Chapter 45: Voluntary Labor on a Ten-Day Holiday
The third day after the scouts departed was the second ten-day holiday of the Peach Moon.
As it was the Peach Moon, there were, naturally, peaches.
The clansmen looked at the sky and the distant mountains before deciding to take only half a day off, spending the morning picking peaches. Yu Qian'er had already scheduled the work for the next ten days, as Chen Jian had instructed. The schedule was not to be changed, so they had to use their rest day for this task.
By now, picking peaches was a deeply ingrained habit. Although Chen Jian had broken their reliance on peaches for an entire month's sustenance, the clanspeople still felt it was a waste to see the ground littered with fruit that had fallen and been devoured by insects and ants.
Paths formed naturally through the peach and plum groves, and the trampled grass seemed to wail underfoot, but the barefoot clansmen paid it no mind. They just laughed, comparing who had picked the biggest and reddest peaches.
The wild peaches, not yet artificially selected, were not very large, though occasionally one could find a slightly bigger one. In the past, they had carried the peaches in animal skins, but now they could confidently and boldly fill their wicker baskets. They weren't afraid of picking too many, only that they wouldn't have the strength to carry them all back.
Previously, peaches had been the main food source during the Peach Moon because they were difficult to store. Now, however, the clanspeople figured that since apricots could be preserved, peaches could be too, so they weren't overly careful with them. Anyway, they had plenty of pottery jars, with more than twenty men and women assigned to pottery making.
Chen Jian wiped the fuzz from a peach and took a bite. It was a bit sour and hard; it would need to soften before it was truly delicious.
He had originally planned to make wine from the peaches, but their sugar content was too low. They were completely different from the large, sweet peaches he remembered from his previous life, which were the result of generations of selective breeding.
Yu Qian'er took a large peach from her basket, followed Chen Jian's example by wiping it casually, and took a bite. Perhaps because Chen Jian's cooking had spoiled her palate recently, she immediately spat it out. Frowning, she complained, "Sour! Why isn't it as good as the fruit back at the Tao River?"
Everyone laughed. A few others took bites and agreed. "It's not that these aren't as good as the ones by the Tao River," one of them said. "It's because eating maple syrup and honey lately has sweetened Yu Qian'er's tongue. These peaches naturally taste sour in comparison."
This was true. The peaches here were actually much larger than those near the Tao River. But in the past, they had to eat them as a staple food to avoid hunger; now that Chen Jian had introduced other foods, the peaches just didn't taste as good as they once did.
Chen Jian said with a smile, "If you want sweetness, you must first endure some bitterness. If you take honey from the bees, they will sting you. If you eat the fruit of the peach tree, the tree will inevitably shed a few tears. Of course, they're sour and astringent."
Yu Qian'er looked at the damaged spots on the peach trees where translucent peach gum oozed out. She truly believed it was the tree's tears and wondered why they were so sticky. She touched a bit to her tongue and quickly spat it out. "I'm not afraid of bee stings. Besides, Brother, you taught me to use smoke so the bees won't sting. We haven't had honey in a long time. Today is a holiday, let's find some honey to eat this afternoon."
Wolfpi came over, handed Yu Qian'er the reddest peach he could find, and said, "I brought back all the honey from nearby. Didn't you just eat those bee larvae a few days ago? Here, try this one. It's big and red, maybe it's sweet."
Yu Qian'er took the peach. Chen Jian smiled and asked her, "Are you really not afraid of being stung? If not, I can let you eat honey every day. But you're not allowed to cry when it happens."
She tilted her head, fiddling with her braids. She weighed the memory of honey's sweetness against the pain of a sting, and finally nodded. The pain of a bee sting was quickly forgotten. The worst part was the buzzing when you didn't know where it was; once you were actually stung, that was that. But the taste of honey was unforgettable, especially now that the mountain flowers were in full bloom, carrying a drunken fragrance on the wind.
As if on cue, a breeze carried the scent of blooming linden trees from the distance. The clansmen paused their picking, closing their eyes to sniff the fragrance, swallowing involuntarily.
Several of them shouted, "Jian, if you say it, you can do it! We're really not afraid of being stung!"
Song Ye added, "Yes! Last time you used honey on wounds. We'll be fighting the Hua tribe's enemies and the Meteor tribe in the future. We should prepare some fresh honey."
Yu Qian'er tugged at his hand, pleading. She knew that as long as she asked her brother, he would surely agree.
Chen Jian grinned. "In that case, we can't take our holiday. Yu Qian'er has already planned out the work for the next ten days."
They had been digging earth and moving bricks for days and were indeed a little tired. Still, they imagined how pleasant it would be to drink honey mixed with cold spring water on a hot afternoon of hoeing.
After some consideration, they decided there would be endless work later, but this opportunity was now. After all, there was no lineup for evening training today, no need to run up the mountain to the beat of a drum. They just needed to wash up at night, and burning artemisia would keep the mosquitoes away from the water's edge.
"Then let's do it this afternoon! It won't delay tomorrow's work."
Everyone sped up their peach picking. The men carried several baskets back to the settlement and piled them in a room, covering them with furs and grass to help the sour, hard peaches soften.
***
The conversation about peaches had sparked an idea for Chen Jian: beekeeping. He pondered the possibility and concluded it was highly feasible. Bees didn't require much care, and the tribe had all the necessary tools. Honey was one benefit, but beeswax was the most important.
There were no ash trees here, which meant there was no way to cultivate wax insects. If they wanted a sufficient supply of wax, their only option was beeswax. Although other methods could be used to smelt bronze in the future, the lost-wax method was superior. It was too late to wait until they needed it; everything had to be prepared in advance.
With many hands, the work would be easy. The only thing they lacked was a saw, but a proper saw was unthinkable without metal. The saws made from river clamshells were good enough for cutting blocks of maple sugar, but not for sectioning a large log.
He had a few people haul over some dry logs. Without a saw, they had to laboriously chop them with stone tools. There was no need to cut them into boards; they just needed to create flat surfaces that could be glued together to form a beehive.
While the uncle took a few young men skilled in making mortise and tenon joints to work on the frame, the rest of the men chipped away at the wood. It wasn't tiring work, and the surfaces didn't need to be perfectly smooth; stone tools were adequate for the job.
They lit a fire and brought over a large basket of fish maws and swim bladders. Since they had started eating fish regularly, they had amassed a huge pile of swim bladders—more than the Tao River people consumed in an entire year. These swim bladders had long since been dried. They were from all sorts of miscellaneous fish, not the top-quality yellow croaker, but they were perfectly fine for making the wood glue he had in mind.
Isinglass is a traditional carpenter's adhesive that was used for thousands of years before being replaced by modern chemical glues. In his previous life, the treasure ships of the great eunuch Zheng He were held together in many places with swim bladder glue, which was extremely tough and waterproof.
After crushing the dried maws and soaking them in clay pots, Chen Jian went to check on the woodwork.
By lunchtime, the swim bladders had softened slightly. Since they were from various fish and not prized sturgeon or yellow carp, they didn't need to soak for a full day. He set up a large pottery basin over a bonfire, placed a few logs across it to act as a stand, and set the pot of swim bladders on top. He covered it and began to steam it over a high flame.
The clansmen watched curiously, wondering what he was doing. Chen Jian never let them throw away strange things like these fish bladders, or the pig bladders from before, or even the fish bones. But since Jian wanted to keep them, they must be useful for something they had never seen before, so they watched with great curiosity.
After a long time of watching the white steam rise, the clansmen's interest began to wane. They figured it wouldn't be a quick process. When Jian had first talked about digging latrines, it took a while, but he later showed them the power of methane. This time, however, nothing seemed to be happening.
Chen Jian lifted the lid and poked the contents with a pair of chopsticks. Seeing they were almost done, he took the bladders out, squeezed out the excess water, and steamed them for a while longer. Finally, he removed several bowls of sticky, steamed fish maw, juggling them because they were hot enough to burn his ears.
The wood shaping was finished. The men gathered around, looking at the sticky substance with curiosity, though it wasn't entirely unfamiliar. They had boiled pigskin until it was a sticky mass several times before.
Chen Jian divided the fish maw among them. "I have a tiring job for you," he said. "Find a rock and pound this into a pulp."
There were over a hundred people, and each received a small portion. "What kind of hard work is this?" one man laughed, looking at the lump smaller than a peach in his hand.
But after about two hours, all of them were shaking their wrists in exhaustion. Working with simple mortars made of concave rocks and pestles of smooth stones, it felt as though the slimy fish bladders were getting heavier and heavier. At first, it took no effort at all, but the longer they pounded, the stickier the substance became. Each lift of the pestle felt like pulling two glued stones apart. Their arms burned as if on fire, or as if drunk on that apricot vinegar they had made. A stone pestle that fit in the palm of their hand now felt like it weighed more than ten catties. Some of them thought about their two-catty rice ration set by Yu Qian'er; this wretched stone now felt heavier than ten times that weight.
Chen Jian watched his tribesmen grimacing with exhaustion and thought to himself that even a strong man is no match for a swim bladder. This stuff was only getting stickier. Perhaps in the future, they would have a new saying to describe a person's strength.
Once he estimated the viscosity was right, he had them collect all the pounded material into one large batch.
He removed the logs from the large pottery basin and filled a smaller pot with hot water from it. He wrapped the mass of isinglass in a piece of fiber cloth and placed it in the small pot. He had two men use sticks to clamp and twist the cloth, squeezing the gelatin into the hot water, where it dissolved.
The resulting cloudy white liquid had a strong fishy smell. It was thoroughly pungent and even stickier than before.
The men, thinking of who-knows-what, stared at the pot and snickered. Chen Jian retrieved the pot, speechless. *What are you laughing at?* he thought. *I'm the one who has to touch it later!*
The frame of the hive was ready, one for every ten people. Chen Jian fashioned some small brushes from scraps of fur, dipped them in the isinglass glue, and began painting it onto the scraped wood surfaces, sticking them together.
"Will this actually hold?" one man asked dubiously.
Chen Jian smiled. "Do you think the force you were using to pound that stuff just now was less than the weight of this piece of wood?"
Remembering the hellish effort of pounding the swim bladder, the man subconsciously shook his wrist and asked no more questions.
The thick pieces of the beehive were glued together with the fish-maw adhesive. Without planes or saws, many surfaces were uneven, leaving gaps everywhere. They found small pieces of wood to glue over these gaps like patches.
Eventually, they had assembled a coffin-like box nearly a meter long and half a meter in width and height. They lined the inside with fiber cloth and left two holes in the front for the bees to enter and exit. The top cover was left unglued so it could be removed, making it convenient to check on the bees' health and to harvest their honey.
All that remained was to wait a few days for the glue to dry naturally. If this glue could hold a boat together, a small beehive would be no problem at all.
The simple part was finding a wild hive, getting the bees inside, covering the lid, and sprinkling some wine to temporarily disrupt their pheromone sensitivity. As long as the queen bee was inside, the rest of the bees would likely make it their new home. Then, they could crush the drones that only mated and did no work, and remove any new queen cells to maintain the colony's growth and prevent swarming. This would guarantee a sufficient supply of honey, at least through the summer.
A more complex approach would involve making frames for the inside, strung with thin threads. They could melt beeswax to create thin wax sheets, attach them to the frames, and the bees would naturally build their honeycomb upon them. Then, they could take out the wax boards, use a leather belt and a pottery wheel to drive a simple centrifuge, and spin the honey out of the comb, much like a drying barrel. This would allow the honeycomb to be reused, giving the bees more time to collect honey instead of building wax.
Considering the materials they had, this was all fundamentally feasible.
The clansmen stared at the new beehive. "When will it have honey in it?" one asked.
Chen Jian looked at the still-wet isinglass, knowing that once it dried, it would be as solid as if it had grown that way. "By the next ten-day holiday," he said confidently.
Ten days didn't seem long. They looked at the beehive as if it were a precious baby, speculating amongst themselves how it could possibly produce honey.
Chen Jian gazed at the isinglass, thinking that the clan now had another simple yet incredibly useful tool. With isinglass, they could create recurve bows, wooden boats, simple furniture, doors, window lattices, wooden barrels... given enough time, all these things could now appear.
Presumably, once he made the first piece of furniture with isinglass, the clansmen's ten-day holidays might include a new and interesting form of "relaxation."
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