Chapter 12: Changes and learning
After the third day of sowing I was finally able to relax, luckily, having all the help of the people, we were able to plant all the crops and now we only have to do the proper maintenance. This work was done by women during the morning.
While the women were doing this, I asked the men who made a big hole about twenty meters from the farmland. This hole will be 3 meters deep and will have an area of one hundred square meters. On each side of the rectangular hole we would make a groove half a meter wide and half a meter deep. These furrows would go one towards the cultivation area and another towards the river. This would serve as a well to irrigate crops. The irrigation method that I chose was the flood method, each cultivation area will have a secondary furrow that will reach the main furrow of the well, in this way each crop will be irrigated in the correct way.
At the bottom of the well I will throw rocks of medium size to cover the bottom, in this way the water will not mix so much with the earth, and we will also be able to take advantage of the water in this well for our daily needs. This will save us time when going for water, and when watering.
Surely it will take about 3 or 4 days to make both the well and the water channels.
During this time I dedicated myself to administer the village, at the beginning it was easy but after the time I realized that it was more complicated than I thought, some of the things that brought me headaches was for example: the time counting during one day, as only the days and seasons of the year are used to quantify longer times, what we might call accounting for village resources, etc. All these problems would be aggravated if we continue like this. In this way I decided to make a few changes, after sunset, I gathered not only the council but the whole village around the central bonfire of the village.
-for you wanted to talk to all Aren- as always the first question came from Mors.
-I have to make a few changes with respect to some customs that we have-
-some customs- this time the one I asked was Haiden.
-yes-
When I got up and noticed how everyone was watching me, I decided to start.
-Well, first of all I wanted to thank you for having all gathered here, the reason for this meeting is to change some customs that we have. First, we will start using a new way of counting time-
The people were intrigued by my words.
-first, we will continue using the days as a unit of time for day and night, but now we will divide the time from the sun until the sun goes down in 12 periods of time-
-and as we will do that- at the question of one of the people, I could only smile and from my back take out a stick.
-Thanks to this- they all stared at me, surely have many doubts, but taking the stick in my hand I approach the fire and nail it on the floor perpendicular to this.
-as you can see the light of the fire produces a shadow of the stick in the ground- before my declaration the people still continued dumbfounded, when they are willing to explain the rest of this method.
-ahhh- Ellen gave a little cry while watching the shadow of the stick.
-What happens sister- Aria asked.
-we will use the sun to create a shadow on the stick and the shadow will move depending on where the sun is and with that we can know which time of the day is more accurate, it is not so Aren- before the agitated declaration of Ellen, I I could only be speechless. I did not think Ellen was smart enough to deduce something I did not know about. Before my silence Ellen was nervous thinking that she had been wrong.
-that is, it is as Ellen has said, we will use the shade created by the sun to be able to better measure the time throughout the day- people were surprised at my explanation since it seemed a good method to control time better, while I was still impressed by Ellen's intelligence, as I watched her as she was happy to have deduced my ideas.
-and as we will divide the sun time- another villager asked.
-I'm in charge of building the object similar to this, but more precisely, in this way we can divide the sun time into twelve equal parts, we will call each part "hour" and with this we can implement a system in which each person will work the right amount of time, this way we can buy time to do other activities-
-and what happens with the night- this time I ask Haiden.
-well to not have sunlight, we can not use this method, I will try to find some, but for now I have no idea for this-
The truth could make a rudimentary clock, but it would take me a long time to do it and I'm not sure if it will work out. At the moment this will work.
-and as we will call this object you will do- again it was Haiden who spoke.
-I call it a sundial
All agreed, anyway I was the one who will do it so no one had any complaints.
-On the other hand, I would like to use a method to count an exact number of days. We will group the days into groups of 30, and to each group we will call it "month", each month will have its own name, and we will still use the seasons of the year, but in this occasion each season of the year will last 3 months, that is, about 90 days. And finally we will join the four seasons or 12 months and we will call this "year", each year then it will have 360 days. I think that in this way we can better organize the tasks that occupy long times-
Despite their initial doubts, the members of the tribe decided to accept this new method of time counting. At the end I told him the names of each month, which were the ones he knew: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. Despite asking me where I got these names from, I simply told them I liked them. In this way avoid the complicated explanation.
-other thing I want to change, is the learning of calculations-
-calculations, that's what traders use, it's not like that-
-that's Mors, but not only do the merchants have to know, I want at least for the time being the people in charge of bigger tasks, like you, Mors, Haiden, Yoru, Eri
Eri is the mother of the twins, despite this she is still quite young. She is in charge of controlling the amount of crops that were harvested in our old village. Like Mors, who ran the village forge and Haiden the training manager and lead the warriors of the village. They would have to learn not only to add and subtract, which they already knew, but with simple operations, but also to multiply and divide. I think it will be useful for your work.
For teaching I had to find a method to teach them, at first I thought about the abacus, but then I discarded it since learning to use it was more difficult than learning it using Arabic numerals.
Other changes that I made were the hours of work together with the previous changes, I decided that each person would only work about 8 hours throughout the day and that the rest would be dedicated to learning new ashen or for what they wanted.
After the meeting, she went to her house for dinner, when Ellen arrived she approached me.
-Aren ... -
-yes, what happens sister- Ellen for some reason is blushing.
-I asked myself if I can also learn to calculate, together with the others- I was surprised by your request, but I remembered what happened in the meeting. Surely Ellen is one of those people who like to learn about each new thing, now that I remember it, I only focused on Nao, but Ellen was also excited to learn magic.
-clearly there is no problem-
-thanks !!! - Ellen hug me happy, I can not help but be nervous when she hugs me, I can feel clearly in my chest, those huge mounds that she has.
The following days, they were a little stressful, since while the men continued with the well and the canals, the women with the care of the fields. I dedicated myself to building a suitable sundial. I also had to deal with people's doubts about the new time system. Once the working day was over, each one carried out different activities, but I had to teach Mors, Haiden, Yoru, Eri and Ellen, about more complex addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. At the beginning they had problems, but they began to understand them. But as before the person who surprised me most was Ellen, on the fourth day of learning she already knew the multiplication tables and I already knew how to make multiplications and divisions more difficult than the rest. To learn how to calculate I also teach you the Arabic numerals and the concept of "0". For some reason they understood them easily, this made me doubt, but it does not matter. We wrote the operations on small clay tablets, these were easy to make and to write and erase. I still do not have a method to make paper available.
After a few more days, Ellen was already able to do more complex operations that even I would have trouble doing. I decided to leave her teaching, although at first I reject the idea. I convinced her and she agreed. I think Ellen could easily become my assistant, she would help me in enough problems.