Ban’s eyes widened with comprehension. “We have it then,” he said. “The water will carry itself!” He slapped his hand down on the table.
“We just have to carve wooden pegs to join these pieces,” Ban said. They had assembled the most likely people they could find to help build. Ban drew a schematic of the water wheel with a set of downward-flowing pipes into the mud of the riverbank.
He stood back and looked at his drawing with satisfaction and a fascination that Illya recognized. He had it too: it was the same thing he felt whenever he read his book.
“We can make these cup pieces by soaking wood and bending them into the shape we need around stones,” Ban said, glancing at Illya as if for confirmation.
“That’s good, excellent really,” Illya said. He took a breath, making a decision.
“From now on, you will be called Ban Builder. Everyone should do what he says; this water wheel is going to make all the difference,” he said. Ban nodded, his face flushed.
He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants.
“Right then, so what’s left is to get the materials,” Ban said.
They dispersed. Though it would have made more sense to leave him to fishing, Illya had asked for Benja to be among Ban’s helpers. He wanted to talk to his cousin more than ever.
“Hey, there’s some stuff in the cellar we need,” he said, drawing Benja aside. “Help me?” Benja raised both eyebrows.
“Course,” he said and hesitated. “I’ll get someone else to help? Not like a Leader to carry things around, from what I hear.”
“I haven’t forgotten how to work,” Illya said.
Conna wouldn’t have liked it if he was there, but he was not. He was way across the village, busy drilling the Enforcers, who had started having daily practice sessions in the open space beside the field.
Once in the cellar, Illya hoisted one end of a pipe onto his shoulder. Benja took the other end. It was heavy, and he was sweating by the time they got it up the stairs and out into the light. The pipe was rusted, but the spot they had been stacked in was one of the driest in the cellar room. The rust was not as bad as Illya had expected it to be. They went back again and again, taking many trips before they had all the pipes stacked alongside the river.
“Some of these are going to leak pretty bad,” Benja said, brushing at a spot rust, which revealed a hole all the way through the thickness of the metal.
“Maybe Ban can patch them,” Illya said doubtfully. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the edge of his shirt. “There should be enough, even if there are some we can’t use.”
“Anything that shortens that distance will help,” Benja said. A line of people still tromped past them with skins of water, keeping the field damp as the heat of the day intensified.
Illya felt better than he had in a long time. Action was going a long way toward easing his guilt. If all went well, there would be a few days of wood soaking, then the building, which couldn’t take more than a day or two. In all, it should be less than a week and the people would be relieved of the carrying.
As they lugged the pipes one by one through the heat, Benja and Illya fell back into their old habits of laughing and joking, pushing each other to work faster. Out from under Conna’s scrutiny for once, he had felt like just another villager. It was a glimpse of another life; one he hadn’t realized how much he missed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“THE SEEDS HAVE sprouted!” Conna grasped Illya’s shoulder and shook it for emphasis. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and blinked at Conna, not sure if he had heard right.
“They have come, just like you said they would. Illya, we have plants!”
He heard laughter drifting through the air.
“Really? Sprouts?” he said.
“Come and see,” Conna said.
It was like spring had come new. The people laughed and celebrated. Some nodded to Illya as they passed. He saw new respect in their eyes, and his heart swelled.
Charlie Polestadt was crouching down at the edge of the field. He stood up and stuck his fists to his hips.
“Look!” he called, as they neared. “You can see them, you can see them all!” He pointed down at the earth. At first, Illya didn’t see anything. He reached the edge of the field and dropped to his knees, putting his face close to the ground.
They were there. Overnight, tiny green sprouts, some with opened leaf buds, had emerged from the furrows.
Illya was overwhelmed with the urge to laugh and cry at once.
“It’s working.”
“I know it’s working!” Charlie slapped him on the back. “Always knew it would.”
“We all did,” Conna said.
Charlie’s broad face was sunburned and lined with fatigue from hard work but was full of such undisguised joy that Illya couldn’t help feeling it himself. Even Conna seemed proud. Tears prickled at the corners of his eyes. He blinked furiously. It would not do to cry, not at all.
Until this moment, there had been no way to know if the seeds would sprout at all. Now there was a carpet of green at his feet.
In the days that followed, the village was a changed place. People who had regarded him with suspicion before were open and relaxed. Impiri, slaving over the cooking fires, seemed afraid to say anything at all. More and more people came to his hut to get a closer look at the book and hear words from it.
A week after the sprouting, the plants had doubled in size. The people worked harder than ever to keep them watered. But, finally, the Noria wheel was nearing completion. Illya had continued to help with the building. He woke with the sun each day to make time for reading before the day’s work started. He was determined to be the best Leader possible, and he was sure that in the book’s pages he could find the answer to any problem if he just looked hard enough. The book had proved its wisdom. The days of hesitation and worry that he would lose his mind were over.
When he had read as much as he could without his eyes blurring, he joined Ban and the other builders at the river. They spent a sweltering morning pounding pieces of carved wood into tight-fitting notches. Assembling the wheel went quickly once all of the pieces had been constructed, and by afternoon it was complete. All that remained was to put it into position.
Two towers had been built on the riverbank: stacked stones inside a wooden frame. They were nearly the height of a man. Five men lifted the giant wheel and positioned it between them, placing the center shaft on grooves across the tops.
As soon as they lowered it into the river, the wheel started spinning, pushed by the current. It picked up cups of water, and, just as in the drawing, overturned them into a trough at the top. Ban had salvaged a few things from the nearby ruins to aid in the construction, but, in the end, most of the wheel had been built out of wood from the forest.
This was a fact of which Illya was extremely proud. He loved the idea that his people had found a way to do something like this without help from Olders’ things. The world of the Olders had been full of marvels, but you never knew if anything they had made would ever be found again.
The Noria wheel stood at the height of two men. It had to be tall to deliver the water to the top of the long network of pipes, which sloped downward from the river to the edge of the field. Eight spokes joined together at the hub, the other ends linked by smoothed pieces of wood joined into a circle. The notched joints, which had been tight when the wood was dry, had swelled and become unbreakable when the wood absorbed the river water.
Illya stared as the river pushed it around and around. Water rushed from the trough down the pipes, some dripping out of small leaks where they had rusted through but most of it flowing past. When it reached the end and spilled out onto the field, everyone broke out into cheers.