58: Forging Ahead

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Tyk is of course as excited about the wingsong stream as anyone. She’s desperate for news of home, and Kemia thoughtfully keeps abreast of the situation and the very morning after they start to get faint, fuzzy communication is able to tell her that the Redstone River Hive is facing no critical problems and that they sent messengers to neighbouring hives to warn them about the Green Hills Hive’s actions towards the sky people. Green Hills find themselves in a politically awkward position, and have replaced their entire hiveheart and strictly disciplined anybody found to be involved in the situation. There’s even chatter about the possibility of exile, which is a somewhat extreme punishment for actions taken against non-hivemates, even murder, but the hive as a whole are apparently enraged at a hiveheart that would commit such acts in secrecy to avoid resistance from their own hive.

Also, Tyk thinks, the situation can’t be good for trade and inter-hive diplomacy. Even if the hive as a whole had supported the murder of the sky people, they would probably still blame the hiveheart and give them the most extreme possible punishments if only to save face. Sentencing isn’t complete yet but between the outrage of their own hive and the outrage of the other hives, Tyk doesn’t think that the former Green Hills hiveheart or any of their accomplices have much of a future in the hives. And unless Dem, Kana and Yotoru have really messed up relations with whatever group of Hiveless are currently managing the lands around their reservoir, the exiles probably won’t have a much better time in the Sleeplands.

The Redstone River Hive are, of course, overjoyed to hear that Smon and Tyk made it safely to Glittergem, and that Ketyk was born strong and healthy, and although Tyk can’t climb the tower and hear the messages herself and is merely getting the information second hand, she gets the distinct impression that most of the hive had considered her death a foregone conclusion, alone out in the sleeplands. Which… is hard to fault. Had it not been for the neima, Tyk’s not sure if she would’ve made it to Glittergem, and she certainly wouldn’t have made it with Smon and her farm.

Once general communication opens up again, Tyk and Ketyk are given priority on streams reaching Redstone River, a privilege that Tyk feels somewhat guilty about not protesting. She tells herself (unconvincingly) that it’s a normal courtesy to a guest from another hive and not because of her connection to Smon. Redstone River doesn’t give such communication priority to travellers and traders, but hey, maybe Glittergem does. It’d be rude to protest. She dictates endless messages to Ketyk for him (or more accurately, the men teaching him how to use the wingsong, but she pretends not to know that in his presence) to deliver to their family and hive, and eagerly devours every return message. The hive is going well, her family obliquely hint without crudely asserting that San and Kesan have been experiencing a large boost in social status simply due to being her parents (as well as being among the few voices in the hive that have been steadfastly insisting that she was definitely still alive and would accomplish her journey). Pol is about to lay another daughter, which isn’t something that Tyk and Ketyk would usually be directly informed about, but Kesan is excited for Kepol, who’s excited to be a father again. San didn’t get an egg out of the courtship, so Tyk won’t be getting any younger sisters, for now. Maybe next cycle.

The idea of being old enough to have a younger sister is a disorienting one. Or maybe San and Kesan proceeded with the courtship because they were less certain of her survival than they’d claimed.

Ayan, Tyk learns (without asking), has gained a lot of respect in the hive as well, as a result of her actions to save Smon and expose the corruption of the Green Hills Hive on the boat. She attended one of the expeditions to warn the other hives, as a diplomat. Tyk can’t find it in herself to resent her for that. Ayan might be a piece of work, but she did indeed save Smon. Tyk has to give her that.

Tyk finally feels like she’s just about caught up on news from home on the afternoon that she comes up from the lower tunnels to find Smon, covered in dirt and dust from her own tunnel work, waving something in her face. “Look!”

It’s a big, shiny blob of metal. “Your first find?”

“Yes! Part of it!” She screws up her face. “This mountain is strange. Being a rock lorekeeper is very helpful, but it’s different to my Earth’s mountains, just a little bit, and in unexpected ways. I should have expected that when I saw just how many types of gems came out of the same area. That’s very, very strange, by my standards. But it’s working! This is my share of our first find.”

It’s a big piece of metal, enough to make the nails for an entire cart if you made them small enough. But the way Smon talks about the Rayjo Tau, she will need a lot more metal than that. At least enough to make a whole caravan of carts, Tyk suspects; maybe even more, a lot more. Maybe enough to make the river ropes at the Green Hills Hive.

“A good start,” Tyk says. “So you’ll use that for the Rayjo Tau?”

“Eventually, probably. For now, though, I need metals for the…” Smon pauses thoughtfully, like she always does when looking for a way to explain something that the echo stone doesn’t have a word for. “For the heat carrying channel.”

“The what?”

“Now that we’re not dragging it all around the continent, I’m making my farm bigger. I won’t be able to carry and feed it up the mountain, so I need to start stockpiling food. That means heating up really big chambers. Now, I can make plenty of heat with my magic stones, but moving it around is harder. I need metal for that.”

“Our metalsmiths can bloom and shape it for you,” says Kemia, materialising out of nowhere in a moment of need as is his habit. “When they heat the forge to make digging tools, I’m sure they can find time for it.”

“I’d very much appreciate the assistance of your metalsmiths, but they should use my heat magic for it,” she says. “I wouldn’t feel right about giving over my magic to forge your tools, but nor would I feel right about taking your precious fuel away from tool forging in order to forge things for me. I would very much love to see your forge though, if that’s possible.”

“I will arrange it,” Kemia says. “If we get in before they start shaping today’s metal, it should be easy. After dinner?”

“Great. That’ll give me time to get cleaned up.”

For Smon, ‘getting cleaned up’ means washing the dirt from her body with water and putting on clean silks. Her shell is too soft to brush clean like Tyk’s, and oozes all kinds of fluids that she prefers to periodically remove, claiming that old fluids stink, although Tyk can never tell the difference. She manages to get both herself and her silks much cleaner at Glittergem than she ever did with river water, partly because the springwater has a lot less dirt and metal in it, and partly because she is using, bafflingly, soap.

Yes, soap. The harsh, pungent fluid used to clean and dye silk fibres. In Tyk’s experience, for both the men who weave the silks and the women who make the soap, working with the substance is usually a punishment duty, because of the way it strips the shine off of carapaces and leaves them dull and easily dirtied. But Smon, almost completely indifferent to the smell, mixes it with fluids produced by her farm and rubs it over herself with no concerns, though it does make her skin dry and a bit powdery if she gets the fluid mixture wrong.

And after she learned that the process makes her smell unpleasantly like soap, she started rubbing other oils produced by her farm on her skin afterwards. Which does remove the soap smell but since the whole process is to remove oils in the first place, makes Tyk confused about the whole process. Still, it’s far from the strangest of Smon’s little habits.

Tyk and Ketyk join Smon and Kemia to see the forge. Tyk, not working in the stone tunnels, hasn’t seen all that much metal in the Glittergem hive, and it hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder about how they shape it.

It’s a small room dug into the stone above ground level, but not very high above. It’s clearly very close to the cliff, because there are small holes in the wall leading outside. There are some different basins and oven-like structures that Tyk can’t begin to guess the nature of, and in the middle of the room, a long bench and some sort of large, oddly-shaped, metal block.

Smon doesn’t seem to find this confusing at all, briefly running her hands over the metal thing and then moving on. She is fascinated by a rack of various tools in the corner; after checking that it’s okay to touch them, she picks a few of them up, one by one, trying to hold them in her strangely shaped hands, then glances at Tyk, clearly trying to envision how they’re held and used. She doesn’t ask, though, simply putting them back with care and examining the room as a whole.

Tyk can’t understand what’s so fascinating. Smon examines every aspect of the room with the same sort of delight that she showed when when learned that the hives trade with each other, or that Tyk knew how the solar system was structured, a delight that Tyk now has the context to feel kind of patronised by. What, is the concept that we can even shape metal somehow surprising to her? She’s known that since Redstone River. She’s seen the metal ropes on the river at Green Hills.

When she opens a bin to reveal charcoal, she laughs. She picks up a chunk, which crumbles slightly in her hands, leaving black powder on them.

“What is it?” Ketyk asks, and Kemia goes to answer, but Smon gets in first.

“Bamboo!” she says. “Half-burned bamboo. My people used to do this, a very, very long time before I was born. We have… well, you don’t have a word for it that I know, but it’s a plant substance like bamboo, or at least bamboo is a type of it in our language… anyway, bamboo burns to make heat, right? But not enough to forge metal really effectively. If you want to make a really, really hot fire, then just burning raw bamboo won’t work, because it also takes heat to burn it, to do the hard part of the burn and to dry all the water out and stuff like that. So they burn bamboo, but they don’t let it get enough air, so it only does that colder part of the burn, then they put the fire out when the other part, the really hot part, hasn’t happened yet. And then they have this, which can burn really hot.” She closes the bin and brushes her hands together, which does almost nothing to knock the black powder off them. “It’s amazing to see a place like this. Some people have these on my Earth, just for fun, to make things the old way, but not very many. And to see a hive where all the metal is actually, properly forged this way… wow.”

So it wasn’t condescension, Tyk realises as Smon inspects some sort of currently disused firepit built into the wall. She’s seeing her own past as much as the present.

“How do you get more air in? To make it hot enough?” Smon asks, inspecting the firepit. “I don’t see a… artificial lung.”

“A what?” Kemia asks.

Tyk has noticed a small hole in the wall behind the firepit. “I imagine that they use a fly-girl,” she says. “In there.”

“A what?” Smon asks.

“You know.” Tyk beats her wings, creating a slight breeze, to demonstrate. “The same way we ventilate or heat or cool tunnels.”

“Oh! Like how you kept us warm in the sleeplands.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s right,” Kemia says. “There’s a little room on the other side of the wall where a couple of girls beat their wings for the forge. And there’s usually another fly-girl up there,” he indicates a platform up near the ceiling, “to ventilate this room and keep it at a workable temperature.”

“Ouch,” Tyk says. “You could scorch your wings doing that.”

“Yes, it’s not a very popular job. How do your people do it without wings, Smon?”

“We keep the fire hot with a big artificial lung,” she explains. We make it out of… out of dead…” she taps her arm.

“Out of your own bodies?!” Ketyk asks.

“No! From skin. Not of us, of animals, big animals. We peel it off and dry it and make things.”

There is silence, for several seconds.

“That’s not… unlike what we do,” Kemia says slowly, clearly trying not to sound grossed out. “I mean, they make utensils out of crab shells on the coast. And along the river, right, Tyk?”

“Uh, yes.” Which is the same thing, and Tyk shouldn’t feel so disgusted. Smon has mentioned using skin for things before, but she’s never been so specific about it. Tyk finds this disgusting, she decides, because she’s never seen any of these large soft animals that Smon talks about, and can’t help but envision Smon’s skin being peeled off and used. She instead tries to envision the soft animals she saw deep in the river, brought up and hollowed out and blown up into artificial lungs like the balloons that had floated Smon’s farm on the river. That’s… a better image.

Not pleasant. But better.

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