“Frogs?” Triga was not in that group, but he spoke up anyway.
“When you’re carrying the food tally, you can catch us frogs, Triga,” Gird said.
“And you’ll eat them?”
Gird swallowed hard. “I’ll do my best. Now—you are with the tool tally. You all know we need a lot of things we don’t have. Another shovel, axes, chisels. A shepherd’s crook would be handy for pulling down vines with edible berries; a drover’s stick for beating nuts from the nut trees next fall. We need pots to cook in, bowls to eat from, baskets or sacks to carry what our gatherers find, spoons, buckets, rope: every one of these will help us make more of what we need. Whoever holds the tool tally will work for that day on one of the things we need.”
“I can make baskets,” Triga said. Everyone stared at him; usually women made baskets. He reddened. “I used to plait the grasses in the bog,” he said. “First just for something to do, and then to see what I could make.”
“Could you make a basket from anything around here?” asked Gird. He did not want to make another trek to the bog so soon.
Triga stared around, uncertain. “Maybe . . . I can try . . . but it may not work right the first time.”
“That’s all right. If you find a way, it’s time well spent. Any of the rest of you like to whittle?” One man raised his hand. “Good—why don’t you start whittling some spoons, and bowls if you find the right chunks of wood. You others try it—anything’s better than nothing.”
“What about the guard we send out to listen for foresters?” asked Ivis.
“From the last group, those with camp chores tally. Two go out, and three will have plenty to do here. Gathering wood for the fire, tending the fire, and some other things I’ve thought up. But first—we didn’t do any drill yesterday, so let’s line up.”
This time they lined up quickly and almost evenly. They all started on the same foot, and they marched almost in step from the firepit to the stream, still in lines. Wavery lines, but lines. Gird showed them how to turn in place to the right and left, and then had them march around the camp as a column of twos. They had to weave in and out of trees, and they were soon out of step, but the pairs did manage to stay side by side. By this time Gird was warm and had worked the stiffness out, so he sent the two groups with food tallies off, and picked two guards from the camp chores group. One of the remaining three he sent in search of the driest wood he could find, one sat by the fire, and Gird beckoned to the last.
He had had the idea that they could weave lengths of wattle, as he’d used for the barton gate, and the fence between his smallgarden and his neighbor’s. Wattle laid at an angle against a log might give some protection from wet. He explained what he had in mind to Artha, a very tall, loose-jointed man nearly bald on top. Artha had vague, hazy blue eyes, and the least initiative Gird had seen.
“But I don’t—that wattle, now, we all’s made it wi’ the sticks i’ the ground, like. Put the sticks down in the wet mud, my granda he said, and then put the vines through, back and forth, back and forth—”
“But the sticks don’t have to be in the ground,” Gird said. The times he’d mended his gate, without ever taking it down, he knew that. Artha stood slack-handed, his jaw hanging. Gird realized that this was going to take firmness, as if Artha had been a child. “Artha, bring me some sticks, about so long—” He spread his arms to show the length.
“All right, but I dunno how you’ll do it lessen you put them sticks in the mud first—”
“Never mind, just bring me the sticks.” Artha ambled off, and Gird searched up and down the streambank until he found a willow sprouting multiply from the muck. He cut the pliant sprouts and stacked them.
By midday, Gird looked around the busy campsite and smiled to himself. The voices he heard all sounded content; one man was even whistling “Nutting in the Woods.” His sergeant and his father had both been right: idleness was a fool’s delight, and work brought its own happiness. Triga had created one lopsided basket from the same willow sprouts Gird was using, and then torn it down to make it “right” as he said. Now he was halfway through again. It didn’t look quite like any basket Gird had seen, but it was going to be a useful size, he could tell. The man who liked to whittle—Kerin, that was—had turned out three recognizable spoons. He’d pointed out that he needed something to rub them with, to finish them, and one of the others had experimented with Gird’s collection of cobbles. Gird and Artha had made one length of wattle, not quite an armspan wide by twice that in length. Gird held it up to the light: it would no more keep water out than a basket, he thought. But it would support something else. Leaves? A deerhide?
Late afternoon brought the food gatherers back. First came the hunting and gathering group, with a miscellany of edibles. Birds’ eggs from different kinds of nests: small, round and beige, pointy and blue with speckles, streaked with brown on beige. They’d found a rabbit’s burrow, and while the blind, squirming kits had been very small, there were eight of them. Fori had knocked another squirrel out of a tree, and they’d found a squirrel nest—but that led to near disaster, when Fori, precariously wrapped around the slender bole, had met a furious mother squirrel face to face. Fori had come down faster than he went up, losing skin off his arms. “But I have a nose, still,” he said. They had also, on the advice of one of the others, dug up the roots of the thick-leaved grasslike plants that grew along the stream lower down. One man had the bight of his shirt full of last fall’s nuts: some were rotting or sprouting, but some were still whole and sweet.
Ivis’s group had come back with little food, but other important treasures. “Gars says he never used his granda’s old stone tools—even his granda didn’t—but look—” and he emptied a well-worn, greasy leather sack. Gird looked at the odd-shaped bits of stone curiously. He could remember seeing clutter like that in someone’s cottage . . . and old Hokka had used a sickle set with tiny stone blades. But he’d never used stone tools himself. “They’re sharp,” Ivis said, as if he’d asked. “Gars thinks some of them had handles—wooden handles—but I don’t know how they’d fasten. But you can cut with them.” Some were obviously blades, thin shards of stone like broken pottery. Others were rough lumps with a sharp edge, like handax heads, or chisels. Kerin poked at them.
“I could use these . . . it would be easier to make a bowl with this than a knife . . .” Gird nodded; that got him off the hook.
“Fine—try them, and if you can teach someone else—” He turned to thank Ivis, but Ivis was still grinning.
“That’s not all. Look here—” Wrapped in a wet cloth, he had brought seedlings of the common greenleaves: cabbage, lettuce. . . . The villagers had liked the idea of the outlaws growing some of their own food, and he’d been given as much as he could carry without crushing it. One of the men carried a small round cheese, and another had a large lump of tallow. He had also thought to ask for things Gird hadn’t mentioned: beeswax, soap, thread. “Best of all—” Ivis nodded at the last member of his team, who pulled a bundle from under his shirt. It was cloth, something rolled into a lump—but the deepest, most intense blue Gird had ever seen.
“What is that?” he asked.
Ivis grinned. “You know the lords won’t let us have blue clothes—”
“Yes. I never saw any.”
“This is old, from my granda’s time. He used to say that the blue was expensive—it came from some kind of blue stone, from far away north—but before the lords came it was a favorite color. Good luck color. Anyway, my brother says if you’re serious about overturning the lords, best we’d have some blue shirts.”