"Speaking in Rakahi"
"Speaking in Common"
10th of Cylus, 718"Speaking in Common"
3rd break
Despite Ewan's best efforts, there had been some confusion as to which shovelers were supposed to be where the trial before. Since they would all be shoveling snow again today, and since they needed to be as efficient as they could be, and since Ewan who would have organized them needed a good night's rest, it was up to Hart to figure out a way to make the shovelers more efficient. Because of that, Hart was up at third break.
He'd gone to sleep at 23rd break the night before, having been up late to melt large pots of snow on the Theatre ovens, since they needed to melt the snow they shoveled to fill the waiting ice rink. For having slept so little and in such an uncomfortable place (he'd slept in one of the balcony seats in the Rynmere Theatre) he felt pretty good. It only took him a handful of bits to wake up fully. After that, Hart was ready to get to work.
He had thought about it some before he'd gone to sleep the night before, and he had come to the conclusion that the best way to organize the shovelers would be to supply them with maps.
It was almost as cold in the darkened Theatre as it was outside, and outside it was very cold. The water in the rink on the stage needed to freeze and so the Theatre's doors and windows had been left open, the furnaces put out. Because of that, Hart already had on his sweater, coat, and boots. With one lantern lit in the entire Theatre and his hands made stiff from the cold, Hart wrapped his face with his scarf, pulled up his hood, and slid on his knit gloves. Then he took his sketchbook and charcoal, and he left the relative warmth and shelter of the Theatre in order to tour the town.
It was snowing as Hart stepped outside, and when he opened his sketchbook, flakes of snow landed on the pages. It was so cold out, however, that the flakes didn't melt. Hart swept them from his sketchbook with one gloved hand, and, heading towards the main street which ran from the crown through midtown to lowtown, he started his work.
In the pitch-dark hours of the Cylus morning, Hart trudged through knee-high snow from street to street, mapping as he went. He had no experience in making maps, not really, but he told himself that that didn't matter-- he was drawing up a first draft, and it didn't need to be perfect. All he had to do now was collect information.
He made sure to write the names of streets in the right places when he came to streets which were named, though not all of the streets were. Many of the streets he drew ran from north to south or east to west, like the main street, but often enough other streets veered into diagonals or were curved or crooked, and those often didn't have names. Regardless, Hart made sure to include every nameless crossway, cul-de-sac, and dead end.
He had never noticed before, but he noticed now that the city was not organized around streets; it was organized around buildings. Clusters of buildings tended to form vaguely rectangular blocks. But not all of the city buildings were organized that neatly. Some of the blocks were big and some small, with the streets running in between. He realized then as he drew, that he could measure street lengths by the number of buildings.
Though each building was not the same size they were uniform enough, especially in the housing districts, to act as a means of measurement. And besides-- Hart didn't know a lot of math, but he knew enough to know about averages. Despite the buildings being different sizes, all of the building sizes put together and divided would come to an average size. He started making even-spaced ticks along the streets as he mapped, with each tick representing a building.
He found that as soon as he started using a system of measurement, the map became instantly more organized and coherent. He walked, counting buildings as he did, and when he came to an intersection of streets he put down what he had counted. He connected block to block, street to street, and saw the map turn from a vague arrangement of indistinct lines to a coherent pattern of shapes. Each shape represented a block. Most were rectangles, but some were triangles, and some were in shapes he couldn't name, shapes with five sides or with some flat sides and some curved ones. Some were even in circles.
Three breaks later he saw he had managed to map nearly a fourth of midtown. His feet and shins ached from wet and cold, and his legs were like jam from pushing through the piled snow, but he thought he had mapped enough that the shovelers would be able to shovel for however long they needed to later today. He decided to head back to the Theatre.
On the slow way back through midtown to the crown, Hart made sure to check and double-check the maps he'd made as he walked step-by-step back through his own deep footprints. As he went, he corrected any mistakes he saw. He was pleased to see that there weren't many.
Back at the Theatre Hart warmed up by the single lit lantern and made himself a cup of hot water on one of the stoves. When he was warm enough that he was no longer shivering, he set out all that he needed and started the long process of remaking the maps for use.
Each map he decided to scale to fit a single page of paper, so that each group of shovelers could take as few pages of paper as necessary. Since there were ten shovelers and four carts for transporting the shoveled snow, there would be four groups of shovelers, with two groups of two and two groups of three. It was up to Hart to organize the groups so that they didn't spend too much time looking through midtown for areas of untouched snow that another group had not yet shoveled.
Hart had estimated that he had mapped out a fourth of midtown, so he split that fourth into fourths, one quadrant for each group. He took the maps' first drafts and before he did anything else, redrew them so that they were clean and neat, using fresh paper and newly-sharpened charcoal. Then, using the second drafts, he sketched out an area-specific map for each group which focused on their quadrant.
Each group would also get a copy of a map which would include all four quadrants, so that they might all be able to tell where each of the other groups were. It took some time to split the whole map into suitable quadrants, and then more time still to draw out each quadrant into its own sketch. Then, after Hart had the basics of each map sketched out, he began trying to add detail which might be useful to the shovelers.
He used the length of streets, measured by the number of buildings, to try and estimate the area of each street. Then he took some numbers he had gotten from Ewan on the 9th, and did a little math. When the math was done, he wrote halfway down the length of each street how much time he thought the street would take to shovel, based on its area and an estimated depth of snow. Hart couldn't calculate exactly how long a street would take to shovel, because he couldn't be exactly sure how much snow would need to be taken from a street; he could only estimate. Still, he thought the estimates would be useful.
Next, he tried to plot out shoveling routes so that each group would not return to the Theatre around the same time, but on that he had to give up. Maybe Ewan could have figured it out, but Hart wasn't that good at math, and too many numbers overwhelmed and confused him. So instead of plotting specific shoveling routes, he carefully drew out a route for each cart to follow back to the Theatre, so that none of the carts should have to pass each other often. Then, because he thought it best to plan too much rather than too little, he mapped out a secondary route for each cart, just in case the first route wasn't viable.
It took long hours to get all of the maps done, with so many little details to attend to. Hart rubbed his eyes with hands colored with charcoal, and, when the last detail on the last map was at last in place, he fell quickly asleep.
A break or two later the shovelers arrived, and Hart had three cups of coffee for Ewan's one. Hart was glad, though, because the shovelers seemed very happy about the maps. Ewan, especially, was impressed. He acted as if the maps were very good, rather than just simple work, and some mathematics.
"These are really good," Ewan said. "You should take them to the University when we're done with them, and show them to the head librarian. I know the University would commission you to do a proper map of the city streets. They might very well commission you to map out general shoveling routes like these for all of Andaris, or evacuation routes to use if ever the city comes under attack. It's always useful to be prepared, but as far as I know, the city doesn't yet have maps like these. They might even buy these incomplete ones on the promise that you would make them more."
Hart told Ewan he would think about it, and Ewan told him that if he didn't take the maps, Ewan would.
---
12th
Hart was very busy the 10th and 11th working on the ice rink, and had no time to go to the University. He, the Theatre staff, and later in the afternoon a couple of the shovelers and Ewan, spent both days putting large pots of snow on the Theatre stoves to melt. By the wee early hours of the morning on the 12th, or the wee late hours of the evening on the 11th, all of the snow had been melted and poured to fill the rink. Now they just had to wait throughout the rest of the day and night for the remaining water in the rink to freeze. More than half of the water was already frozen and so amazingly, they were right on schedule. Since all he had to do on the 12th was watch over the rink as it froze, late in the morning Hart took his maps over to the University for them to appraise.
The library worker at the desk was not initially impressed, but when he called over his superior and they started to pore over the maps, Hart saw that they understood what he had drawn. To his astonishment they bought the simple maps, and said they would pay him and a University artist to redraw them in more exacting proportion. Hart spent the afternoon redrawing the maps as carefully as he could, using tools he had to learn to use to make precise measurements, along with the University artist. The University had very specific standards. They brought him a pen and different jars of ink so that he might include a key, and assigned a student to help him and the artist make copies, as well as brainstorm even more efficient routes.
By the end of the day on the 12th he had promised to come back to finish the maps when he could. He was not available the 13th, 14th, 15th, or 16th, and the University requested he come in on the 17th so that he and the University artist and student might go street-by-street again in order to quadruple-check the finished maps.
They liked his work enough that for the rest of the season, Hart was paid by the University to map the remainder of midtown and lowtown.
