Chapter 5: arriving home, the beginning of an industry

We were trail-weary when we reached our home. Our neighbors turned out to welcome us back and marveled at the size of the bearskin. Ruth was ecstatic to receive the parcel from her mother. Josie sold off most of the cloth, the dyestuffs and wool rugs while being careful to keep a few of the heavier ones for our cabin.

Josie was over the moon, having become pregnant with our child. I was pretty giddy myself until the responsibility kicked in. No matter what happened to Josie or me, I had to provide for our sprout. Josie wondered at my smile for a couple weeks until I broke down and explained my ideas. Then she was all for it.

I began building a low stone building at the rear of my property, out behind the smokehouse. Whenever I wandered around in the woods and found a small bald, I felt around for whatever the woods had rejected. If I found nothing I continued on, figuring that it was just a fluke. Otherwise I used my talents to surround it in gravel and clay, then compress the hell out of it to make a huge stone block. Each one got a glazed surface then quickly cooled. This I rode back to my home as if I were sitting on a flying horse. The first time I did it I realized that I'd done a new thing--I flew! I showed Josie how to do it as well. She was ecstatic!

Anyway, I slowly accumulated a cache of stone blocks, each of which was over a yard on a side. I dug up the soil until I hit gravel. I laid all that dirt to one side. I continued digging, saving out the gravel in a separate pile, until I reached four feet below the surface. Then I laid the stone blocks into a low room, some thirty feet long by ten feet deep, including a stone floor. The next part was difficult. I brought back another several tons of stone blocks, most made from disused roadbeds going to places that didn't exist any more. I carefully cut the blocks into trapezoids and laid a barrel vault ceiling, then filled in the end caps. The ceiling ended at eight feet high which brushed my head. Two blocks were left out of one end wall making a doorway of roughly seven feet tall by four feet wide. When inside the chamber on a sunlit day I could see sunbeams come down through the ceiling. It would leak like a sieve in a rain.

It would have been one hell of a messy job without the use of TK. A couple clay banks in the river were unusable because of inclusions of rock, sand and mud. I lifted great gobs of that sticky mess up and over to my 'brew house' where I thickly pasted the walls and ceiling. I didn't want to fire it in place because I'd never seen such a large structure heated to such a degree before. I didn't want to see any explosions.