Five Iron Ingots and a Hill

The hopper was jammed.

Beno heard it from outside, in the dark, on the wet grass, before the sun was up. A warming house that is working sounds like tick... ping... clink. This one was going tick... ping... and then nothing.

He went in through the low door and the heat wrapped round him like a blanket out of an oven.

Four iron golems stood on the glass floor in a row. Under the glass, in a sealed channel, orange light moved slow as syrup. The golems had been standing on it all night, warm all the way through for the first time in their lives. Happy golems do nothing at all, very slowly, with their eyes half shut.

"Morning, Nan," said Beno.

Nan's head turned about four inches. That is a lot, from Nan.

"Rivet. Clang. Big Quiet."

Big Quiet did not move. Big Quiet never moves. Big Quiet is, in Beno's professional opinion, the most relaxed object in the valley.

Beno crouched at the hopper slot under Rivet's feet and put his eye to it. There it was. One iron nugget, tiny, wedged sideways in the mouth of the hopper, with about two hundred more piled up behind it, waiting.

Tap on the glass, from outside.

Beno looked up. Through the north window, out in the cool blue shade where the sun never comes, a small snow golem with a carved smile and an orange nose was pointing at the jammed hopper with a stick eleven blocks long.

"Yeah, I see it, Toasty. You could have said."

Toasty tapped the glass twice more and pointed at the hopper again, harder.

"I SEE IT."

Beno flicked the nugget out with his thumbnail. The pile went shhhhk and the hoppers ate it and the chest at the end of the line went clunk and the whole building came back to life all at once, tick, ping, CLINK, tick, ping, clink, and Big Quiet, without opening his eyes, made a sound like a kettle deciding to be happy about something.

"You're welcome," said Beno.

He did the rest of the round. Under the glass, the lava channel was low at the west end, so he tipped in a bucket and watched the orange come back up. Two glass blocks had frost on the outside. Leaking cold. He pulled them both and reset them with the seams tight. Nan's left foot had a nugget stuck between the toes. He got it out. Nan looked at him for eleven whole seconds afterward. From Nan, that is a hug.

Last stop, the west wall. Toasty's board.

It is a slab of glass set into the wall at snow golem height, and Toasty writes on the outside of it with a lump of charcoal, and Beno reads it from the inside, backwards, every morning.

Last night it said:

NAN 11. RIVET 9. CLANG 12. BIG QUIET 8. RAIN.

"Rain," Beno read out loud. "Nan, you had a good night."

Nan had. Cold golems shed more iron than warm ones, and a cold golem is a golem who got rained on, and a rained on golem who then stands on a warm glass floor for nine hours is a golem who ticks and pings all night and drops iron rice like a broken necklace. Rain means a good chest. Toasty had worked that out in November and written it on the glass and nobody had asked him to.

Beno rubbed the numbers off with his sleeve, on the inside, and Toasty wiped his side clean with a mitten, and the two of them did that at the same time through the same piece of glass, the way they had every morning since the snow went.

Then the chest.

Beno knelt and opened it and started counting, and this is the part he does not tell anyone he likes.

The golems do not shed ingots. They shed nuggets. Little flakes of frost loosened iron, the size of a grain of rice, and it takes nine of them to make one ingot, and Beno sat on the warm glass floor in the dark before dawn with his hands in a chest full of iron rice, counting in nines.

Nine. One.

Nine. Two.

He was on ninety one when the door banged.

"Nine hundred and twelve," said Miles.

Beno did not look up. "I'm counting."

"You're on ninety one." Miles dropped down beside him, cross legged, and shoved both arms into the chest up to the elbows. "Nine hundred and twelve ingots. I did it last night. Twice."

"Then why am I counting."

"Because I want to see your face when you get there."

Nine hundred and twelve ingots.

Forty a night, all winter, all spring, every single night while the valley slept. Four warm golems on a glass floor dropping iron rice into a chest for nobody.

Nine hundred and twelve ingots, and not one thing in the world to spend them on. They had a castle. They had buckets. They had more shovels than people. Beno had proposed, in February, an iron statue of Beno. The motion had failed.

"We should do something with it," Beno said, every week, all winter.

"We should," Miles agreed, every week, all winter, and then it snowed some more.

Miles took five ingots out and put them on the crafting table in the shape of a U.

"What's that."

"That's five."

"Miles, what IS it."

Miles pushed it.

The table clacked, and something came out of it that had never existed on that hill before, and it sat there on the wood being about the size of a bucket and about as impressive.

Beno picked it up in both hands. Turned it over. Wheels underneath. Nothing on top. No sail, no reins, no handle, no engine, no opinions whatsoever.

"It's a bucket."

"It's a MINECART."

"It's a bucket with wheels, Miles."

"It's a bucket with wheels," Miles agreed, "and if you put it on a hill it does three minutes in three seconds."

Beno went very still.

Then he was out the door and gone, and Beno running at four in the morning is a noise like a barn falling downstairs, and Miles grabbed the cart off the table and went after him.

"RAILS," Beno shouted, from somewhere out in the dark.

"Six iron and a stick!"

"HOW MANY DO WE GET?"

"SIXTEEN!"

Beno stopped so fast in the wet grass that he sat down in it.

"Sixteen? For six?" He looked up the hill in the dark, and Miles could see him doing it, the thing Beno does where his whole face goes still and then goes bright, like a lantern lit from inside. "Miles. Miles, how far is it to the pond."

"Forty blocks."

"So that's..."

"Three crafts. Eighteen iron, three sticks, forty eight rails. We'll have eight spare."

"EIGHT SPARE," Beno bellowed, at the sleeping castle, at the whole hill, at nobody. "WE HAVE EIGHT SPARE!"

Up in a window, a duckling fell off something.

They laid the track down the steep east face, from the courtyard gate to the flat grass by the koi pond, and it took them until the sun came up, and it took them twice.

The hill did not want a railway. Hills never do. A rail needs the block in front of it to be the same height or one step down, and the east face of that hill was a staircase built by nobody, all knuckles and dips and one enormous rude boulder.

So before they laid a single rail they had to make the hill agree. Miles went down it with a shovel taking the high spots off. Beno went behind him filling the low spots in with the dirt Miles had just dug out, and by the third dip they had it: the hill gave them exactly as much fill as it took away, every time, if they went in that order.

"It's paying for itself," Miles said, delighted, elbow deep in a hole. "Beno, the hill is PAYING FOR ITSELF."

"Dig, mathematician."

It took an hour and a half to make forty blocks of hill into a smooth clean ramp, and then they laid rails on it, and then they did it again, because the first time, Beno got excited and started bending the line around a rock. A rail bends where you put it. It also stays bent forever, and it takes the cart with it, and Miles lay flat on his belly in the grass with his cheek on the ground and squinted one eye down the line and said, "Beno."

"What."

"Come look down it."

Beno lay down beside him and put his eye to the rail.

Forty blocks of iron ran away downhill in the grey light, and eleven blocks in, the line went out, a little wobble, a small unmistakable belly to the left, and every rail after it was carrying that mistake all the way to the water.

"Ohhh," said Beno. "That's ugly."

"That's eleven blocks."

"Pull it up."

They pulled it up. They laid it again, straight this time. Clucky supervised from the fence post. The sheep supervised from further away, with the terrible patience of an expert who has judged three castles and was not going to get excited about a metal U.

By sunrise there was a straight bright pair of lines going down a very steep hill, and one bucket sitting at the top of it.

"Right," said Beno, hat on backwards. "Who goes first."

"ME," said Miles, and got in.

"Miles..."

"Forty block slope. Thirty degrees. Pond at the bottom. Worst case I get wet and famous."

"We haven't TESTED..."

"BENO." Miles gripped the sides of the cart and grinned back up at him, and it was not a careful grin. "That's what I'm doing."

And he leaned forward.

It took four seconds.

The cart went clack clack clackclackclackCLACKCLACKCLACK and the world turned into a smear, and the noise that came out of Miles had no words in it, a bright ribbon of AAAAAAAAA trailing down the hill behind him like a scarf, and at the bottom the track ran out and the cart stopped and Miles did not.

Miles went into the koi pond.

Silence.

A head came up with a lily pad on it.

"THREE POINT ONE SECONDS!" Miles screamed at the entire hill. "IT'S A THREE MINUTE WALK! BENO! WE BROKE THE HILL!"

Beno was already in the cart. Beno had been in the cart since about the word seconds.

Nothing else got done that day. Nothing.

There was a queue at the top of the hill by lunchtime, a real one, with Clucky walking up and down it like an admiral inspecting a fleet. The students rode it in stacks of six. It does not work. They did it four times.

Bumble the bee rolled down beside the track and beat the cart to the bottom, twice, and has never let anyone forget it.

Moth rode it at three in the afternoon inside a bucket with a blanket over the bucket, screaming happily in the dark.

Wobbles flew alongside the cart. That was cheating. Everyone knew it was cheating. She knew it was cheating. She did it eleven more times.

And Gerald.

Gerald got in the cart, folded his little green arms in his lap with the enormous dignity of a creeper who has thought carefully about safety, shut his eyes, and went down the hill at full speed.

The cart stopped at the bottom. Gerald did not.

Fwoomp.

He came up with a fish on his head and said, in the smallest happiest voice in the valley, "Again, please."

He went in eight more times. He never once opened his eyes. When they hauled him out for dinner he sat by the fire dripping and glowing and said, "The pond is very wet. Would hug," and nobody could look at anybody for a full minute.

Late afternoon. The queue had thinned. Miles was flat on his back at the top of the hill with chalk dust on his hands and a chicken standing on his chest, and he said, to the sky:

"How many chickens fit in a minecart?"

Everything stopped.

Beno stood up so fast he fell over.

"Say it again."

"How many chickens fit in a minecart."

Beno crawled toward him through the grass with his hat over his heart.

"That's a Terrible Idea."

"It's a question."

"Miles." Beno's voice had gone reverent and slightly wet. "For four years, every single Terrible Idea in this family has been MINE. Sixty of them. Hatch the dragon. Flight school but the teacher is a chicken. The hole is the best room. We don't fight the snow, we BECOME the snow. Sixty entries and one author, and you have never once, not ONCE..."

"Number One," said Miles. "M."

"M?"

"M for Miles. You keep your column. I'm starting mine."

The answer, for the record, is one.

One chicken fits in a minecart. She was furious about it. She was also, and nobody knows how, STEERING.

At dusk they ran out of hill.

"Longer," said Beno. "Out across the flat. All the way to the barn."

Sixty more blocks, straight and level on the good grass past the pond. Beno got in at the top, came down the slope like a thrown rock, hit the flat at a speed that made the students shriek...

and slowed down.

And slowed down.

And stopped. Dead. In a field. Twenty blocks short of the barn.

Beno sat in it. Out in the dusk. In a metal box. Not moving.

Somebody laughed. Then everybody laughed. Then Beno lay down in the cart with his boots up over the edge and laughed at the first stars and shouted, "SHE'S SHY! SHE ONLY LIKES HILLS!"

That was the joke of the evening. The cart is shy. The cart only likes hills. Somebody get the cart a hill.

Nobody wrote it down. Nobody thought about it once, all night.

A minecart on a slope is a miracle. A minecart on flat ground is a box.

The box would wait. It had nothing else to do.

They ate outside. It was that kind of night.

Afterward Miles went down into the Foundation Hall, the old mine under the castle, where the beams are still rusty and the sign still says HERE FELL BENO. IT WORKED OUT, and he picked up his chalk and drew the world on the wall.

The castle, in the middle. The village, west. The coast, south, where a ship once sailed. Beside it he wrote 900 blocks.

The north road, up past the ice. 2,000 blocks.

And east, over the ridge, the cherry grove, where an old man with an enormous straw hat was one block away from finishing the little house he had been building for sixty one years and had recently announced he was in no particular rush about.

Miles measured that one twice.

1,860 blocks by road.

Beno came and stood next to him. Two boys, one wall, one piece of chalk.

"Three days," said Beno.

"Three days sideways, over a ridge, on a road that goes the long way around the ridge, because roads always go the long way around everything." Miles tapped the chalk on the stone, tick, tick, tick. "Today I did three minutes in three seconds."

"So what's the real number? Not by road. Straight. If you could just go."

Miles put the chalk on the castle and drew a line east. Through the ridge. Not over it. Through.

"Sixteen hundred."

Behind them, in the doorway, Master Hinoki had been standing for some unknown amount of time. Possibly hours.

They waited. With Hinoki, you wait.

"A road," he said, "is not for leaving."

He turned and went, slow as weather, back to his own hill and his own house and his own one block a day. At the door he spent tomorrow's word too, and the day after's, recklessly, a whole future sentence in one night.

"It is for coming back. Before dark."

The hill went to bed sore. The good kind.

The students lost an argument about times to their own eyelids, one by one, up on the landing decks. Bumble slept in the cart, having claimed it. Wobbles curled along the roof ridge in a dent the size of a house. Gerald sat by the fire, damp and glowing, holding a small dry fish named Steven that he intended to return to the pond in the morning. Moth hung in the east rafters in the dark he loves.

Under the porch, Pockets the fox lay on his side turning something small over and over between his front paws. It was Miles's chalk. Miles had definitely put it in his pocket. Miles would definitely be looking for it in the morning.

The chalk would matter. Not tomorrow. But it would.

Down the slope, the warming house went tick... ping... clink in the warm dark, and Nan and Rivet and Clang and Big Quiet stood on the glass with their eyes half shut, dropping iron rice into a chest for people they loved, all night, for nobody, in the dark.

And at the north window, in the shade, where he always is, where he has to be, Toasty put down his stick.

He had watched every run. All eleven hours of it. He had counted them, and nobody knew that.

It was July. He is made of snow. The sun is the sun. So he had stood at the glass all day and managed a hillside he could not stand on, and it was the best day of his life, and that is true, and he would have said so.

He would also have liked one ride. Just the once. Just to know.

Brrr-buk-buk-brooooo...

Right on time.

Clucky walked out to the roof peak of the highest tier of the tallest castle in the whole blocky world and looked down at all of it: the smiling barn, the koi pond with eleven new fish stories in it, forty blocks of iron going down the hill with the moon lying on it end to end, a shy cart stopped in a dark field, a hundred windows full of lantern light, and one small snow golem at a window who did not know yet that everything about to happen was going to happen for him.

And she sang.

Brrr-buk-buk-brooooo... brrr-buk-buk-brooooo...

The pack is safe. Counted twice.

The pack is fast now. That is new, and a little dangerous, and completely wonderful, and it cost five iron ingots.

Nine hundred and seven left.

Brrr... buk... buk... brooooo.

Goodnight, minecart. Goodnight, shy flat field. Goodnight, fox with a stolen piece of chalk. Goodnight, boy at a window who has never once been anywhere.

And the whole warm lit hill went to sleep.