Inside the Walls

For Lilfluff‘s prompt.

Planners ‘Verse, in the after-the-apoc by about 10 years. Planners have a landing page – here (or on LJ)

Commenters: 8

It seemed safe out past the walls, but Tess knew it was an illusion. As the junior elder at the Library, it was her job to take the stories of the refugees they let into the camp between the inner and outer walls, and the far fewer students they let into the inner sanctum. She knew from those tales that even now, ten years into what they were calling The Collapse, things were hard out there, and dangerous, and the bandits were only getting worse; with all of the country to gather in, they still had more refugees coming to their growing-cramped camp than they could handle, and the story was the same from every Family outpost they could reach. The world was a dangerous place, outside of their forts.

Tess wondered, as she took the long stairway down from the wall into the inner courtyard, if the elder Elders would make the decisions they did if they heard the stories she did. She was haunted by those stories, by the expressions on the faces of the refugees, by the injuries they would show – and the ones they would only hint at. She was haunted by the violence she sometimes saw just outside their walls, when those that weren’t allowed inside tried to set up camp, and the marauders were feeling brave.

“We should expand,” she’d told the elder Elders, and “we don’t have the resources,” they’d come back; “we’re already stretched thin with the farmland inside the walls. Maybe when the marauders aren’t such a threat.”

By then, of course, it would be too late for so many hundreds of refugees. By then, the ghosts haunting Tess’s nightmares would have doubled or quadrupled in number.

“Elder Tess,” the guard called, as she reached the bottom of the stairs. “We have more refugees than we have farm work, and the others are asking for something to do.”

Like that, it fell into place. “Do you have a few guards to spare?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Ma’am, from a man probably old enough to be her father. Rank had its privileges. “We are over full strength right now; everyone wants to join the guard.”

The guard got full rations and a better place to sleep, and the test wasn’t as hard as becoming a Scholar. “Take those that want to out about two hundred feet beyond the outer wall, and begin prepping to build another wall. I’ll send an engineer with a plan while you get them gathering rocks and clearing the ground.”

If they didn’t have enough room for more refugees, the answer was clearly to build more room.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/151216.html. You can comment here or there.

26 thoughts on “Inside the Walls

  1. I am reminded of a piece from a Pratchett novel. The logic goes like this. “Our friends are on this side of the wall. Our enemies are on the other side of the wall. If we expand our wall until the entire city is inside our wall, we win.”

    • Of course nothing says that because the new wall has gone up, the old wall must come down. In fact rings of walls will give you fall back positions if there is a serious fight, and at other times places you can have a ‘we are deciding if we trust you, but in the meantime you can at least have a wall between you and the marauders,’ zone. But yeah, in this environment there is a risk of falling into the, “This side of the wall Good, that side of the wall Bad. So if they’re on this side of the wall I can trust them, even if that wall was a new expansion finished today,” mindset. That said, if nothing else, it keeps the the people there wasn’t otherwise work for from sitting around idle. And if it is make-work, it is at least probably more productive make-work than might otherwise exist. Although how Tess will feel when she realizes that even with an expanded wall there are still likely many more people who need shelter than they’ll have room for…

      • And once the wall is expanded at least some of the wall builders can become farmers. And is the new wall actually enclosing people just outside their wall or is it expanding their space into which they might then admit a few more people?

        • I do think they will keep making wall-circles. And yeah, they are expanding to allow in more people – more farm land in the circle, even if only a few acres, more room for tents or semi-permanent structures Which means the once-outer ring can be made into more permanent structures for the refugees who have stayed longer. Until it becomes a walled town.

        • Building more wall adds more secure space and possibly farmland (that may take substantial time to develop, depending on the soil — if they are readily gathering rocks for a wall, it’s not going to be easy farmland right off), but those aren’t the only resources they’ll need. Water, wood, metal, fuel. Do they grow trees inside the walls? Mine? Have a spring? Cisterns? Animals for meat, leather, fiber? Increasing the flock takes more out of this year’s production than saving more seed grain for planting does. Medicine. Sanitation. What are they screening for when they let people in? Attitude, disease, genetics, skills? If they’re accepting people more rapidly, the quality of the population they’re accepting will go down (to be crude about it). Also, socially, what’s being promised to people allowed inside the walls? They already have a caste system going, with elders, scholars, guards, farmers, and unassigned refugees provided with different levels of privilege and resources. Do those categories multiply with another ring of walls and more people? “You can’t come in at all; you can come in and sleep in the outer courtyard, but have to provide for yourself; you can work our farmland, and pay us a share of your crops; you can be issued weapons and keep those other people under control; you can study in the library.” The marauders outside the walls would happily attack the planners and take their resources if they thought they could pull it off; how much less than the scholars will those allowed inside the walls accept before someone thinks that perhaps they could get a better share by cutting a deal with the marauders? And human populations have this way of expanding even when they aren’t taking in people from outside …

          • All very good points! I was already pondering the caste system. I think they were turning down qualified people before due to a lack of room, but certainly the scholars and guards have a higher qualifying level than the refugees. And yeah, I believe their number-they-let-in has a wiggle in it for population growth, so it doesn’t LOOK like it’s full, which has to screw with people who really, really want to be in a wall. Tess will have to come up with answers to the other questions. Meat, water – rocks, well, the soil around here is really rocky and really arable, so I’m used to fieldstone walls, etc. Screening for willingness to work, skills, disease, by the way.

            • <nod> I’m not sure how feasible it is to put all of one’s farmland behind walls to begin with. Even if they’re doing high-labor-intensity, high-density farming, can that support enough people to man the walls? Fieldstone walls are useful markers, but can they be built high enough to provide useful defenses without mortar? Do they have the materials to mortar the walls? Are the marauders out to steal, or destroy? How frequently and in what force to they approach/attack? Are refugees camped right outside? Could non-food crops (flax, cotton, jute, animal feed) be grown outside the walls and go relatively unmolested? Could animals be grazed outside and brought in when marauders are spotted? Tess means well, but whether she’s building the first city in the post-collapse world or dooming this outpost is not at all clear.

                  • Tb-tbbth to you! I’m fascinated, I just need to sit down and talk too much back to you! (part of this is that hte inner sections were Planned by people called The Planners for a reason, but Tess really is a Junior Elder and is having a bleeding heart moment, so her plan *isn’t* that well planned out)

                    • Tess really is a Junior Elder and is having a bleeding heart moment, so her plan *isn’t* that well planned out Yes. Thus the not knowing whether she can pull this off. It wouldn’t make good story tension if we knew how it would fall out. 🙂

              • I’m not sure how feasible it is to put all of one’s farmland behind walls to begin with. Even if they’re doing high-labor-intensity, high-density farming, can that support enough people to man the walls? That’s a good point. There’s an interesting article here – http://tinyfarmwiki.com/index.php?title=How_much_land_to_feed_one_person%3F – But I’d have to go back and decide (maybe I should) * How many people does the Library intend to house? * What do their extant food supplies look like, and were they intended to be supplemental or feed in its entirety? * how many refugees did they intend for, in addition? Grain needs fields, meat sort of needs fields. They’d have to have a way to protect some of this from the raiders. Ah, I see you address some of that later on. Are the marauders out to steal, or destroy? How frequently and in what force to they approach/attack? Are refugees camped right outside? Could non-food crops (flax, cotton, jute, animal feed) be grown outside the walls and go relatively unmolested? Could animals be grazed outside and brought in when marauders are spotted? At this stage, I’d guess “steal,” and really, not all that frequently now, since they know the tower is guarded and there are much easier settlements. So yes, animals and non-food could probably be grown outside the walls. As I am picturing this: There is the Library-tower complex, with a protective wall around it. Outside of that wall is a space for refugees, and a second wall.

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