Chapter 54: Opening the Waterways III

It took a couple of days longer than expected but the drain came open at last. The whole settlement came out to watch.

Working out where to stand had taken a long time.

Hiccup had scouted the coast looking for the far end of the drain and come back with nothing both times.

Whatever it emptied into sat under the cliff sides at the far western end of the island, in that band of rock the sun never gets round to, from the air it was one shadow among a hundred others.

Still, he found it eventually.

They stood well back from the edge, out on the western cliffs, the ones that drop straight into the sea, looking down a sheer wall of volcanic rock three hundred feet into grey water.

Nothing happened for a few long minutes.

Then a horn sounded, small and thin in the distance.

Then the cliff opened.

It came out of a stone-lipped mouth halfway down the rock face.

It did not trickle and it did not build.

It came out all at once, under the weight of gods know how many years of stored filth. It was a solid arm of water thicker than a horse, it went straight out from the cliff for several hundred paces before it even began to fall.

What came out of that cistern was not sea-green. But the opaque green of actual vomit, thick with silt and rot and whatever other wonders. It hammered down into the sea with such might the noise reverberated in one's lungs.

Where it struck, the waters turned brown, then green in a stain that kept spreading, until there was a filthy plume half a mile long running away south on the current.

The gulls came from everywhere along that coast. Thousands of them, screaming over whatever dead things had just been handed to them.

The smell reached the clifftop about a minute later, and after that the party was over.

It ran for a day and a night.

By the following dusk there was barely a trickle coming out.

The trouble with such a convenient answer to their problems was, of course, everything else. They spent the next day surveying, and the news were just getting worse every hour.

Plus the barley still had to drink, it had to be watered every day.

So the bulk of the settlement stayed up on the cliff path with their yokes and buckets across their shoulders, hauling from the wells to the strips the way they had all spring.

The people working below was what was left over. Some few masons, the handful of smiths, Dwarf, and whoever the old farmer decided he could do without that morning.

Case and point: Some of the gears for the irrigation channels leading to the terraces were beyond saving.

Almost half of them.

The bronze had gone soft and green and the teeth of the gearing had welded themselves into the stone with corrosion. Dwarf's professional opinion was that the only way any of those were coming out was in pieces.

That was the good news.

The bad news was the channels.

Haaland had not been lying when he pointed that they were choked solid. Centuries of silt and rock and mud and whatever else had come down with the rainwater and settled.

In theory, pressure could have cleared them, in a wet year, with working gates.

But they had neither.

Eivind went in to look inside one of the few that wasn't outright blocked, crawling on his belly with a candle in front of him. He came out grey to the elbows and had to sit down.

"That one is about thirty paces of silt and then a fall," he groaned. "I could not get past it. The other is clear for about ninety and then there is a root system through the muck with everything behind it."

Wonderful.

Dwarf was sitting on a block with his arms folded, pensive.

"Well," he chuckled. "That is a great deal of work."

"It is weeks of work."

"It is weeks," Dwarf agreed. "Better start now, then."

So they started, the whole load of the work took yet another moon to clear. It was, by common agreement afterward, the worst month anybody spent on the island.

They cut the gates out, first and foremost.

Dwarf and some of the artisans under him and the few smiths did that work, he was down there with them for every hour of it, he practically lived there.

It took a week of back breaking labour.

They took the bronze up in pieces to the smithies to be melted down and reforged.

Dwarf went with it as far as the door and no further (he was stubborn about having to climb up more than 500 steps again).

He knew enough about metal to say what a gear had to survive and what shape it had to be, he knew exactly where that knowledge stopped, which was roughly at the point where somebody lit a hearth.

"Stone, I will argue with any man alive," he complained, handing over the last of it. "Metal, I'm not touching that with a ten foot pole."

The work to unclog the irrigation channels ran parallel to that, those were a different kind of misery.

With the cistern emptied and some of the gate mechanisms out for repairs, the channels could finally be walked into from inside. From the cistern side.

Which was the whole of the job.

Crawl up each tunnel from the outflow chamber with a short shovel or pickaxe, dig centuries of packed filth out of it until you came out the far end on a terrace.

Which was easier said than done.

It was a claustrophobic tunnel of about the height of a stooping man, running the better part of a mile out from under the plateau, and there were close to half a hundred of them.

Nobody had understood that part until they had dry boots on the bottom of the cistern, counting them.

Half a hundred tunnels.

Half a hundred gates.

Half a hundred fields.

They had seven strips in the ground.

They could have cleared seven channels and been done with it.

The old farmer was the one who argued against that, surprisingly. His point was that they were going to be down here anyway. The gear and the buckets and people were already assembled, and assembling them again next spring would cost the same again.

That the tunnels for the lower fields and the upper fields ran off the same chambers and were choked with the same filth.

"We are not going to be a hundred forever," he chuckled, stealing an annoyed glance at Hiccup, "if you lads are doing the work, then have it done forever."

So they agreed to clear all of them. Starting by their seven fields, of course.

Everything came out by bucket. There was no other way, the tunnels were too narrow for a barrow and there was nowhere to put the spoil except behind you.

They worked an hour at a time at the face, that was as long as anybody could stand it.

The smell was that bad.

Plus the water was ankle deep in most of the channels and knee deep in others.

The farmers came down to lend a hand when the planting and the rare light rain lessened their work on the fields. The fishing crews came down when the weather was bad. Women worked the bucket chains in shifts, with children running the empty ones back up the line.

The blockages were everywhere. There was not one clear channel in the whole of it.

Mostly they were sediment. Mud and sand and filth that had come down over the centuries and packed itself hard under its own weight.

Luckily, most of them were not too difficult to clear.

Most of them.