18: Silk and Stone

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If the hive is working on the assumption of no trade, there are two critical industries likely to suffer more than any other – silk, and blackmoss. Silk is made by spiders high up in the tower, harvested and woven by men, and generally, Redstone River can provide for itself just fine, but the spiders eat silkvines and silkvines are easily sickened by high-flying pollens. The silk farms are far too low to have been caught in the pollen storm itself, but the whole reason for pollen to travel the wingsong stream is for it to fall over the land, and while the small amounts probably falling around the hive right now are no problem for people, they will inhibit the growth and recovery of the vines that the spiders depend on for food. Which means, until the vines recover or trade can be relied upon again, much less silk. So much less rope, and much less fabric. Redstone River doesn’t use a whole lot of fabric, and most of what they do use (bundles and sacks, building supports, covers for the carts for Smon’s eventual expedition) can be temporarily replaced with woven grasses and barks instead, but there are a couple of critical uses for which no substitute exists. The first is repair of the tower itself, which needs the lightest, strongest and most reliable materials – no bark rope would do. And the second is the water filters for the moss farms.

Blackmoss makes up a large portion of the Redstone River diet, but it’s very vulnerable to rot and infection. Mosses that grow on the surface tend to be tough and vigorous, but hard to eat and not very filling. The sweet, soft, energy-rich blackmoss that the hive relies on is grown deep underground, and unfiltered river water will kill it. Water for the farms has to be dripped through bags of crushed white stone imported from coastal hives; the bags are made of silk, carefully woven to an exact tightness by master weavers, that catch large impurities, and the stone inside removes small ones through some process that Tyk doesn’t understand. Both the shortage of silk, and the potential shortage of fresh stone, could be a problem.

The hive has plenty of seastone in reserve, of course, but they’ll use up the stone much faster if they run out of silk, so rationing silk is critical – the hive can’t afford a mass moss farm collapse. And, of course, the wet season is coming, meaning that the redstone river will swell and the waters run red with toxic deposits from the mountains that eat through the filters (bag and stone) much faster than dry season water does, as well as require extra filters for drinking water for the old, young and sick, who can’t handle the red water so easily.

Tyk doesn’t think they’ll run out of stone. The traders know that they’ll need it, and while they’re unlikely to predict the silk shortage, they know about the red water. It happens every year. The adults, however, seem to take the possibility of a complete stop in trade until communication is back up very seriously, and while Tyk isn’t exactly sure why that would be the case, they surely know better than her about such things. Which means dealing with the possibility, however small, that simply going on as normal will run them out of seastone, collapse the farms, and create a serious issue with the hive’s food supply.

There are a couple of ways to deal with that. The obvious one is to find other food sources to rely on, if necessary. The hive can do that if they must, but it’s far from ideal – relying on finding enough sweetroot to broach the gap is very chancy, and excessive hunting or harvesting wild plants would have knock-on effects throughout the entire ecosystem that could cause future problems. Besides, if the hive allows the moss farms to collapse, then they’ll take years to recover, and the hive will need those alternate food sources for a lot longer than the stone shortage.

Their other option is to avoid needing to filter the red water in the first place. Both silk and stone in the filters last far longer in the dry season. If the hive builds a huge tank or artificial lagoon to store river water in the dry season, then they can use that instead, leaving the river alone. The problem with that, of course, is the building – making a lagoon or, even worse, a tank, able to hold that much water, would be a massive undertaking. It’s something that somebody in the hive suggests every now and again and is rejected as not being worth the labour when there are so many other critical projects that need doing. Getting it finished before this year’s wet season would be nearly impossible, pulling huge numbers of workers away from other duties; an absurd task to defend against something that probably won’t even happen. They could get halfway through such a project and then the wingsong stream could fix itself, or traders could turn up with seastone. The hiveheart dither on the topic for a long time before deciding to go ahead with water storage in the most dramatic, but labour-saving, way possible – instead of digging new puts and chambers to store water in lagoons or tanks, the hive will take advantage of those that they and their ancestors have already dug.

The hive will block off and flood old, unused tunnels.

There are a lot of peripheral sections of the hive that are barely used; areas where giant sweetroot tubers were once found and harvested and nothing of value remains. The walls can be temporarily waterproofed by re-mortaring them and ‘half-firing’ the mortar, a rarely used technique that involves exposing the mortar to heavy smoke for multiple days. The resulting mortar isn’t the night-indestructible fired bricks that make up the permanent structures of the hive, but much less liable to dissolve than completely unfired mortar. If submerged, it should break down over a period of a few years, turning the tunnels into temporary water storage without causing permanent structures liable to hinder the growth of new sweetroot and the migration of bugs and crabs when the land next sleeps. Furthermore, because very little actual tunnelling needs to be done, the project doesn’t need to slow tunnelling operations elsewhere in the hive; the young and the old can chew mortar and haul the small amounts of dirt required, and firing the walls under the supervision of an armful of experienced architects will be, if anything, good training for the girls and young women of the hive.

It is still, all things considered, drastic. No labour is free, and those that flood the tunnels do still need to be pulled from other jobs, including support jobs in the other tunnels. The nature of hive expansion means that the areas thoroughly picked over and available for flooding tend to be between the main nest and the areas currently being explored (the hive gathers all nearby resources before digging out further), meaning that some tunnellers’ routes to work will be extended as they move around the new water storage area, and the blocking of any tunnel system between the main hive and the working tunnels creates all sorts of ventilation issues. If water is needed, it’s the easiest and most efficient option, but it’s still a lot of work.

Which is why Tyk is so puzzled that the hive is going ahead with it. Several days into the re-mortaring project, she gets tired of adults fobbing off her questions and goes out of her way to get reassigned to the supervision of the one supervising architect who she knows won’t treat her like a child – Bette.

“They keep saying they’re not sure,” Tyk says while her team piles dried bamboo slivers in the spot Bette has marked. (Both placement and fuel is important – charcoal burns too clean and hot, and regular bamboo smoke has too much water in it. And placement is vital for smoking all the surfaces they want half-fired as thoroughly as possible, without heating up or asphyxiating anyone in the living and working areas. The details are beyond Tyk, but nobody understands how the tunnels work better than Bette, except perhaps Master Architect Lian herself). “But this is a lot of work for something that nobody’s sure about. I mean, seastone is the one thing that the coastal hives would know for certain that we need, right? Even without the wingsong, the traders would know to come. And they’re making a lot of assumptions about the wingsong stream staying down, for people who have no idea how long it’ll be down.”

“Oh, I’m sure they have some very good estimates by now,” Bette says. (She looks in better condition again; Kebette must have recovered from whatever was affecting his ability to do his duties. Maybe he’d been away from home on some long-term job up the tower that Tyk didn’t know about?) “The sudden change was unexpected and startling, but singers know how to map the wingsong stream. Their predecessors had to map it to know where to build our communication tower, after all. They may be uncertain of the chances of more sudden, radical shifts, but assuming no more of those, they’ll know exactly what the wingsong stream is expected to do, by now.”

“Then why haven’t they told us anything?”

“Interesting, isn’t it? Claiming ignorance about when things will go back to normal, and at the same time pushing for a project like this? What does that tell us about the wingsong stream, do you think?”

“That it’s bad news,” Tyk says unhappily. She listens out for the movements of the other girls in the group, who are all pretending not to listen to the conversation, and presses on anyway – they’re all thinking the same things, surely. “It means no communication until we’re close enough to the wet season that a stone delivery wouldn’t get here in time, at the very least. Maybe longer. Bette… is the stream going to set into a new equilibrium? Are the towers pointless?”

“The towers are for more than communicating, you know that. A change in equilibrium wouldn’t affect our need for silks, or stargazing. But I have no idea, Tyk. You’d have to ask the singers. Or just wait for them to tell us, I suppose; I imagine that if we are seeing a new equilibrium, we’ll be informed after they’ve found a new place for a tower.”

“And if there isn’t a new place near the hive?”

“Then that would be a knotty logistical puzzle, wouldn’t it? But to answer the other half of your question, no, we can’t just assume that traders will come with seastone if nobody can communicate.”

“But they come every year!”

“Do they? Which hive sent traders last year?”

Tyk thinks. Most girls her age wouldn’t notice that sort of thing, but Tyk always takes time to talk to traders. There’s always been the strong possibility that she would become one. “Sharp Spire Hive.”

“And the year before that?”

“That was… Whitesand Hive, I think?”

“And before that?”

“That was Sharp Spire again. I don’t know the pattern.”

“That’s because there isn’t a pattern. There are three coastal hives close enough to reasonably make the journey with such heavy cargo, and four hives near the river that need a lot of seastone. Who goes where depends on how much seastone they have, how much the river hives need, and what we can offer in return – and Redstone River is generally not the richest priority. If nobody is talking, then how do any of the coastal cities know who is sending seastone where? What if they all show up at the same place with to much seastone, and have to drag it back home with nothing to show for the journey? Seastone is very heavy, very hard to move, and hardly worth the damage to the carts if there’s a chance they can’t even trade it. Furthermore, merely going to other hives is just a little bit dangerous without communication – if somebody is hurt, there’s no way to tell home or call for help. If there is some dispute over trades or borders or crime, there’s no way for hivehearts to communicate and resolve things peacefully, meaning that everyone is just a little bit worried that something bad might happen, which makes it more likely that something bad might happen. See? It’s likely that no traders will arrive spontaneously at all, and if they do, they’ll be carrying much lighter and more valuable goods than seastone. If they can trust us to trade such goods, and aren’t worried about simply being robbed.”

“Redstone River wouldn’t do that! No hive would!”

“I agree; no hive would do that. But it doesn’t matter what I think, does it? It matters what traders are willing to risk, and some of those traders are used to being out of communication when travelling through sleeplands and contending with the Hiveless. Okay, girls, that’s enough fuel – everyone out of the tunnel and we’ll seal it up behind us. Eshor, check that the ventilation shafts are half-covered and lay a fuse through the main one. We’ll need to control the air to keep things burning but let as little smoke escape as possible; I’ll show you how to do it.”

Tyk follows her directions, but her mind isn’t on the task. As they block the tunnel behind them with fresh mortar, she’s thinking about Smon.

Because if Bette is right, if this all means that the hiveheart do know how long communication will be down and that it will be until dangerously close to the wet season at the very least, then that’s an inconvenience for the hive, certainly.

But if Tyk’s reasoning is right, it’s potentially deadly for the sky people.

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