Chapter 55: Opening the Waterways IV

It took the rest of that moon.

All of it. Every tunnel in that chamber, the ones running down to the lower fields and the long ones climbing to the upper terraces. Close to fifty channels, open end to end for the first time since the kingdom fell.

The hunchback farmer walked them afterward with a candle, all the way out and all the way back.

The weather turned.

It broke days after the last of the old water went over the cliff, the way it always does the moment a thing has stopped mattering. It rained for a night and most of a day, and then went on raining every few days after that, in the ordinary way of spring.

The barley lived.

It came back small, the way the old farmer had said it would. And it came back.

Every person on that hill knew perfectly well that this was the weather and not anything any of them had done.

What they had spent that month building was the promise that it would never come down to the weather again.

Which was the second piece of luck, because by then the cistern was empty and the floor of it could be walked on.

The women went down and took it.

That was Oddr's doing and he was insufferably proud of it. Forty of them working in shifts by torchlight, on a stone floor the size of a small lake, scraping and sweeping and hauling out centuries of black sediment that had been sitting there since before the kingdom fell.

It took nine days. It was the filthiest work anybody did that year.

And when they came up out of it on the last evening they were unrecognisable, and singing.

Then they shut the drain gate.

And the sky filled it. Every gutter and grate and grooved paving stone on that whole plateau ran, the way it had been built to, down into a clean stone box that no living person had ever seen the bottom of before that month.

By the end of the moon the water standing in there was clear enough to see your hand through, and it was pushing at the field gates from the inside, waiting.

They opened the watering channels on a bright morning at the end of that month.

Seven of them.

That was the strange part, standing down in the outflow chamber looking at it. Fifty arches, every one of them clear now, every one running out under the hill to a terrace that had been waiting an age for somebody to come back.

And forty-three of those gates were going to stay shut, because there was nothing planted behind them.

The old farmer had chalked the seven they wanted on the stone above the arches.

Barley. Barley. Barley. Oats. Oats. Oats. Rye.

The rest of that chamber went off into the dark unmarked, and would stay that way until there were enough hands on this island to work what lay beyond it.

Next year, Hiccup thought, looking down the row. Or the year after. Or the one after that.

Up above, the whole of them had come out. The old and the young, the sixteen women who were most of the way to their time and had been brought out on other people's arms to see it.

They came up onto the terraces and stood along the walls and down in the dry stone channels.

Toothless was on the roof of the old halls with his front paws over the edge, watching the whole thing the way a cat watches a window.

Down in the chamber it was Dwarf on the wheel of the first of the seven, because he had cut it out and had earned it, with Eivind beside him counting turns.

Somebody had set a squared block down in front of the housing for him to stand on, without being asked and without saying anything about it. The half man looked at it for a moment, then stepped up onto it, and said nothing about it either.

The signal went up the shaft to the cliff hatch and out.

Dwarf put his whole body into the wheel.

It moved badly. Then somebody put more grease on the thread and it moved better.

And out of the housing came the sound of water going somewhere.

Then they waited.

The channels ran the better part of a mile, and it takes time for water to cross a mile of stone.

Up on the terraces they waited for long enough that people began looking at one another.

Somebody laughed, and it was a nervous laugh.

Somebody else said blocked, and the word went along the wall like a cold draught.

Then the ground under the top terrace started to talk.

It came up out of the stone first, a low travelling rumble that people felt in their boots a breath before they heard it, and then it came round the last bend in the channel.

A brown foaming head about a palm high, thick with silt and leaves and torn-up pieces of root.

The children ran alongside it, screaming and shoving at each other and trying to keep up with it, and losing, because it was going faster than they were.

It went through the first sluice and split, and ran the length of the second terrace, and split again.

And then the others came.

Seven arches. Seven channels. Seven strips.

For the first time since the last man walked out of that city, water came down off the mountain, through the stone, and out into a field that somebody was going to eat from.

It was strange how the training ground had been busy for months and Hiccup had never once stopped to watch it.

Though in fairness, there had not been a morning to spare until recently.

Since the water came back up the hill, everything had loosened.

Nobody was carrying buckets down four hundred paces of cliff path any more. Nobody was losing a whole day getting water to the top strip and back. The fields watered themselves off a wheel one man could turn, and all the hours that had been going into simply keeping people alive had quietly started going somewhere else.

Haaland had taken his back the way a man takes back a thing he has been owed for a long time.

The training ground sat at the far end of the old lower plaza. A flat stretch of paving he had swept clean himself.

At dawn it filled up with a couple of dozen people standing in rows in the cold, doing the same three things over and over until the sun cleared the wall.

Children, mostly. Anybody old enough to carry a load was out carrying one, so what Haaland got were the ones too small to be useful anywhere else, and he took them seriously in a way that nobody else on that island did.

Hiccup thought it was sweet.

He also thought, in a distant and uncharitable way, that it was faintly pointless.

Why?

They had a Night Fury. They had him.

He had killed more men than he cared to count, most of them with his hands, and not one of those men had died because Hiccup had good footwork.

So the sight of a few dozen islanders solemnly waving sticks struck him as a child's game being played while the adults got on with things.