Alea glared after him, then sighed and followed.
11
Alea caught up to Gar and demanded, “Just how do you think we’re going to get down?”
“How do the deer get down?” Gar returned.
She eyed him narrowly. “You’ve been listening to that sage too much.”
“I never disdain good advice,” Gar said piously, “no matter the source.”
He seemed so sure of himself that Alea felt an irresistible urge to needle. “How do you know it’s good advice?”
“Why,” Gar said, “when it’s the kind of thing I would think of myself, of course.”
“You might consider the source,” Alea said with dry sarcasm.
“I have been known to make a mistake or two now and then,” Gar admitted.
“Such as looking for a government where there isn’t any?”
“That’s not a mistake until I think I’ve found one,” Gar protested.
Alea turned to stare ahead. “Speaking of finding things…”
They had come down into the trees while they had been jibing. Now the pines opened out into a clearing—a new one; there were low stumps all around the edges and three log buildings at its center. Nearby, two young men were sweating over shovels, digging out the roots of one of the stumps. In the cleared ground, other young people were plowing while still others were up on top of the long house, thatching its roof. Others were hanging doors in the dozens of doorways.
“There must be a hundred of them!” Alea said. Gar nodded, frowning. “That’s an awfully high concentration of teenagers—and no chaperones!”
“Oh, I think most of them are in their twenties,” Alea demurred.
“Then your eyes are better than mine.” Gar lifted his head, stilling for a moment to listen to thoughts, then relaxing. “You’re right—they’re young, but they’re grown.”
Alea was listening, too. “Most of them are … what did they call it, bonded?”
“They’ve paired off, anyway,” Gar said. “I wonder how many of those pairs will last… Well! Let’s test their hospitality”
They went forward to meet the youthful builders. One of the stump-pullers saw them coming and called out. His fellow worker looked up and dropped his pry bar. They both grabbed their tunics, pulled them on, and came running to meet the new arrivals.
Voices sang out, passing the word from mouth to mouth, and in minutes everyone in the clearing had converged on the companions.
“Peace, my friends, peace!” Gar crackled in his old man’s voice. “We’ve goods aplenty!”
“We have not, I’m afraid,” said a plump young woman. “We’re only beginning to plow, as you see, and have little enough that we have gathered from the forest.”
“Or hunted and smoked,” a young man agreed, “though I expect we could spare a ham or two.” Alea laughed. “We wish to eat, friends, but not to be weighed down! Have you found amber in the streams or rubies at the base of a tree’s roots?”
“No such luck, I’m afraid,” said a bony brunette. “Still, we can offer you a night’s food and lodging in exchange for news and songs!”
Gar glanced at Alea; she nodded and turned to the young woman. “We’ll accept your trade, and gladly.” The young people cheered and turned to escort their guests toward the buildings. A few ran on ahead.
As they went, they pointed out their accomplishments proudly. “There’s our barn,” said a tall young man, “and the two longhouses are our dwellings.”
“Crel, you’re so silly!” a young woman scoffed. “Anyone can tell that if they’ve ever been to a new village!”
“To tell you the truth, we haven’t,” said Alea. “We’re from very far away.”
“Yes, I thought you had something of an accent,” the young woman said with a little frown. “Don’t they have new villages where you come from?”
“Rarely,” Alea said, “and when they do, they just grow—one person builds a house by a crossroads, then a few years later another person builds nearby, then another and another until you have a village.”
“What an odd way of building!” the bony young woman said.
“Now, Honoria,” a blond young woman reproved her, “they may like the way they build.”
“Well, it’s just not sensible, if you ask me.” Honoria sniffed. “We, now, we wait until there’re enough young people in three or four villages to start a new one. Then we all march out into the forest together and clear some land for ourselves.”
“Don’t your parents give you any help?” Alea asked, wide-eyed.
“Oh yes, they all came to help us build the longhouses and the barn when spring began,” Crel said, “and they stop by from time to time.”
“Which means there’s a parent coming to visit every other day,” the redhead said with a smile.
“Of course,” said a young man who seemed as broad as a door, “they gave us cattle and tools to start with.”
“And linens and featherbeds and tableware,” the blonde reminded him. “You shouldn’t forget that, Umbo.”
“Well, no, I shouldn’t,” Umbo agreed. “After all, we needed them as soon as we arrived here. But once we had built our homes and began plowing, the old folk were happy enough to leave us on our own.”
Alea rather doubted that, but she had to admit the parents were being quite restrained about their supervision.
“Of course, we won’t be doing any more building until midsummer,” Honoria explained, “not until the crops are in and growing. Even then, we’ll have to do the hoeing ourselves—won’t we, Sylvia?”
“Well, since we don’t have any children to do it yet,” the blonde said with a smile, “I suppose we shall.”
“I’ve never seen buildings like these,” Gar said in his rusty old man’s voice. “Why so many doors?”
“Oh, these are just temporary, until we have time to build separate houses,” Umbo said. He led Gar and Alea toward the longhouses. “When we do, of course, we can take down the inside walls and have a meeting house—but until then, everyone has their own two rooms.”
“With their own outer door.” Alea nodded. “Very good. And those inner walls—they’re logs, so they’re thick?”
“Very thick,” Sylvia said, “so they’ll keep the heat in.”
“When we’re done with them, we’ll have time to saw the inner walls into planks,” Honoria said. “They should be nicely seasoned by then.”
“Especially if we hang herbs from the roof beams,” Crel said, and everybody laughed.
Spirits were high; everyone seemed to be excited about the adventure of setting up their own village. Several of the villagers proudly showed the travelers their apartments—all the same in size and proportion, but each decorated differently. Some things were the same in every room, such as the herbs truly hanging from the roof beams—and Alea recognized several that she hadn’t seen in other villages, so the young folk did have something to trade with, after all. They spent half the day exclaiming over the peddlers’ wares but in the end bartered only for needles and pans and a few other useful things; they gazed at the porcelains and figurines with longing but were too poor for luxuries at this stage. Alea resolved to make them presents of several of the exquisite little items when they left.
In the afternoon, the plowers went back into the fields and half a dozen others started to roast a boar and prepare the rest of the evening meal, but all the other villagers sat around and traded stories with Alea while Gar sat watching with twinkling eyes, drinking in every word, every sound. He had to admit that Alea did a much better job adapting Snow White and Siegfried than she had with Cinderella—but then, she knew the pitfalls now. He was intrigued to see how well the villagers responded to the notion of a hero fighting a dragon and wondered if there had been local monsters in the early days of the colony.