35: The Price of Metal

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The caution is probably unnecessary, but they wait until it’s well and truly dark before moving. The pair carefully forage what they think they can get away with, reinflate the farm’s balloons and fill it up, and continue on their way.

Usually, their pace is somewhat leisurely, with plenty of resting for Smon’s vulnerable feet and Tyk’s muscles unaccustomed to long periods of swimming. They slow when they get tired rather than stopping, and the few brief stops they are forced to make are restless. They pass the boat line early in the night, almost invisible in the dark and noticed largely because they have to manoeuvre the farm over the chains, and from then on it’s all about distance, putting distance between them and the faint chance of pursuit. With every step, the slim chance of discovery and slimmer chance of pursuit shrinks smaller and smaller, and for the first time, Tyk starts to feel like they’re really going to make it. They’re going to get to Glittergem, and then to the Starspire, and nobody’s going to be able to stop them.

“Why didn’t you open the boat?” Tyk asks at one of their brief rest stops.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Myn and Haidn’s boat. You told me ages ago that there’s ways to open them without the echo stone, but when the Green Hills hiveheart took you there, you didn’t even try. You just said it was locked.”

“Oh, that. Myn and Haidn warned me not to. They wrote a message on the boat.”

The design that she’d said was a prayer to the stars. Had to be. “They said not to trust the hiveheart? And you still crossed the river with them?”

“Well, I didn’t suspect that they were killing us. I was wary of the opposite problem. They didn’t say not to trust the hiveheart, necessarily; they suspected that the hiveheart were interested in our resources and our magic. Which makes perfect sense; I’m sure the Redstone River Hive are interested in that, too. But Redstone River always treated my things with appropriate levels of caution, and not once have I been worried about anybody trying to steal from me. Myn and Haidn’s relationship with the Green Hills Hive seemed to be more tense, and they did seem worried about the hiveheart taking the things from the boat, which could be very dangerous.”

“Dangerous for your people?” Tyk asks, thinking of the killing tool that Smon has. How many more killing tools are in those boats?

“A bit. There are things in there that we will need to live, like the life I built my farm from. And there are frozen eggs in there not ready to hatch, waiting for us to build a hive for them. The hive could kill all of those things by complete accident. But the bigger concern is what damage our magic could do to the hives.”

“Like your killing tool.”

“What? Oh, no; this thing couldn’t bring down a hive. Even giving every one of these to a warlike hive and teaching them how to make them and letting them declare war on everyone would be very bad, and would get a lot of people killed, but it wouldn’t do any serious long-term damage; the other hives would learn how to hide and burrow and shield themselves and fight against it, and they’re much too hard to make in a place like this. And the hives are far too aware of ecology to make any truly continent-changing tools from our magic. No, no; the problems are more… well. Let’s take the boat chains for example. Lots and lots of metal, needed to keep the river crossing working. But it’s in the water, so it rusts. It must take a lot of very expensive metal to keep working, right?”

“I assume so.”

“Which has to come all the way up from the Deep Bog Hive, right?”

“Yes. Nobody else knows how to make metal.”

“Oh, I doubt that that’s true. You have lorekeepers and traders and hive immigrants moving all over, and I’m sure the metal-makers down there have friends they talk to on the wingsong stream. I’d wager that a lot of people know the theory of making metal, or at least know somebody that they could ask to find out if they wanted. But if your people make metal the same ways that my people used to a long time ago, it takes lots and lots of heat. My guess is that the Deep Bog Hive is the one place that has both good access to the river and also lots of things that can burn. The stone that you call seastone can also help make the metal cleaner, so if they’re near the ocean, that too might help.

“I might be wrong, maybe they have a different way, but even if I am wrong, the fact is that river water and a lot of heat are all you really need – there’s a way to make a lot of metal with that. So let’s imagine if Myn and Haidn saw the river crossing, and saw how hard it must be to maintain and how much good it does for the whole continent’s trade route, and they said, we can help you. We can teach you to make your own metal, and give you magic stones that can make lots of heat for a very long time.”

“Like how you heat your farm.”

“Yes, exactly. That would be very valuable to the Green Hills Hive. They could keep their boat line in perfect condition far, far more cheaply; they might even choose to build a bridge, although I don’t know enough about the river or about how your people build to know if that’s a good idea or not. They could maintain the crossing very cheaply and reliably, making it cheaper and more reliable for the traders to use.”

“That sounds like a good thing,” Tyk says, puzzled. “Where’s the problem?”

“The problem is this: what happens to the Deep Bog Hive? I asked around and metal is their main export, isn’t it?”

“Um. Probably?” Tyk doesn’t know all that much about the Deep Bog Hive.

“And taking these big chains all the way up the continent, that’s a huge journey, a long and difficult and expensive one. Those chains must be incredibly expensive to buy. So if the Green Hills Hive doesn’t need to buy them any more… where do the Deep Bog Hive get what they need to survive? Is it worth them going North at all without that sale, or do they just stop sending traders up there through other hives like Redstone River? I doubt that they’re paying for the trip with just the trade of small batches of nails. If they’re not getting any nails, or if nails become expensive enough to pay for Deep Bog’s trader needs, then what does that do to their bamboo trade for things like building trade carts?”

“So if the sky people gave heat magic to the Green Hills Hive, then Redstone River wouldn’t get any metal?”

“You probably would, when Green Hills started trading it. Not only would they be making it much more easily and cheaply than Deep Bog, but you’ve mentioned before that while it’s not possible to take a trade caravan upriver by boat, it is possible to take one downriver during the dry season. Caravans trading metal, I imagine, would have much heavier carts on the way to their destinations than on the way back, so if Green Hills can take the metal downriver on boats then they can move it around much more cheaply than Deep Bog as well as making it more cheaply than Deep Bog. So Green Hills can trade the metal much more cheaply to everyone, and Deep Bog has to trade something else or is in big trouble.”

“Deep Bog would still have everywhere that isn’t on the river, though,” Tyk points out.

“Do they? Redstone River Hive is near the middle of the continent and very, very close to the riverbank. Redstone River Hive is also known for growing very strong bamboo that makes the best trade carts, good for carrying the heaviest things. What would your hive do if you suddenly could get as much metal as you wanted for very very cheap?”

“Oh. Right. We’d trade it. We’d take as much as Green Hills was willing to bring to us and build as many trade carts as we could and take it to everyone on the East side of the continent.”

“Leaving Deep Bog with not many hives to trade with, yes? And also, in this model, there is so much more metal. Everyone has lots of metal now, and lots of metal can build lots of different things. How many more hives trade things that nobody will need any more, because they can do it with metal?” She raises one of the tendrils on one claw. “That is one magic given to one hive for one thing. We have many magics and there are many hives on the continent.”

Tyk remembers talking to Hetta, telling her about how Smon’s people could help them build stronger carts and towers, and Hetta asking her if, given that their main trade was bamboo, she really thought that that was a good thing. “So you can’t share any magic with us,” she says, horns sinking.

“We can. But we must be careful. Even sharing heat for metal might be very bad, or might be very good. Metal is useful and can make many things that make living more comfortable, that make work easier and safer. It can make new things that your people haven’t thought of yet because other materials can’t do it, things that you can discover and build. Your people dig enormous hives; my people dig, too, to find things in the ground, and when we long ago started making lots of this metal it meant that we could dig further and deeper using metal support struts and ladders and chains; maybe there are things even deeper in the ground that metal can help you find. The Deep Bog Hive can’t be supporting all their trade on metal; maybe they trade more of other things, and not having to burn so many things to get their metal could even make their hives better. But we don’t know; we don’t know enough about your people and you don’t know enough about our people to know what trade is good and what is bad. Even all the things I just said are good might be bad! Burrowing deep with metal might be bad of ecology! I don’t know. That’s why it is important to get my people together with Rayjo Tua, so we can gather all our knowledge and act together as a group instead of doing small trades that seem like a good idea but have effects that we don’t know.”

“Well,” Tyk says, “your timing is really, really good.”

“Our timing?”

“The sweetroot’s rotting in the ground. In a few generations, all of the hives on this part of the continent will collapse. That’s not a bad thing!” she adds hurriedly, seeing the shock in Smon’s eyes. “It’s a normal part of the cycle. When that draws near, people will lay less eggs as the food supplies start to dwindle, and then when the hives can’t support them any more, they’ll all pick up and move into recovered sleeplands and find new places to build hives, that will develop around the new resources in those areas. So this might be chaotic for us, but my great-grandchildren will be digging in clean mud, and your great-grandchildren will have a great chance to trade as much magic as they like when they’re deciding where to build. They can incorporate the magic into their decisions.”

“Great-grandchildren.” Smon smiles. “We’ll have to keep my people alive down here long enough to do that.”

Tyk looks back towards the river crossing, far behind them and no longer visible, then North, up the river. They still have plenty of night left to travel in. She gets up and heads for the farm.

“Oh, we will,” she says. “We’ll get Rayjo Tau up and your people will be fine. I’ve got no doubts about that.”

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