wall was full. Or as close to full as it could get without going over the top.

Then they arrived.

It was a small chamber cut into the rock at the base of the cistern's outer wall. A dozen stone channels ran away west out of it, and in the mouth of each channel sat a mechanism of half-rusted gearing on a threaded rod.

Bronze, one of the masons was quick to point out.

Hiccup nodded.

"The gears were what opened them, or they did. I spent this morning on that one," he pointed, pointing, "it took a while, but once you get the rust out of it, it can turn. Turn the wheel and the gate lifts, and the water goes down the channel."

Some of them had already figured it out.

"Those channels coming out of the cliffs and onto the fields...", he paused and it was Haaland who finished the thought. "These lead to the terraces!"

Dwarf turned all the way round on the spot, and Hiccup watched the whole room arrive at it together.

"The stone gutters," Dwarf chuckled nervously. "The stone gutters on every terrace. The ones everybody assumed were drains."

"It doesn't make sense," Haaland pointed, "most of those 'gutters' do not look like anything at all. Half of them are packed solid with earth and rock. I thought they were just for decoration."

Hiccup put his hand flat on the rotten bronze.

"They are not drains. I'm- I'm convinced those have to be the last few feet channels."

He gestured down the corridor.

"A dozen gates here, all of them feeding must be feeding the upper terraces. There are another five chambers further down, with the gates for the lower terraces too, you can count them, they match."

"They watered the whole hill from here," somebody pointed.

"Plus they did it by just turning a wheel," Dwarf's hands were tugging his hair in desperation. Trying to wrap his head around- around this.

Hiccup steadied himself.

This is it. This is the solution to everything.

"Guys, there is enough water on the other side of that wall to drown this city. Every drop of rain and every foot of snowmelt sitting there, waiting. All we have to do is have the gates somehow turn again-"

Haaland shook his head.

"Not to offend, Hiccup, this is a great find on your part. However, turning the gates will solve nothing if the far end will not open," Haaland reminded him. "I already told you, it is packed solid over there. That is not door. It is as solid as stone."

"So we just dig it out," snorted Dwarf, "it can't be that difficult."

Haaland had no honest answer to that, "Maybe. Maybe it is a day's work. Maybe it is packed the whole way through and we have dug a hole for nothing."

"Haaland has a point," Eivind lifted his hand to take a turn. "plus the clogged drains are not our only problem here, think about the state of the water."

Eivind was pinching his nose, which was why his voice sounded funny.

"That is not fresh rainwater. That is centuries of shit festering underground. On the long term it may make up for great fertilizer. However, if you pour that down to the fields right now you will surely kill all the crops."

Nobody argued. Eivind had a point.

Hiccup stood quiet for a moment with his hand on the bronze.

He had walked down here that morning with a torch and the intention to solve a problem, and he had. He still thought this massive tunnel of channels was the answer to any future droughts.

"You are right about it," Hiccup chuckled at last.

He hated saying it, but it was the truth, even he could see that.

"So what do we do?", someone asked and Hiccup opened his mouth and found nothing to say. Not this time.

Dwarf cleared his throat.

"If I may." He looked round them, almost sheepishly. "I am no expert on pipings and sewers. However, it seems clear enough that if this cistern has never once overflowed in all the many centuries of abandonment, so it must have some kind of... release system. Somewhere. We should be able to use that to get rid of all the... filthy waters."

Hiccup didn't enjoy the idea of letting go of this much water, even if it was foul and wouldn't do much good at all.

"You propose we throw it all away?"

Dwarf nodded, "All of it. Every drop that is in there now. We empty this to the floor. We go down and clean it. Then we open the intakes and let it fill again with clean rain, and then we water the fields however much we need."

There was a long silence of lots of cynical looks, but the idea seemed solid. On the hypothesis that such a release mechanism even existed, of course.