Mast
Mast, n. — the fruit of forest trees, as food; from the Old English mæst.
Mast 30. First weighing.
The carts began coming down from the north groves before dawn, and by noon the queue at the great shed ran back over the bridge. I stood at the scales all day, as the warden stands at every first weighing, and called the figures to the ledger clerk the way my predecessor called them to me: gross weight, spoilage sample, sound fraction.
We split two hundred nuts from each cart on a block, in front of the growers, and count the grubs. This is the oldest of my duties and the one the children come to watch, because the growers cheer the clean splits. Out of the first day’s samples: eleven grubs in two thousand four hundred nuts. Nine parts in ten of the crop sound, as it has been at every mast in my ledgers and every mast in the ledgers before mine.
There is no mystery in the number. The weevil rode here inside the founding seed, the way it has ridden inside chestnuts since chestnuts were carried anywhere, and it cannot be poisoned out of a valley, because it spends its childhood underground in a cell of packed earth, below the reach of anything we could spray that we would still want to eat. The founders did not fight it. They rebuilt the chestnut instead, and put a gate on its flowering: a particular run of warm springs that comes once in four years, or five, or six, no one knowing which. The same weather touches every tree, so the groves agree without consulting one another. In between, they grow wood and give nothing.
A grub can sleep in its cell through three winters waiting for food. It cannot sleep through four. So the interval starves the weevil down to the remnant that lives on the handful of trees whose gates leak, and then the mast comes all at once, everywhere, and there are three hundred nuts on the ground for every grub that woke. The weevil ruins what it can reach and drowns in the rest.
The interval is the pesticide. The sheds are how we survive our own weapon.
Interval, first year.
Soil cores in the spring: four sleepers in a hundred cores. Sheds sealed and turned. Nothing else to record.
Interval, second year.
Three sleepers in a hundred cores. And an assessor from the coast, Sanne Dekker, sent up after the thin mast at Reeve — their twenty-ninth came in short, and the coast has been uneasy about us ever since, the way people are uneasy about a thing they have stopped understanding.
She spent a fortnight in my ledger room and was no fool. I want to put that down fairly, because of what came later. She read forty years of weighings before she said anything, and when she did, it was in the shed doorway, not in a hearing.
“Marta, you’re carrying four years of risk in wooden sheds. One thin mast and a shed fire in the same stretch and this valley is on ration barges. You know that better than I do — it’s your ledger.”
“It’s happened once in nine masts,” I said. “That’s what the second granary is for.”
“I can take the gate off,” she said. “Not everywhere. One district. Steady trees, a crop every autumn, and your sheds become a comfort instead of a wager. The gate is a switch the founders built. It was always meant to be adjustable.”
“The gate is what kills the weevil. The interval is the pesticide.”
“Then I’ll buy you a better pesticide,” she said. “One district. Netting, trapping, hot-water dips for the seed stock. People manage weevils on steady chestnuts on the coast. They managed them on Earth for two thousand years.”
“They lost a fifth of every crop on Earth for two thousand years.”
“A fifth of every year,” she said, “against all of one bad year. I know which ledger I’d rather keep.”
I wrote my objection into the record and the council took her scheme over it, six to three. I do not blame the six. The thin mast at Reeve was in everyone’s mind, and she was offering bread every autumn, and I was offering arithmetic.
Interval, third year.
The Ashfield district took the switch. Their trees flowered in a silent year, alone in the valley, like a lamp left on in an empty house. First steady harvest in the autumn: modest, clean, and weighed in their own new shed, because a district that crops every year has no need of the great one.
Two sleepers in a hundred cores, valley-wide. In Ashfield’s cores, six.
Interval, fourth year.
Ashfield’s second steady autumn. Their sample split ran fifteen grubs in two hundred — they netted, they trapped, they dipped, and they lost their fifth, exactly as the old books price it, and their fifth of a steady crop still fed them better than a sealed shed feeds anyone. Young families have been moving there. Vessey district has petitioned for the switch, and got it.
One more thing, which I put in the ledger because I did not know where else to put it. In the valley we have always lent grain across the interval without a fee. You cannot charge for time where time falls on everyone at once. This autumn, Ashfield lent to Harrow against next year’s crop and priced the year. Nobody broke a law. There was no law, because there had been no next year to price.
In Ashfield’s spring cores: nineteen sleepers in a hundred. In the cores half a league downwind: nine. The weevil is a poor flier. It spreads like damp, a few hundred paces a season, out from anywhere it can feed.
Mast 31.
The gate opened for the whole valley this spring, and the mast came in the autumn, and I stood at the scales.
The north groves, farthest from Ashfield, weighed in at nine parts in ten sound, and the growers cheered the splits, and the children watched.
Then the carts came up from the south. Harrow: two in three sound. Millbrook, which borders Vessey: one in two. The Ashfield fringe groves — masting trees, gated trees, trees that had done nothing wrong — we split two hundred nuts on the block in front of the growers and I stopped the count at ninety grubs because the queue behind them had gone quiet and there was nothing the number could teach us past that point.
I had the clerk draw the sound fractions on the survey map that evening. You could take a compass and set its needle on Ashfield’s new shed, and swing it, and follow the damage round in rings.
Satiation is a sum, and it is nobody’s sum in particular. The mast was the size the founders made it. The weevil was the size we had fed it up to be, two steady districts of it, four autumns of it, a population bottlenecked by nothing, sitting in the middle of the valley when the one great crop came down. Three hundred nuts to the grub in the north. In the south, three grubs to the nut.
The valley’s weighing, taken whole, came to just over half sound. We have the sheds. We will not be on barges. That is what the second granary was for — though I had always supposed the bad year it waited for would come from the weather.
Interval, first year.
The council sat for two days. Sanne Dekker stood up first, laid the ringed map on the table, and moved against her own scheme, which I record because it was the bravest thing I saw a coast official do and the minutes will not say it was brave.
The switch is off in Ashfield and Vessey. But a gate re-closed does not unfeed a weevil, and the sleepers can wait three winters for the next mast. So the remedy is the founders’ remedy, taken in a larger dose: the council has set the gate wide, and the whole valley will stand silent past the third winter — five years, if the springs allow it — until the last cell in the ground has waited as long as a grub can wait, and lost.
We will live out of the half-filled sheds, on measures, for the length of the silence. Ashfield eats from the great granary now, on the old terms. Nobody priced the years.
Sanne stayed. She asked the council for a duty rather than a passage home, and they gave her mine to share: she takes the soil cores. In the spring count she logged forty-one sleepers in a hundred cores on the Ashfield fringe, and initialled the page, and said nothing, and I said nothing, and that is how we work together now, which suits us both.
Interval, second year.
Twenty-two sleepers in a hundred.
Interval, third year.
Nine.
Interval, fourth year.
Two. Both split under Sanne’s thumbnail: dead in the cell.
Interval, fifth year.
None. The springs are running warm. We will let the gate open next year.
The sheds stand a quarter full, which is thinner than any warden has wintered on, and the children born since the failure have never seen a mast. They know the trees as a thing that is promised. In the autumn they will stand at the block with the growers and watch the splits, and I will call the figures to the clerk, and if the founders’ sum still holds — and it held for thirty masts, and we now know the one way it fails — the number I call will be ordinary.
That is what the number is for.