22: Nailing It

First —- Previous —- Glossary —- Archive —- Next

One of the older diggers, Maiza, comes to find Tyk while she’s on soil clearing duty in one of the peripheral tunnels. “Hey, Tyk. You can understand the skyborn visitor, right?”

“About two thirds of what she says, yeah.”

“Two thirds?”

“Sometimes she talks about rocks with poisonous light, or tiny shapes in food that hold sunshine. I can only do so much. Is there a problem?”

“She’s helping us build the carts. And she found a nail.”

“So?”

“So she’s really excited about it. For some reason. It’s probably nothing, but…”

But she might be trying to warn them of danger or something in some incomprehensible way, and very few members of the hive understand her body language. Tyk takes her leave from her mother (‘something’s come up with Smon’ takes priority over a lot of her other work, these days) and heads up to the surface.

Usually, the last half of the dry season is a fairly relaxed time in the hive, but not this year. The sealed tunnels were flooded successfully, the men are doing what they could to keep silk production up, and the hiveheart have made their decision about the messengers. They agreed to send messengers up and downriver and, as Bette and Smon had predicted, decided to send their own trade caravans with them, putting everything on a much tighter schedule than sending a couple of messages really needed. Bette and Smon had both asked to join the trip to Green Hills Hive, were immediately rejected for what Tyk thought were very reasonable reasons, then exchanged a very determined look and spoke to the hiveheart alone for a few minutes and the decision was suddenly reversed without explanation, so both of them – as well as Ayan and Keyan, who won’t leave their mother alone, Tyk, who won’t leave Smon alone, and San and Kesan, who won’t leave Tyk alone – were assigned to the upriver journey. Tyk’s never pulled a heavy cart long distance before (the bamboo carts from the yearly upriver bamboo harvest don’t count), so that’ll be a learning curve, she supposes.

She exits the hive through a side ventilation tunnel and heats over to the cart construction area. Most of the Redstone River Hive’s carts are little, temporary things, built out of second-grade bamboo and twine to haul local goods short distances; a lot more care needs to be taken with trade caravans. They not only have to haul heavier loads over longer distances on more varied terrain, but if they do break down mid-journey, it’s a much more serious issue. The hive can’t just trot over another one to pick up the load half a day later. A broken caravan on a trade route needs to be repaired, or its goods abandoned. And depending on how good the foraging is on the journey, those goods could be a critical part of the food supply.

The Redstone River Hive know how to build proper trade caravans, of course – it’s one of the major demands for their bamboo, and it’s not unusual for them to repair the caravans of traders coming through with some of the very bamboo they’re trading for. Hardier caravans need hardier materials, like metal nails. One of which Smon is inspecting very closely, kneeling in the mud, rattling off excited questions with the echo stone with such messy syntax that even Tyk is having trouble understanding her.

“Smon! Calm down! What’s the problem?”

“Tyk!” Smon pulls back the strips of flesh covering her teeth in a disconcerting gesture that Tyk knows, from long experience, is friendly. “What this?”

“It’s a nail. A metal nail.”

“Metal?”

“Yeah. You have metal, I’ve seen it. You have metal that’s a lot smoother and shinier and worked into more delicate shapes than ours. Why is the nail special?”

“Big special! Tyk’s people have metal! River from stone red metal is – ”

“Calm down!”

Smon stops, and takes the time to form her next sentence properly. “Did your hive make this from the metal in the river?”

“Uh, no. There aren’t many metal nuggets in the river, there wouldn’t be nearly enough. It’s made down south at Deep Bog Hive, I think.”

“How many different kinds of metal do your people use?”

“There are different kinds?”

“Metal might be wrong word. How many types of stone that are like this? That are shiny and get hot or cold easily?”

“Uh… I don’t know? It all looks the same to me.”

Smon nods thoughtfully and inspects the nail some more. “How it made into shape?”

“I don’t know. Shouldn’t you know? I mean, you have so much of it.”

“I know how my people do it. I know how my people used to do it, too. It an important part of… rock lore. There is much metal in the river, maybe from the mountains… this Deep Bog Hive. It near the ocean?”

“A lot closer to the ocean than us, yeah, but not incredibly close.”

“It near bamboo? Or other… fire food? Things to make lots of fire?”

“I… don’t know?”

“It is,” Smon says decisively. “Downriver, you said? Opposite way than we are going.”

“Yes.”

“Pity. Well, I can see it another time. I did not know you have metal, Tyk.”

“Yeah, we have metal. It’s just not very useful.”

“It very useful!”

“It has some uses,” Tyk allows. “Like holding these carts together. But it’s very heavy, which makes it a lot of work for the traders to bring. And you can’t build things with it forever, like fired mortar. It can be used to fix pieces of a cart together, but it’s much too heavy to use in, say, building communication towers. And it’s made far down to the south, which means to get to most of the continent it needs to go over land or upriver, not downriver. Stones from the mountains can be sent here easily on boats that come downriver at certain times of the year, but moving upriver is much harder.”

“Should not be much harder, except when river moving very very fast.”

Tyk rolls her shoulders in a Smon-like shrug. “They say it is. Boats can go downriver but not upriver. I don’t know much about boats.”

“That also very interesting. Why river do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well. Maybe we know on travel. Cart not make its cart!” And before Tyk can figure out what that means, Smon leaps to her feet and gets back to work building carts with the others.

Metal, huh. Well, she is a rock lorekeeper, whatever that means. And if her boat is anything to go by, her people use an abundance of metal. Maybe the Sky People Hive will have a lot of business with the Deep Bog Hive.

The final caravan is six carts long, comprising of seven women, their truebrothers, and Smon. Which seems like a lot, but since those seven women include Ayan and Tyk, who are too small to pull heavy loads and need lightened carts, and Bette, who’s too old to be assigned a cart at all, the amount of trade goods they’re actually moving is pitifully small for the number of people. It doesn’t help that all of the Redstone River-born traders are far South this time of year so there’s not an experienced trader among the group; they simply have to hope that a combined knowledge of cart maintenance, San’s experience pulling the heaviest carts during the bamboo harvest, and the messengers’ travel and foraging knowledge, will be enough.

“I see and think of my people coming here,” Smon remarks as final preparations are made. “We use big knowing in different way. Only way to go.”

Tyk isn’t sure what exactly Smon has said to the hiveheart, but they seem really invested in using this journey as a trial run for how exactly to move Smon’s people about. Even with all of her efforts, the smallest she can get her farm still has it and her personal effects taking up a whole lightened cart and it is loaded, unsurprisingly, onto Tyk’s. Ayan’s cart is loaded with repair materials for the carts themselves, leaving the trade goods in the care of the adults.

On the night before they leave, Smon takes the time to “shut down” her boat. With Tyk’s help, she packs away her tent and shelves and various containers and seals up the door. Tyk can hardly believe that everything fits so neatly into her little “egg”, sitting there on the grass and looking just as it did when it first dropped out of the sky.

Well, that’s not true. The silk parachutes have long been cut down and packed away, the fire-spouters attached to the bottom have been partly disassembled, and while the boat is still charred from its drop from the sky, much of the surface soot has been washed away by rain. The grass in the area has been trampled and over-harvested, leaving patches of bare dirt of slick mud depending on the weather, and Smon’s water tank and attached pipe still sit against one side, not in use but very visible. But apart from those things, it looks fairly similar to how it did when it first dropped out of the sky.

Once Smon closes the door, something inside moves to lock it in place (she’s explained to Tyk before that she uses the echo stone to do this, that it talks to the boat somehow, but Tyk isn’t sure how that works). She presses a claw to the scorched exterior for a long moment, nods to herself, and steps back. “All done.”

“It looks how it always does when you close the door,” Tyk says.

“Look, but not. All things sleep inside, except for cold boxes.”

“Cold boxes?”

“Where my people’s life is. Hibernating in cold. And other things that can rot, all in cold also. When my people gather for hive, we bring all things from all boats. But now it all sleep while I am go.”

“And you can wake it up with your echo stone.”

“Yes. Or other way, if no can use echo stone.”

“Other way?”

“Not matter.” She gives the boat one last affectionate pat before heading for the trader burrow to get some sleep before the journey starts at sunrise. And Tyk, too, heads home for some sleep.

She’s leaving the hive.

Very temporarily. For a short journey, with her parents. It’s not the fate of the average wanderer, the destiny that still looms large over her life threatening to claim her someday, but she’s spent so much of her life dreading that eventual leaving that even this seems terrifying. She should learn everything she can on the journey, everything she’ll need to know to make helping set up Smon’s hive her destiny, a destiny she can come home from afterwards. There’s nothing to worry about; this is good. This is an opportunity.

She sleeps so fitfully that Kesan spends half the night automatically humming soothing melodies in his sleep.

In the morning, after getting probably not quite as much rest as one would want before setting out to pull a cart all day, Tyk has a filling morning meal and heads out to assemble with the rest of the travellers. Six carts, thirteen travellers – Tyk herself, with Smon to help with her cart; Ayan with Keyan on her horns and Bette to help with her cart; San and Kesan, with the heaviest cart as befitting San’s legendary strength; and six volunteers, a mix of local foragers and scouts, the best that the hive could pull together as ad-hoc long distance messengers. Tyk has done enough training and children’s work on the surface to recognise the three women by sight (Toi, Ohta, and Mir), although she doesn’t know any of them particularly well.

“I am so jealous,” Dahm tells her, coming to see her off. “We never go anywhere cool.”

“You could’ve volunteered for the mission,” Tyk says as Kedahm settles on her back to sing briefly to the egg inside her in goodbye.

“And take these gifted claws away from the farm at this critical time? The other farmers would kill me.”

“Not to mention the silks,” Kedahm adds. “I can’t abandon the silkvines. Bring back some good news for us from Green Hills, will you?”

“The goodness of the news is outside of my control. Or, indeed, if there’s any news at all. Unless a lot of traders are passing through the Green Hills Hive, they probably don’t know much more than we do.”

“Bring back some juicy gossip, then,” Dahm says. “They’ve got two sky people and Bette was born there, so I bet they’re all a lot like her. Drama Hive.”

Bette was born in the Green Hills Hive? That helps to explain her insistence on going on this trip, Tyk supposes. Perhaps she wants to die deep in the tunnels she grew up in, instead of Redstone River’s tunnels. Not that Tyk would ever say such a rude thing out loud – she’d just get bitten by Ayan again. And she’d deserve it.

“I’m sure they’re much like we are,” Tyk says, to disbelieving clicking from both her brother and sister. And then the pair pull back, and Tyk and the others shoulder the yokes of their carts.

And the caravan is off.

First —- Previous —- Glossary —- Archive —- Next