She was right that some people in his position would have taken the house; Conna certainly would.
There was a second set of stairs leading down from the kitchen into the cellar. That was where Impiri led him now. He hesitated, wondering what she was up to.
He needn’t have worried. When they had reached the bottom of the stairs, there was candlelight to the left beside an Enforcer who guarded the room that held Elias. She ignored it and turned to the right, taking him down a hall and then into a room full of dusty shelves ghosted with cobwebs before stopping at a small door. Illya shivered. The cellar was an eerie place in the flickering candlelight.
“This has always been called the pump room,” she said. “A long time ago, I asked my pa why.” She opened the door, shedding a beam of light from her candle onto an incomprehensible mess of parts, rusted and halfway sunk in mud.
“It’s because this is a water pump. This is what it took to water that same field, what the Planter used.” She pressed her lips together and gave him a thin smile. Her eyes brightened momentarily.
“Hasn’t worked for the whole life of this village, and it’s not about to start now,” she said.
Illya crouched down. Avoiding her stare, he examined the heap.
It was true. There was nothing here but a pile of broken parts, like so many of the left-over “machines” of the Olders. He lowered his head. Even with Impiri’s pessimism, he had still hoped to find something.
“How did it work?” he asked, his voice breaking past the tightness in his throat. He had been stupid to think that she would tell him anything that could help.
“Oh, it ran on their ‘licktricity.’ It’s useless without it,” she said, shrugging. Then, almost gleefully, she continued.
“Those things are pipes,” she said, pointing to a pyramid of long metal tubes stacked against the wall.
“It forced water up from below the ground and then through those, out to the plants.” Her lip curled as she looked at the pump, as if it should be ashamed for treating the water with such little consideration.
“It has pieces that should move to do that,” Illya mumbled to himself. “I wonder if we could just move them with our hands.” Experimentally, he pulled and pushed on various parts of the pump.
It was no use. Even if he’d had the first idea of how to make it work, it was so rusted that bits of it crumbled off at his touch. The parts all seemed frozen in place.
“Like I said, it’s broken,” Impiri said.
Illya stood up and wiped his hands off on his pants.
“I guess there will just be more water carrying for all of us then,” he said.
Impiri shrugged, her mouth pinching. She turned and went back up the stairs, taking the candle with her and not bothering to wait for him.
When Illya returned to the fire, the people were still dancing. They carried on as if nothing had happened, as if they were not all doomed to carry water for eternity. Nearly aching with disappointment, he looked around for Conna.
His second in command was not where Illya had left him. Aaro now sat with Julian and Nico. They had started a game of Targets, tossing stones into circles on the ground. A moment later, he saw Conna.
In Illya’s absence, he had found Sabelle.
They were dancing to the music, whirling around and laughing as if they had no cares in the world. Her hair was unbound. She was beautiful with the firelight on her face. He looked at the way her eyelashes lay on her cheeks; he saw the way Conna held her hands and felt sick.
Illya looked away. He folded his arms across his chest and stared at the dirt, trying very hard not to let it overwhelm him.
A shadow fell over him, obscuring the firelight.
“You’ll excuse me, Leader,” said a man’s voice above his head.
“What?” Illya said, raising his gaze slowly. His eyes were blurred and he could feel the tears he held back burning behind them.
It was Ban. Illya blinked, his vision clearing slightly.
“I been thinking about this watering,” Ban said. “And I might have an idea.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“YOU AREN’T THE only one who has paper,” Ban said with a small smile.
“What do you mean?” Illya asked, reluctant to come out of his gloom. He couldn’t help being curious though. If anyone in the village might be able to figure out a solution that would work, it was Ban.
“Got a few things, drawings all folded up. My granddad gave ’em to me,” Ban said. “There’s one that might help.”
Illya sat up straighter. The song had finished, and nearby Sabelle had dropped Conna’s hands. She was retreating to the edge of the circle, where Martha and Josie were sitting. Illya felt a little bit better.
“Show me,” he said.
Ban’s hut was full of broken parts and pieces. There was scrap metal for his blacksmithing and many other salvaged tools and Olders’ things. Illya whistled; there was even more here than he had collected in the lean-to behind his mother’s hut. She had always affectionately called it his magpie nest because he had hardly ever gone out to explore the nearby ruins without coming back with something for it.
Firelight glinted off the piles of metal stashed in every corner and on the shelves, turning the hut into a jungle of twisted shadows. If Impiri had ever been in this place, Illya would have gotten knocked down to a much lower spot on her priority list.
“Wife thinks I’m crazy hanging on to all this stuff,” Ban said in response to Illya’s raised eyebrows. “She says she still likes me fine though.”
Ban grinned and led him to the table, where there were several pieces of paper spread out. Illya picked up the one on top, fingering the now-familiar smoothness with his fingertips. It was browned and creased through the middle.
“Your granddad saved these all this time?” he asked.
“Yep, been stowed away in there,” Ban said, pointing to a case leaning against the table made of what looked like leather. The clasp was broken, and Illya could see divided fabric slots inside. It had letters stitched into the top. REB
The paper was a drawing. The markings on it were faint, and some of them had worn away completely, but Illya could still see the essence of what it was.
A wheel. It was tall with cups around its edge. A crude sketch of a man stood beside it, showing that it was twice his height. It sat partially submerged in a pond, with arrows indicating that it would rotate. The cups on the ascending half were full of water. They would hit a bar and overturn into a trough at the top. Faint letters across the bottom of the drawing said, “Old-Fashioned Noria Wheel.”
“A water wheel,” Illya whispered to himself, amazed at the simplicity of it.
“Yeah,” Ban said. “We would still have to figure a way to get the water from the river to the field, but at least this gets it up out of the river,” he said.
Illya looked at Ban, his eyes wide.
“I know how to do that,” he said.
“You do? How?” Ban asked
“Impiri!” Illya exclaimed, getting excited. Ban stared at him, appearing thoroughly perplexed. Illya laughed out loud.
“Something she showed me. She wanted me to see how it wouldn’t work, how we are going to fail… but we don’t need a pump after all! We just need pipes!” he said. Ban was still staring at him with no comprehension. Illya knew he was babbling, but he couldn’t help it.
“This wheel is tall,” he said. “Water will run down from it, like down a hill, if it has a path.” Ban nodded, he raised his eyebrows.
“There is a stack of pipes in the cellar. All we have to do is run them from this trough down to the field, and as long as it gets lower as it goes, the water will carry itself.”