36: Wheel Work

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After a couple more days of travel, the river starts to bend East, and the pair are forced to finally leave it. They’re somewhat off the trade route now, which curves slightly West away from the river at the boat crossing, meaning that they’ll be dragging a cart through rough terrain with no ruts to follow, which isn’t ideal. Diverging from the river at the boat crossing had of course been out of the question – there was no way they could safely stop there, build a cart, and expect to get any decent distance away from the crossing without risking being spotted and pursued. But by now they’re well out of sight of the crossing even for a man flying high looking for them, and it’s very unlikely that anybody will be searching for them upriver, so it’s… well, as safe as it’s going to get. They can at least switch to daytime travel now; a necessity, if they’re going to be pulling a cart over uneven terrain.

Despite probably being safe from pursuit, the pair are determined to keep moving as quickly as possible. Smon, of course, wants to get to the Starspire as soon as possible, and Ketyk’s egg seems to become heavier inside Tyk every day. She has to make it to Glittergem before it’s time to lay. If she can’t lay him at home, she will at the very least make sure to lay him at a hive somewhere. Not in the middle of the wilderness with no friendly wings to help him.

Which means that they’re both rather frustrated by the task of trying to build a cart capable of carrying something quite heavy over uneven land, with basically no materials to work with.

“The farm itself is fine to move as a single unit without support,” Smon says as she sorts through crumbly, flawed bamboo sticks. “All we really need are axles and wheels. I can pull it by the straps I used to pull it upriver, so – ”

“No, we’ll want a proper yoke,” Tyk says. “Those straps give you no control for steering. Even between the two of us, trying to wrestle the thing over bumps and stones is going to be a strain, and we can’t afford that.”

“I don’t mind a few bruises and some muscle strain if – ”

“You’ll end up dead thinking like that. Neither of us can afford to get injured, because we can’t afford to stop and heal. This land is uncultivated – we can just about scrape by foraging with just the two of us, especially since your farm can eat so many different things, but only if we keep moving. More than one day in one spot will pick the area clean. We can probably expect a lot better once we reach the normal route again, but we’re going to be moving so slow between here and there that that’ll take days. Even then, we can’t expect it to be as good as the route to the Green Hills Hive, which is well-travelled, through hive-owned lands, and practically on the riverbed. And we don’t have any supplies; we’ll be relying completely on forage. One or two days resting in one spot could starve us. I can only eat certain foods, and your farm needs lots of water to work, meaning that as soon as we leave the river it’s a race against time to get to the trade route and its wells.”

“Yeah, I know, I know. You’re certain there will be water pits?”

“Any trade route more than a couple of days’ travel from water has wells, or so traders have told me. That’s a couple of days on normal caravan travel time; longer for us. Once we’re on the trade route, we might be able to afford rests at the wells, depending on how the forage is, but we’ll be moving so slowly to get there that we can’t afford any injury that might make us stop before then. So we should probably build a proper way to pull and steer the farm.”

“Out of what? Where are we even going to get wheels?”

“I can use bamboo and mortar to make us wheels, but they won’t last long. Unfired mortar is pretty fragile; we’d have to replace them a few times a day, probably. If I could half-fire them, that would be better, but I don’t want to risk a fire out here where the smoke might be seen from the river crossing.”

“What does the firing do?” Smon asks, glancing back at the farm. “Do you just need the heat? We can make heat.”

“Heat and smoke. The smoke gives it a hard, unyielding shell. Heat alone should help a lot, but it won’t be as good as with smoke.”

“Well, halfway is good enough. We can heat your wheels as much as you like.”

So Tyk gets to work making wheels. She’s not exactly trained in this, so the job involves a lot of guesswork, but she’s seen cart wheels all her life; it can’t be that hard. She decides against making the solid, mostly-mortar wheels used on the well-travelled tracks up to the bamboo forests and instead decides on the lighter, thinner designs preferred for long journeys and treacherous terrain. Hopefully, even with her lacklustre building skills and the substandard bamboo available, they’ll do the job.

Clipping the bamboo into spokes with mandible and claw isn’t hard; the hard part is finding long strands that can be bent into an even circle without breaking. While she works, Smon takes out a small metal thorn and a long piece of silk and gets to work repairing the silks that she wears on her body. (Tyk has learned that due to her soft, uncarapaced flesh, these silks provide some level of protection against the environment, especially the ones on her claws and feet.)

Tyk cements the joints with freshly chewed mortar as if she’s cementing a tunnel support join and carefully moulds the axle attachment in the centre. After a quick exposure to the heat rock from Smon’s farm, it’s ready.

Now to make the others.

Smon finishes repairing her silks and gets to work making cushioning for the wheels out of dry grasses, to extent the life of the wheels. Tyk’s already uncertain how they’ll hold up against the stones and dips on the journey, even with cushioning; maybe she should’ve gone with mortar instead. The heavier, lower-set mortar wheels are harder to use in such terrain, but they are at least far less prone to breaking.

The hardest part of the design is axles. There simply isn’t all that much in the environment strong enough to be used as axles for such a load. Tyk, having spent her life in a bamboo-harvesting hive, simply cannot get over how fragile and useless uncultivated bamboo is.

“It seems fine to me,” Smon says, propping the end of a stick against a rock and standing on it.

“Sure, it can hold you up for now, but can it hold up the farm as it rocks and jolts over every bit of uneven ground on the way to the track? Besides, hardly any of these sticks are even long enough to reach under the farm to be an axle.”

“Do they need to?” Smon taps her claw against the side of the farm. “The bottom is solid. It holds everything up itself if we can get it above the ground. We don’t need to run axles all the way under, we just need a way to affix the wheels to the sides with as little wobbling as possible.”

So they focus on using stronger, shorter lengths of bamboo to do that and, with the help of bamboo wedges and a lot of random splotches of fresh mortar, manage to get four wheels attached that move somewhat smoothly. Then they attach a proper rigging and yoke to the front for Tyk, some pushing handles on the back for Smon, and they’re ready to go.

It’s very slow going. Every few body-lengths, they have to pause briefly for Smon to move a rock or lever a wheel out of a ditch or something.

“On my Earth,” Smon says conversationally as she kicks a stray plant out of the way of the wheels, “there are big big triangle stone mountains built on vast plains of sand, where a long time ago, powerful people were buried. To make them, lots of people would have to pull enormous rocks over the sand, and they’d use huge bamboo rollers and wet the sand with river water to make it easier. I wish we were moving this over sand.”

“How can your Earth have that much sand?” Tyk hears Smon get into place behind the bars again, and takes that as her cue to pull them a bit further.

“My Earth has so much sand. Sand everywhere. Sand all over the bottom of the ocean, sand on the edges of every continent and every island, huge patches of sand in dry places. Mostly sand.”

“If you guys could chew mortar, you could make really strong objects with all of that.”

Smon laughs. “We make mortar without our mouths. Mix types of dust with water, mix that mortar with sand to make things.”

“It is strong?”

“Stronger than your fresh mortar, weaker than your fired mortar. Easier for you, I think, with your mouths. For us, we need to get all kinds of powder from different places. Pieces of ash, pieces of rock, pieces of animals.”

“Animals?”

“Inside-carapace, in my body. Many, many animals on my Earth have this. It has some things in it… like seastone, mostly. Also blood. Different body materials to make things. Skin.”

Come to think of it, Smon does have skin, like a larva, or like a fruit, or presumably like those strange water beasts that Tyk saw diving deep into the river on the way to the Green Hills Hive – it would make sense that other animals on her Earth would also have it. “Skin?”

“Animals with thicker skin than us. We used their skins for a long, long time to make things. Still do sometimes. Is better than silks for some things, especially very very early on, when we could not make the silks I use yet. On my Earth, a big animal would pull this cart.”

“A big animal?”

“We have many big animals, bigger than me and you. Bigger and stronger. We would use them to pull carts and things. And also to carry us.”

“They let you do that?”

“They grew up near us, and were taught to be our friends from when they were larvae. We would feed and look after them and they would help us.”

Tyk is aware that the continent used to have larger animals on it. After a concerted effort over the first couple of hive cycles, the first people on the continent had managed to kill them off, making the land safer and easier to cultivate. The idea of somehow convincing such beasts to work to help the hive sounds ridiculous. How would the hive even tell them what to do? Such animals can’t speak.

Smon has said that there are no other kinds of people on her Earth, but perhaps her Earth’s animals are just smarter. Smart enough to talk to. Smon has never met a smart animal and isn’t sure how such an animal wouldn’t count as a type of person – surely, if they’re smart enough to understand how to contribute to the hive when you explain the system to them, they’re smart enough to be a member of the hive? – but asking Smon about that with their limited shared language would probably just confuse her more.

“Well,” she says, “animals or not, we’re strong enough to do this. My people have been pulling carts since the beginning of time; nothing this place can throw at us ca – ”

Which is, of course, when it starts to rain.

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