Chapter 63: Matters of Human Nature II

So they met about it in the plaza, at the fire, on a night with no wind.

The usual people. Haaland and Oddr and Hiccup, and Eivind with his charcoal, and the men and women who carried the various pieces of the settlement. The fields, the stone, the herds, the smokehouse, the waterways.

The group had settled over the winter and the spring the way water finds its level. The competent had drifted to the front and everybody else had simply let them.

And that night two separate things were put on the fire, in order, and it matters that they were two.

The first was the one everybody had come to talk about. Tribal cooperation was failing, right now, at a hundred people, for reasons nobody had done anything wrong to cause.

The second was Hiccup's, and it was the one that actually decided the matter.

He had said it out loud in the hall in the spring, in front of the farmers, in the middle of an argument about strips of ground.

And some of them I am going to go and get.

Nobody had asked him what he meant then. Nobody asked now either. They had all had a season to work it out and every one of them had arrived in the same place. Sooner or later there was going to be a ship, and it was going to come back full.

So the settlement was not going to stay a hundred people.

And that turned the first problem into a different problem entirely.

Because a hundred people who had all bled on the same beach, who all knew each other's names, who had spent an entire winter breathing each other's air in the same cave, were already coming apart at the seams.

That is the only thing tribal cooperation runs on. It runs on knowing the man you hand the fish to. It runs on shame. If you sit on a wall all afternoon, ninety-nine people watched you do it, and you have to eat your supper in front of every one of them.

Take away the knowing and there is no shame left. Take away the shame and there is nothing underneath it at all.

It was failing now, at a hundred.

What was it going to do the morning four hundred strangers walked up off a beach?

So the third thing followed from the first two, and it was a decision.

"They are all the same problem," said Eivind, who had been quiet for hours and had covered a slate.

"Every one of them. The goats. The fish. The roof. Nobody knows what anything is worth, so nobody can be paid for anything, so nobody does anything they are not made to do."

He looked up.

"But if a fish is worth something, the man who catches it can trade it. If a week of roofing is worth something, then that man is not owed a favour. He is owed a price, and he can go and collect it."

He paused.

"He can work himself half to death and have something at the end of it that is his."

He tapped the slate.

"And a stranger off a boat can be paid the same as anybody else, because a price does not need to know your name."

"Trade," said Haaland, to be certain everybody had heard what was being proposed.

"Trade," said Eivind. "Value for value."

"Value for value," agreed Oddr.

They went round it once more for form's sake, and agreed unanimously, and were in bed before the fire had properly burned down.

It was, everybody said afterward, one of the best decisions ever taken on that island.

It came apart inside a fortnight.

Because nobody knew what anything was worth.

A goat was worth what, in fish?

Only the gods knew.

Everybody had an opinion, and every opinion was several times the other man's, and not one of them had ever bought a goat in his life, because they had all been slaves.

Inside days, a good many of the men worked out independently that fishing was the thing that paid, and went out on the rafts. All of them. On the same morning.

They came back with more fish than the settlement could eat in a month.

And since everybody suddenly had fish, the fish were worth nothing.

So nobody bothered to smoke any of it.

Most of it spoiled, and everybody afterward agreed it had been the single most colossal waste of food yet.

And then the question nobody had thought to ask at that fire, which Oddr asked out loud a fortnight later in the flattest voice he had.

Value for value is a beautiful principle, he said. And it has one very simple consequence.

A man who cannot produce value does not eat.

There were the little ones. There were the old. There were the women too far gone with child to lift anything.

All of them had been fed all winter without a word, because that is what a tribe does, and not one of them had anything at all to put on a table now that a table existed.

Nobody had an answer that night either.

And then, over the following moons, they worked it out.

Not in a meeting. Not by a rule. It simply got solved, in pieces, by a hundred people all pushing at the same thing at once, and afterward nobody could say who had thought of what.

The fish came first, because the fish had been the loudest failure.

Nobody ordered the rafts to stagger their days. They staggered anyway, because a man who goes out on the morning everybody else goes out comes home with a boat full of something worth nothing, and it only takes one week of that to teach a fisherman arithmetic.

The roofer got his door.

That was the one Haaland enjoyed most. The man walked up to the family whose roof he had spent a week on, and did not ask them for a favour, and did not have to be grateful for anything.

He named a price. They argued about it, cheerfully, in the street, for a quarter of an hour. Then he took it, and he bought a door with it, and he hung it himself, and half the terrace came to watch him shut it.

And the old and the young sorted themselves out in the most obvious way in the world, which of course nobody had seen coming.

Because it turned out that minding a dozen babes while their mothers worked the strips was work.

Somebody had always done it. Nobody had ever called it anything.

And now the women who did it got paid for it in grain and in cloth and in whatever else was going, by the mothers who could go and earn something on a terrace instead of sitting in a doorway all day.

That was the thing about value for value that nobody at the fire had worked out and everybody worked out on the ground.

It does not only ask what you cannot do.

It also asks what you can, and it turns out there is almost nobody alive who can do nothing at all.

And underneath all of it, the thing that mattered, which took Oddr most of the summer to find words for.

They were being paid.

Every soul on that hill had worked their whole life. Some of them had worked most of it. They had hauled and dug and hammered and been fed for it, the way you feed an ox, because a fed ox works and a starved one does not.

Not one of them had ever been paid.

There is a difference, and it is not a small one, and the difference is that a wage is a thing you can refuse.

A man who is paid can say no. He can say not for that. He can walk away from a job and go and do a different one, and the whole world rearranges itself very slightly around the fact that his labour is his and he is the one selling it.

You could see it in how they stood.