Days 5-9
Days 10-14:
Day 10:
The cabin is useable, but it’s drafty, the roof leaks (either rain or dirt), and my furnace doesn’t appear to be holding up very well after the move. I almost toppled it last night cooking on the surface. The clay simply didn’t get hot enough in the sun to properly fire it. It did, however give me an idea. I plan to make bricks! It’s a simple enough formula. Clay plus mud plus straw plus heat equals brick.
So I took my newest shovel and went to work on the riverbank, wandering up and own the stream looking for clay deposits. After the entire morning doing this, I had loaded a nifty little raft with enough clay to make a decent start of things. Mud is plentiful along the riverbank, and there’s enough tall grass in the forest to lend me the equivalent of straw needed to give the mixture some internal stability. In fact, my biggest problem is the size of the furnace and the need for fuel. My coal is running low and I can only properly fire one clay brick at a time. And I had to chop up quite a bit of my remaining supply of wood for the furnace to keep it going.
While I waited for the bricks to fire in the furnace, I started working on turning some of my wood into useable building material. It’s back-breaking work, as my rough stone blade is simply not a saw. It can chop down a tree, but making a plank is incredibly difficult. I managed to make about half a dozen of them, each roughly three feet long, out of an eight foot section of log. Trying to make them any longer than that simply wasted wood, as I have no way of keeping the scraping/peeling motion level. I’m basically just chipping away at each side, trying to make a flat surface and then hoping to split the log down the center to give me another flat side.
By the end of the day, I had nearly a dozen bricks fired and eight planks. It’ll be a slow progression, but I think it’s worth the effort.
Day 11:
With time and practice, I found that I was able to spot the grain in the wood and use my axe to create a fairly straight split in each log. It left me with a lot less material from each piece I gathered, and it only works on the dried wood, I can’t do it with the stuff that’s still green on the inside, but it let me collect a lot more useable planks. Enough that I’m probably going to build an actual structure out of the things, rather than try to turn the small amount of clay and mud I have into a real brick house.
It makes me kind of depressed. Does focusing on building a house, one that I want to make a permanent structure, one that I can live in comfortably, does that mean that I’ve given up on going home? Have I resigned myself to my exile?
I don’t know.
I cut planks and fire bricks and try to remember what my son’s face looks like, the smell of my wife’s hair as we drifted off to sleep in the chill of the night. It’s harder to do today than it was yesterday.
Day 12:
I worked hard today. The stack of useable planks behind the cabin is growing. It’s nearly six feet high now and close to ten feet long. My collection of bricks is coming along nicely too. Tomorrow I’m going to scout for a place to build. I want to stay relatively close to the river, I need the water, but I want some height. I need to be able to see the land around me.
Day 13:
I think I found a place that will work. The hill that I dug the coal out of is actually quite tall. In fact, there’s a slope on the back side, which is what the front must have looked like before the river cut it away. It’s tall enough that I can even see the sand of the beaches by the ocean, still several hours down the shore from where I was dropped off, so not immediately accessible by the Vizier’s men, and with a great view to warn me if they are coming. I can see both my old cave and the rough cabin from here.
The back of the hill’s crest looks out over the forest and some more hills. I headed towards them, content to spend the rest of the day exploring, taking a break from the mud and the axe. The bricks and planks will be waiting for me on my return.
I found the end of the river. It empties out into a beautiful lagoon about an hour’s walk from the hilltop. It overlooks a large field and there are an astounding number of wild animals around. I might very well go into sheep herding, as many of the creatures as there are wandering around wild. There are also a couple of caves into the cliffside and into the heart of the earth itself that I want to explore.
If I can find some more coal, it would make things so much easier. I’ll have used up the last of it on the bricks tomorrow and after that, it will take much more work to get the furnace hot enough to truly fire the clay into something close to bricks.
With evening fading, I made my way back to the cabin. I’ll spend tomorrow making more planks and bricks and then start hauling them up to the top of the hill. I’m not sure what I’m going to build there, but I’ve got some time to figure it out. It will take me several days more to get even close to the number of planks I need. I’m having to go further and further out into the forest to find dead wood that will split easily. And hauling them back to the cavern is tough. At least the planks are easier to carry.
Oh what I wouldn’t give to have some rope. I could rig a rough block and tackle atop the hill and simply haul the planks up that way!
Day 14:
My hands have become callused enough that I couldn’t feel the splinters they kept collecting while hauling my planks to the top of the hill. That doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. I still miss my family. And I still struggle with how I’m going to get back to them. But there is a sense of pride, of accomplishment in realizing that I can make this work. That my ability to exist is not dependent on a city, or a king, or a market. I can survive and I can thrive.
I made a mallet and used the wonderfully straight and uniform branches of the nearby birch trees to craft several pegs that I will use to hold the planks together. And I’ve decided to use some of the bricks for the foundation. It won’t be very deep, but I don’t have to worry as much about water up on the hilltop.
I spent the rest of the day clearing the hilltop of the few trees it held and the brush surrounding them. Another rough shovel (I really have to find a way to make better tools), smoothed out the worst of the uneven patches. I lined a small section of the hilltop with some of the finished bricks and got a great result. They shift a little on the dirt surface beneath them, but that will fade in time as the pressure of the walls and my walking on them packs the cracks with dirt. I think it will be far more stable than the rough patchwork of stone I used in the first cabin. It still seems odd to have finished one “house” only to begin on a second, but the last few nights in the first cabin have confirmed it just isn’t working. I guess one truly must fail before one can succeed.
