Mazelton was pretty pleased with how the heated walkways turned out. His little plot was as radioactive as advertised, so he kept a small forest of heat sponges going at all times. The river roared past in a furious flood, also as advertised, bringing plenty of freely scavengable heat with it. Making heat stones was laughably easy. The only challenge was figuring out what the heat output should be like. It was a fun little project, and if digging through snow and frozen earth to lay the stones was hard work, well. Exercise was good for you, and hard to come by in the winter. Besides, Danae was thrilled to be able to walk to both the barn and the privy without shoveling out a mountain of snow.
It was the little things, right? Plus the barn was now heated, so they didn’t have to sleep with the fucking animals in the house, right?!
It was the little little things… that you forgot about… that drove you nuts. Things like “If humans need heat to survive the winter, so does the livestock.” Now, in some places, the whole house was built around the concept of bringing the animals in at night, or in the winter. Not Danae’s place. Nope, the whole downstairs had to be emptied out and cleaned out and covered in straw so the smelly, pooping, pissing, farting, forever noisy, ungrateful bastards could stay nice and toasty. Including Bastard and Scumbag, his cheves. Who were positively thriving on the farm, the wretches.
Mazelton had never been so eager to make heat stones in his life. The uninsulated barn soon managed to maintain a slightly chilly but otherwise comfortable temperature. Even in the dead of winter, in the high Ramparts. A lot of very hot heat stones. The snow piled up so high, there really weren’t many drafts to speak of. Nevertheless, he managed to win Danae’s approval with his determination to board up any gaps and seal any holes.
This had the knock on effect of limiting the time Mazelton could spend polishing cores, but it was winter. The Sky Runners had to snowshoe through damn dangerous conditions for much of the trek up from Hope, so they didn’t come around so much. He had now made so many of the most basic cores, he could carve them in just a couple of minutes. It was ridiculous. It also brought in a small fortune. A large fortune by New Scandie standards. Didn’t matter. He just piled the money on the mantle, so if they needed it for something, it was there. In the meantime, he would sit next to the fire and carve away.
“Not quite sure how to ask you this.” Danae said in a conversational tone. “It’s kind of an odd thought.”
“Not to worry, I specialize in the odd, curious, peculiar and macabre. What do you need?” He kept his eyes on the core. It would be a wound purification core. He had a feeling these were going to be big sellers, come spring.
“Not me. This is more a request for New Scandie generally.”
“Oh?”
Danae nodded. “You said that it wasn’t any hardship making the heat stones, just took time and some basic materials.”
“Yeah. I mean, they aren’t very good heat stones, you can’t cook on ‘em. Frankly, I’m not sure how many seasons they will hold up. Cheap and cheerful.” He steadied his breathing, letting his pulse and the tiny movements of his hands guide the tools.
“Any reason you couldn’t make a lot of them? Like… a whole lot?”
He looked up from the core. “How many is a “whole lot?” Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?”
Danae choked on her own spit. “I was thinking maybe a couple of hundred!”
Mazelton looked over at her with a crook to his lips and mischief in his eyes. “You say that, but my family ran the continent’s biggest heat stone factory. What do you want this limited run bespoke heat stone production for?”
Danae shot him an exasperated look, then shook her head. “You know, most folk this time of year are fixing equipment, making wagons, making brooms, that kind of thing. Just saying.”
“I made some brooms! They’re really nice.”
“They are really nice. The carving on them is so nice, I haven’t the heart to sell ‘em.”
“Who wants to buy a boring broom?”
“People who are going to use it to sweep floors, and don’t want their hands tore up by carvings?”
“Tsk tsk. The misery of an artist- a public that insists on function at the expense of form.” Mazelton looked tragic.
Danae tsk’ed herself and looked away. The silly man had sidetracked her. Again. She swore he did it on purpose.
“My point, oh Husband, is that if there was a polisher who could make several hundred heat stones like the ones you turned into flagstones on our farm, we could make clear paths through the village. That would let people share food and supplies even if everything gets snowed in, definitely making people more comfortable, probably saving lives.”
Mazelton’s lip got even more crooked at that.
“Did I not, oh Wife, provide every house in the village with a small but powerful new heat stone? More than doubling the available heat in each home?”
“Yep. It’s wonderful. Lots of folks are going to live a whole lot better because of that. Can’t even imagine all the colds people aren’t going to catch. It was incredible.”
Danae just sort of stopped there, and left a hole in the air. Mazelton did it to her all the time, it seemed only right to do it to him.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
A swarm of questions boiled up inside of Mazelton, starting with “Did someone put you up to this? Who? And why didn’t you tell them to go die in a ditch?” Then “Some terminally greedy bastards in this village, ain’t there?” Running through the question was the subquestion- “Who gives a flying fuck if any of these people die?”
Then he took a breath, and didn’t ask any of them. The answers were pretty obvious. Nobody asked Danae to ask him, she just thought it would be a good idea. She didn’t attach any cash value to the stones, so greed had nothing to do with it. It was just that she thought everyone should live comfortably and harmoniously, and this was something Mazelton could do at essentially no cost but his time. Because the Dusty way was communitarian. Because every life mattered, especially those specks of dust determined to leave the world better than they found it. And because while he might be a bad Dusty, he was trying to be a good one.
Mazelton sighed, and tried to think through how he would even practically do such a thing. He would have to spend ages just making forms, not to mention digging up clay, collecting straw, manure and every other thing he could think of for binders, then baking the silly things after doping the clay with some core dust…
It would be a huge chore. Not hard, but immensely time consuming.
He looked over at Danae. “It would mean having fewer cores made for the spring trades. They are going to be in high demand.”
“True enough.”
“Not at all sure I can even make enough of them to matter before the spring thaws.”
“Might be so. Though I’d say it would be almost impossible not to make some difference.” Danae agreed. Then left a hole in the air again.
She hadn’t promised him anything. No one had. There wasn’t a shred of a promise of any kind of reciprocity. Except that was the very nature of the place. If you could do something to help out, you did. Because you could. Because if you did, you could leave the world a slightly better place than you found it.
Mazelton looked up at the bowl full of rads on top of the mantlepiece. When you got right down to it, did he actually care how full that bowl got? Or did he care that he and Danae were comfortable, and that he could raise an entire tribe of Ma here in the mountains? Where no one would let them starve, or freeze.
Other than him, obviously, but that was training, and not at all the same.
“I’m going to need help making the forms, gathering up clay… it’s going to be pretty similar to making bricks, actually, for most of it.”
“Ah, help! Help I can do. I expect others could too, if you asked.” Danae smiled happily. She didn’t smile much, but when she did, it left Mazelton devastated. He would do quite a lot to keep her smiling.
“Haaah. Alright. Let me get some paper and try to figure out how much of everything this project actually needs.” Mazelton grumbled. Would the heated walkways make the kids too soft? It wouldn’t do to make things too easy on them. Make it a game- you can go and visit your friends as long as you get there without walking on or crossing a path. That would get their bodies and their brains working!
Danae heard the grumbling and smiled. “Hey Mazelton?”
“Yes, oh Wife?”
“You know you really are getting better at being a Dusty, right?”
“I wonder. I am trying.”
She walked over and gave him a little peck on the cheek. “Me too.”
It was a frigid day, with the snow on the ground reaching shoulder high. The great heat stone project hadn’t gotten very far. It turned out that the forms were stupidly easy to make, given that the stones didn’t have to be particularly smooth. In fact, it would be better if they weren’t smooth, so people’s feet wouldn’t slip on them. Getting the clay, on the other hand, was a complete non-starter. Utterly frozen in the earth, you would have better luck shoveling granite. Digging out cubic smoots of snow (Danae insisted on using ken, which was a silly unit of measurement in Mazelton’s opinion) and then trying to dig out cubic smoots of dirt was marginally more possible, and it turned out that you could, with an infuriating amount of labor, turn normal dirt into clay. The yields were pathetic, and it seriously begged the question of whether it wouldn't make more sense to do all this in the spring. The villagers wouldn’t hear of it.
It seems that Mazelton, in his misanthropy, had severely underestimated how much the villagers hated being isolated. It became a new hobby in the village- hack out a good heap of dirt, mix it with melt water, and start purifying the clay. Over and over again, bucket to bucket, until no more sediment fell to the bottom. Then let the last bucket sit for a day until the clay precipitates out. Then let it sit to concentrate, pouring off the water as the clay falls out of solution. When it stops shedding water, drain it well in a cloth. This could take a couple of days, easily. It took a while to drip dry, and space indoors was at a definite premium.
The yields of clay-per-pound-of-dirt were not great, but most of the time was spent just waiting around. Meaning the villagers could help while doing all the other things that would normally keep them occupied in the winter. Slowly, steadily, Mazelton’s clay pile increased in size. Which meant that he had to figure out how to incorporate the radioactive dust inside of the stones in enough quantity to heat it up, but not so much that the heat gave everyone in the village cancer.
The key was to properly seal the stone- let the heat… heat up the clay around it, without spitting out the little sparks that brought mutation and tumors. It wasn’t entirely straightforward, but hell, he’d made heat stones on the trail. Making them in the barn wasn’t any real trouble. He had drafted one of the aurochs to be his press, stepping on the form to pack everything in tight. Then, once they were formed, he just let them dry in the warm barn. Warm-ish barn. Cold barn, but not freezing and he lined them up near the much, much, larger and more powerful heat stones he had already installed around the barn, to help them dry out a bit faster.
It would take a long while. Might not be many laid down by the end of winter. But next winter, the villagers will have clear paths to each other. The world, in a microscopic way, in just this little corner of it, would become better. The people would prosper, and they would turn their strength to making the land prosper. As it should be.
One night, entirely out of the blue, Danae revealed to Mazelton that she had memorized the words to the Akeloisis, and was game to sing it if he wanted to dance. So she did, and he did and he hugged the hell out of her with tears running down his face, thanking her over and over again for making his dreams come true.
She acted like she had done it on a whim, but Mazelton could tell Danae had practiced it. The ancient sounds fell naturally from her mouth, the ancient rhythm kept comfortably in her hands as she clapped the time. For a heady moment, Mazelton wondered if his wife had fallen in love with him. He hoped so. He surely loved her.
Mazelton never bothered to keep track of time, beyond “It’s morning,” or “It’s winter.” It hardly mattered, really. He was alive now. Everything else was pointless speculation. They had crammed their larder as full as they could manage. They had loaded the barn with fodder. If they needed something, they would ask a neighbor for it. He tried not to dwell on what he would do if they really, really needed something. Polyclitus’ determination to not be caught in the mountains in winter made a great deal of sense now. It was hard to leave the bounds of the farm. Hard to move off the paths even within the farm. Snowshoeing was hard damn work, and not something to be done recreationally. The world became very small. Little seeds, buried under the snow, waiting for spring.