Ozzie made sure he kept his woolen gloves on at all times. It made the tools harder to use. He had to move slowly, and consider what he was doing. But without them, his fingers became too cold, losing feeling. That was when real accidents occurred.
He joined in with the repair team, three humans and a Korrok-hi lifting the first heavy runner up into place on the end of the legs—sliding it back under George Parkin’s directions. George had been at the Ice Citadel long enough to qualify as the unofficial workshop foreman; he was certainly the most competent carpenter. The new runner fitted neatly, the dovetail joins slipping into their grooves with the help of a little oil lubrication. Two of the team members set about securing the joins with locking pins hammered in sideways and glued.
Ozzie had now been out six times on the sleds as part of a harvesting party, twenty-five humans and aliens armed with ladders and baskets. On each occasion, they’d set out just as dawn rose, heading for the crystal tree forest surrounding the huge desolate depression. The opal-colored wedges that bloomed from the end of every twig on the mature trees were actually an eatable fruit, a little knot of near-tasteless carbohydrates in a tough shell. Without them, the inhabitants of the Ice Citadel would never survive. It took a couple of years for one to grow to the size of an apple, so they had to harvest in strict rotation, painstakingly recording each trip on crude hide maps that marked out radial sections of the nearby forest. When they got there, it was hard physical work retrieving the crop, ten hours with only one small break, climbing the ladders in thick layers of clothing and a fur coat to knock the fruit down with a length of bone. Ozzie was fascinated by the fruit. It convinced him that the crystal trees must be some kind of GM biology, or whatever Silfen science was equivalent.
Several members of the harvesting party roamed along the treacherous rocky gullies that crisscrossed the forest, where patches of litchenweed that took decades to grow coated the steep sides in shaggy blue-gray carpets. They stripped them off like vandals on a wrecking spree. Fungi were another prize, with the tetrajacks sniffing them out among the narrow clefts in the icy ground so they could be scooped out by picks and shovels. Between them, their haul was enough to feed the Ice Citadel for another couple of weeks.
The harvest, and the subsequent cooking and processing of the fruit and fungi, were a communal effort. Everyone contributed to the general upkeep in whatever way they could. Sara told him it was a civilized place most of the time. She could only remember it getting unpleasant once, when the Silfen hunt didn’t visit for over a year, and the icewhale meat had run out.
The workshop team lifted the second runner into place before lunch. Ozzie stood back with George Parkin to watch the locking pins being hammered into place.
“Two days,” George said happily; he had some kind of thick English regional accent that Ozzie couldn’t place. “The glue’ll set, then we’ll be able to take her out again.” He put his bone pipe into his mouth, and lit the dried fronds of litchenweed. It smelled foul.
“How many big sleds have we got?” Ozzie asked, waving the smoke away.
“Five. I’m planning on building another after the next hunt when we’ve got a decent stock of new bone in. I’ve a few ideas for improvements, and these old ones have been rebuilt so many times they’re losing their strength.”
“Five large sleds, and what, like seven small ones?”
“Nine if you count the singletons.”
“That’s not quite enough to carry everyone, is it?”
“No. Those five big sleds carry about twenty of us when we go chasing off after the hunt; it could be a lot more but we have to haul our tents along with us as well. Nights out there are just plain evil; we need those triple-layer fur tents. And we’ve also got to leave enough room on board the sleds to bring back the icewhale. Big brutes they are, you’ll see.”
“But there’s enough bone inside the Ice Citadel to build more sleds.”
George gave him a funny look, sucking hard on his pipe. “Not spare there ain’t, no.”
“Chairs, cots, rug frames. There’s a ton of it.”
“People are using it.” He sounded quite indignant.
“They might want to use it for something else.”
“What are you getting at, lad?”
Ozzie wiped the back of his glove across his nose. As always in the workshop, it was cold and runny. “I’m talking about taking everyone out of here. All of us at once.”
“Chuffing heck, lad; how do you figure that?”
“People get out by following the hunt, right? But they’re on foot, or sometimes skis. They have to be fast to keep up.”
“Aye.”
“So we follow the hunt on sleds. Pile everyone in, humans and aliens, take all the animals, the tetrajacks and the lontrus and the ybnan; use them in relays to pull us, cut the exhausted ones loose if we have to. But that way we can keep up with the Silfen, man, we can do it!”
