37: The Slog

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At first, they try to push on, but as the rain gets heavier and heavier, they quickly realise that there’s nothing to do but rest. There’s no sense endangering themselves or the slapdash cart by pushing on through mud, and without knowing how long the rain will last, neither of them wants to be wetter than they absolutely need to be. Smon pulls out some of the waterproof covering over the farms to make a little shelter for them and gathers bunches if long grass while Tyk hurriedly assembles a rough floor from bamboo laid across stones to keep them out of the mud. It’s not great, but it’s dry enough.

“I hate getting wet,” Tyk grumbles as outside their little tent, Kelennin starts lancing across the sky in bright arcs and shouting celebrations of the start of the wet season in her booming voice.

“You’ve spent the last several days in the river,” Smon points out. She’s shaking, not with emotion or exhaustion, but as some sort of self-heating technique. It’s her version of shivering, Tyk thinks; Tyk starts to shiver too, lifting the carapace from over her wings and rubbing the wing membranes rapidly against each other to produce heat. Like most girls in a hive, Tyk’s spent her fair share of time on ventilation duties in the tunnels, working to control temperature, humidity and air supply with her wings; she knows what she’s doing. It’s hard work without the help of other girls, but their tent is a small space, and soon the air is becoming tolerably warm and dry.

“Swimming in the river is difficult,” Tyk says, having to raise her voice to be heard clearly over both Kelennin outside and hey own wings inside. “Being wet in the river, being wet underground, and being wet on the surface are all different, and being wet on the surface is the worst of the three.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Smon says, “though being wet underground sounds pretty miserable.” She takes a handful of the grass she harvested and filches a stick of bamboo from their uneven floor to beat the grass against.

“What are you doing?” Tyk asks.

“Making rope,” she explains, peeling the now-broken tough outer shaft of a grass stem back and carefully pulling out the flexible fibres within. “I’d rather not use my silks if I can get away with it, and we have time in here.” She lays the fibres in a small stack and uses her dextrous claws to twist them together. This part, Tyk recognises; she’s seen men spin cordage in a similar way, albeit they use their mouths to do what Smon is doing with her claws. She sticks the ends of the tiny cord in her mouth to maintain the twist as she harvests more fibres.

Understanding the process, Tyk is able to help; she gets to work efficiently breaking the grasses with her tougher claws and baring the fibres within for Smon to add to the cord. Smon’s movements are efficient and well-practiced as the cord grows in her claws.

“Did you do this a lot on your Earth?” Tyk asks.

“No, never. I learned on the javlyn. We knew that we would not have magic tools forever, and didn’t have room to bring down a lot of the magic tools that were on the javlyn. So we learned to do things in other ways instead. Ropes and silks are very very important to our people, to protect us and do important tasks, so we learned to make them before we fell. After I fell near your hive, I practiced with all the different grasses I could find to see which are good for rope and which are not. So I know what to do.”

“Is this rope for anything in particular?”

“Yes. We need to keep moving when the rain stops, we can’t wait for the mud to dry. Especially if this big rain are going to happen a lot.”

“It’s very common in the early wet season.”

“Then I’ll use this to build something that will let us move the cart through mud more easily.”

By the time the rain lets up, they have a decent length of cord, although Smon says it won’t be enough and she’ll have to use some of the straps and ties from her farm and baggage. She has Tyk fell the longest stalks of bamboo nearby and cut them in half lengthways to make half-cylinder planks. Using her cordage and a small blade, she ties the planks together to make two mats, each a bit wider and longer than the cart, that can be rolled up into large bundles of bamboo.

“These,” she explains, “should be much easier to pull a cart over than mud.” She lays one in front of the cart and, together, they drag it up onto the mat. Then it’s a simple matter of laying the other mat in front, pushing the cart forward, and gathering up the previous mat to move in front of the cart once more.

It’s a slow way of travel, full of constant stops to move the mats, but it’s much faster than moving through the mud without them. The bamboo of the mats cracks over time and it’s immediately obvious that they’ll need regular repair, but they’re also saving some damage to the wheels, so it probably evens out. Tyk can already see how much easier the mode of travel would be with three people; having one person at the back to gather the mats and hand them to someone else to lay them in front would reduce the amount of back-and-forth and let the cart puller move forward at a relatively steady (if slow) pace, but they don’t have a third person, so they just push on as best they can.

The pair quickly fall into a rhythm. Rain showers are frequent and unpredictable, so whenever it starts to rain, they immediately forage as much as they can before it gets too wet and then set up their little shelter, where they sleep and repair things under the light of Smon’s magic stones until it’s dry enough to move again. When the rain stops, they press on, under sunlight during the day and under Smon’s light during the night, until they get tired or it rains again. Smon takes to collecting rainwater in a big pocket made from the farm’s waterproof covering; it’s not enough to fully remove water as a concern, but it certainly makes the push to get to the trade route and its wells far less urgent. So long as they move enough to stop on new foraging ground, they’re fine.

So long as Ketyk takes his time. He’s not ready to be born yet, but the longer this early part of the journey takes, the higher the chance they won’t make it to Glittergem in time.

Then, after several days of travel, Tyk sees it. The scraggly little dewflowers scattered here and there on their route become larger, their bushes devoid enough of old branches that the fresh flowers, bearing their sweet globs of nectar, have the sun and room to grow to their full size. Not by accident, and certainly not by the activity of the long-extinct larger animals that handled such tasks before the hives were built; by pruning. They’ve entered the forage range of the trade route.

The pair press on, harder than they should, pushing for longer in the rain, resting their bodies less, risking the cart wheels more. Even so, it’s still about half a day before they finally find the tracks. The pair settle the wheels into their ruts and Smon collapses against the farm.

“We’re stopping for the rest of the day,” she declares. “I don’t care about more progress today. We made it onto the route and I’m going to celebrate that.”

“Probably a good idea,” Tyk says. Both travel and foraging should be easier now, and Tyk too is looking forward to a rest not dictated by the rhythm of rain and urgent need for distance. A full half-day off Just Because sounds wonderful.

Also, she’s hungry. The foraging has been scant, and since hitting the properly cultivated route she hasn’t taken the time to harvest anything. Smon’s body is noticeably thinner than when they met; not a lot, probably not enough that nobody who spent very little time with her would notice, but the puffy, soft flesh is less puffy, the diameter of her upper limbs and torso narrower. The wrinkles around her eyes seem deeper, too, which is fascinating. Tyk wonders if her own people’s flesh does that underneath their carapaces, and immediately stops wondering because the mental image is incredibly upsetting.

Instead, she heads off to find some food. It’s fairly obvious that the plants along the route haven’t been harvested for quite some time; expected, in the circumstances. Tyk doesn’t dare backtrack down the track too far (she’s fairly certain that nobody would be pursuing them, but why tempt fate), but doesn’t want to go too far forward, either; ahead is tomorrow’s forage and there’s no sense in stripping it today. So instead she branches out sideways, expecting – and finding – a fairly wide band of semi-cultivated land on either side of the track, where foraging traders would keep pace with the caravan pullers and forage as they moved.

She doesn’t want to stray too far. She doesn’t want to lose sight of Smon. If something unpredictable were to happen, and she came back to the path only to find no Smon and no farm on it… no. She makes sure not to lose sight of them for too long a stretch of time as she pulls up anything edible she can find and carefully prunes, replants and redistributes according to the rules.

And finds something strange. Because the band of semi-cultivated land to the East, where they’d come from, is fairly narrow. But the band to the West is much, much wider. Wide enough that she daren’t find out just how wide; it would take her further from the farm than she’s comfortable with to find the end of it. It seems that the foragers, for some reason, spread out much further on one side of the path than the other. Why? Is the land better on this side? It’s certainly no easier to walk, and the plants seem the same. Did they want to spread out on both sides, but wanted to avoid getting too close to the river for… some reason? She and Smon had walked up that river for several days, and found nothing dangerous enough to warrant giving it such a wide berth.

Well, she can always ask somebody at Glittergem Hive. She goes to harvest the nectar of a dewflower, and stops. Checks another dewflower to be sure. Then a couple more. They’re all the same.

There’s… not a lot of nectar in them.

The plants a fair distance West of the path have been harvested much more recently than the plants closer to the path.

That doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason for traders to do that; they’d obviously have their carts on the path, and they’d obviously prefer to harvest closer to it. Is there some sort of… obscure rule between trader groups going on here? Unlikely; very few hives are in a position to use this route, so they shouldn’t need complicated harvesting rights rules to work around each other. Should they? Maybe that’s standard, and Tyk just doesn’t know enough about trader rules to be aware of it. (Maybe the Redstone River caravan unknowingly broke a bunch of treaties harvesting on their way up to the green Hills Hive.) That has to be it; that has to be. Because the more obvious possibility…

The more obvious possibility is the work of a resident hive. A hive in the area that cultivates this land, and has been harvesting here as normal, but leaves the trade route for the traders. That way, the trade route would be unharvested, but this land to the West of the path, between route and hive, would be cultivated and harvested by the hive. That would fit the data. With no other information, that would be the obvious, clear, straightforward conclusion – seeing land like this would mean that they were near a hive.

But they do have other data. This is the route that they’d initially planned to take to the Starspire. They know what’s supposed to be here. And this is very, very definitely, according to the maps, according to the lorekeepers, according to the Green Hills Hive, according to the talk on the wingsong stream before it went down, according to every Northern trader that Tyk has spoken to in the past… sleepland. This is a place where the ground is recovering, where the sweetroot is regrowing, where it should be impossible to have a hive.

So is that a lie? There’s been a secret hive here the whole time? A hive that the traders know about (they’d have to, there’s no way they wouldn’t notice the cultivated land), and just… kept secret, for some reason? How many people know? Do the Green Hills and Redstone River hivehearts know? Does –

No. No, that’s impossible. Why would there be a secret hive? Why keep it a secret? She’s misunderstood something, misread something. That must be it.

Tyk is still unsettled when she returns to Smon. She doesn’t explain the find; no need to confuse and worry Smon, not when Smon can’t possibly know enough to have an answer. But she does suggest sleeping in shifts.

“If you like,” Smon says, not asking why. She’s making more cord. “I’m in the middle of this, so you can sleep first, if you want.”

Tyk does. She wakes up to darkness, and settles in to stand guard while Smon sleeps. Smon has set up the little waterproof shelter, so Tyk heads outside; it’s raining out there, just a very light drizzle, but she wants to be able to see, in case there’s… anything. Something. Whatever. Best to be safe.

It turns out to be the right decision, because it gives her a great view of the colossal form approaching, barely visible in the dark as anything other than a dark patch blocking the stars. Only when she hears the wings and see the smaller figure rise into the air does she realise what she’s looking at – a man and a woman, approaching. It was hard to tell at first, because the woman is the biggest woman that Tyk has ever seen, almost a third again the size of Tyk’s mother, so big that she must have trouble fitting in the hive tunnels. Despite that, she moves almost silently, and the man (her truebrother, Tyk has to assume) didn’t start flying until they were very close, so by the time Tyk notices them it is far, far too late to wake Smon and flee.

Tyk should wake Smon anyway, alert her to danger, find some way to keep them both save. But she’s completely paralysed with terror as the woman silently lumbers close enough for Tyk to make out… absolutely no gemstones on her carapace. No carving, either. Cuts and cracks and scuffs, yes, but the kind resulting from a rough life, not the careful designs that the Northern hives use to denote status and accomplishment. She has no indicators of hive origin at all. And then her truebrother says something to her that Tyk doesn’t understand, in a language that Tyk doesn’t know, a language that isn’t the language of the hives, and Tyk understands.

There’s no secret, hidden hive cultivating the land.

After all, the Hiveless need to eat, too.

“Indeed,” the wild woman answers her truebrother, this time in Tyk’s language, looking down at her. “It seems that we’ve found ourselves a little hiveling.”

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