8
“Maybe the other farmers are having more luck,” Frida suggested. “If they’ve found better soil, or found some trick that we’ve missed to deal with the tanglers, they could be thriving already, while we’re just wasting our time.”
Rosalind looked around the tent. The last time the same idea had been raised, people had still been clinging to their pride: every group was meant to be self-sufficient, capable of creating their own foothold in the new world. But now she sensed that most of her colleagues were so despondent that they’d be willing to seek help anywhere.
“The soil itself is perfectly fine,” Hildur insisted. “The seeds all germinate, before they’re choked by the tanglers. If we could just transport enough soil away from the plateau, and set up a new, pristine field out on the ice, the crops could grow there, unmolested.”
“And what’s supposed to hold the soil in place, while we’re waiting for the seedlings to spread their own roots?” Frida asked.
“We carve trenches into the ice,” Hildur replied. “Deep enough to trap the soil, to shelter it from the wind. But once the crops become established, we can start smashing the walls between the trenches, one by one, until we end up with a continuous field.”
Rosalind couldn’t decide which part of this plan would take the most work: hacking up the ice to make the trenches, or filling them with soil when every handful had to be wrestled out from between the tanglers.
Anya said, “I think it’s time to try everything. My vote would be to send a couple of people to tour all the other soil deposits in the region; there might be something we can learn from every one of them, whether or not there are people trying to farm them. But we should also start work on testing Hildur’s idea.”
Joanna said, “And what about my idea?”
Anya scowled. “If it kills you, we lose you and your brothers—”
“If it kills me, no one else needs to waste their time wondering about it.” Joanna laughed softly. “I could easily have died in my glider—revealing nothing new or interesting about this world—and no one would have treated that as a calamity!”
Rosalind said, “When you ate the berries that the cats eat, you were sick for four days.”
“That was worth knowing, wasn’t it?”
“Only if you learn not to take the same risk again!”
Joanna sighed. “It wouldn’t be the same. The tanglers want the cats to eat those berries, for whatever reason. They’ve made them nutritious for that particular animal, and they must get some kind of benefit in return. Maybe the cats travel far enough to excrete the seeds in places where the plant couldn’t send them by any other means. But the cats don’t eat the roots; nothing we’ve seen does that. And maybe if the parts the locals relish make us sick, the parts they avoid will have the opposite effect.”
“There’s no logic in that,” Sigrid protested.
“I didn’t claim it was a syllogism,” Joanna replied. “But it’s still a possibility, until someone tests it.”
Anya said, “Let’s have a break to think things over before the vote.”
Rosalind was glad to get out of the tent; just standing beneath Tvíbura reminded her of how many supposedly impossible problems their predecessors had managed to solve. They could not come this far and fail. There was fertile soil all around her; all they needed to do was prize enough of it out of the tanglers’ grasp. Hildur’s proposal was daunting, but none of them were afraid of hard work. Rosalind tried to picture the expression on her mother’s face when she saw the first farms rising up, not on the original soil deposits that had been mapped generations ago, but on their borders.
Joanna approached. “Are you going to vote for my plan?”
Rosalind laughed, exasperated. “What plan? I can still smell the vomit from when you tried the berries. What was your argument then? ‘Look at how strong and healthy the cats are!’”
“It’ll be a risk,” Joanna admitted, “but it’d hardly be the biggest one we’ve taken. And it won’t be easy to poison myself; those roots are tough. It’ll take half a day to slice them up, and the rest to chew the pieces.”
“Which is why we need to keep trying to grow actual food,” Rosalind replied.
Joanna said, “None of these proposals are mutually exclusive. And believe me, I’d prefer to eat something that grows back home—though with turnips, honestly, would there be any difference? But we need to know exactly what we can and can’t eat here, even if it’s just a matter of having something to fall back on if there’s a shortage of our own crops in the future.”
Rosalind had no problem with planning for contingencies. It was the idea of making do with the tanglers that dismayed her.
“If we can’t grow our own crops,” she said, “how will anyone know that we survived? How will they know that it’s safe to follow us?”
Joanna nodded grimly. “If the famine doesn’t break, there’ll be nothing more important than letting people know whether or not they can escape it here. But if we can find a way to feed ourselves without covering the soil with our own kind of crops, we’ll just have to find another way to get a signal across the void.”
Anya called them back in for the vote. In the end, everyone agreed to send emissaries in search of the other expeditions, and the vote was five-to-three in favor of testing Hildur’s back-breaking plan.
But only Joanna voted for a trial of the tangler roots’ culinary potential. Rosalind had tried to be objective about it, but she couldn’t. She did not want to learn that there was a way to keep on living while everyone they’d left behind starved to death.
As sunset approached and the other members of the team put down their picks and headed for the tent, Rosalind decided to keep working. She had almost come to the end of her second trench, and she wanted the satisfaction of finishing it before she slept.
Her shoulders ached, and she was famished, but each time she swung the pick, the spray of blue-white chips flying off the ice-face was all she needed as proof that she was making progress. This was how they’d finish the task: one strike at a time, over and over, until it was done. Tvíburi had made the job harder than it had to be, in ways she’d never expected, but their patience would wear the world down. Tvíburi would feed them, willing or not.
Her brothers squirmed and hissed, disturbed by her labors, but she knew they wouldn’t grow any calmer when she stopped to rest. They’d woken from their long sleep more ardent than ever, and though she could hardly blame them for the expedition running out of pessaries, they ought to have been capable of noticing how poorly fed everyone was. Who tried to bring children into a world without crops?
“Rosalind? Is that you?”
Rosalind looked up to see a lone figure approaching across the ice. In the twilight, she couldn’t make out the woman’s face, but she knew the voices of her seven fellow villagers, and this wasn’t one of them.
She put down her pick. “Your eyesight’s better than mine,” she called back.
The woman laughed, and strode forward to meet her.
“Erin?”
“Your eyes are still working.” Erin removed her pack and they embraced.
“How’s your group?” Rosalind asked. “Did everyone land safely?”
Erin looked down. “We lost Miranda.”
“I’m sorry.” Rosalind hadn’t know Miranda well, and she decided not to reopen the wound with more questions.