The Great Golden Hoard Game Thread

[Nogrod]

Novgorod was marching straight on through the grassland with fair speed and in high spirits. The sun was shining, and not regarding the low-lying shrubs, the terrain was easy to walk. Suddenly he ran into an area of familiar blue on the ground. “Blueberries!” he shouted and ran to the bushes, laying down on the ground and guzzling the sweet and ripe berries. He just loved them, had always loved.

But soon he came to think of continuing with his journey. I’ll not leave these to anyone else to pick. I’ll have to carry as much I can with me. With that he took a quick glance around to see what there was to make a basket or other kind of vessel to carry the berries. His mother had taught him how to make different baskets when he was young and he still thought he could make one from almost anything.

There were a couple of birches and poplars but they were too stunted to produce any reasonable quantities of bark for the purpose. That was sad because birch-bark baskets were both easy and fast to make and solid in use. He would have to come up with something else. He studied the shrubs with a keen eye. The stalks were thin and had just a little of broad leaves in them. The grass was knee high and had thin spindly stalks. These will have to do, Novgorod thought and took to his task.

First he searched four thickest stalks from the shrubs and cut them to different lengths. Then he took them one by one to be pre-bended. His mother had taught him that that way the stalks would slowly learn and get used to their new form and would then settle to it at will. He took a stalk with both his hands from the middle and started to bend it easily, being careful not to break it. He did all this in rhythm, moving his hands slowly farther away from each other with every bending until he reached the end of the stalk. Then he re-performed the operation. After he had handled all the four he left them to rest for a while.

Next he gathered some of the youngest and thinnest shrub-stalks to make strings for tying. He carefully gnawed the surface of the stalks to break it. This way the stalk would become supple and yielding. Then he rubbed them between his hands, twisted and turned them for a couple of minutes to gain more elasticity.

Now he had what he needed to begin the work. He went through the bending operation once again with the thicker stalks, but this time he went all the way through to bend them into a round shape, both ends of a stalk overlapping each other by a few inches. These he then tied up with the strings he had just made. Very soon he had four round circles of different sizes. The smallest one he put in the middle, the next in size around it and so on. Then he needed again some more stalks from the shrubs.

Novgorod picked four thicker stalks and eight thinner ones and came back to his framework. Carefully he slipped one of the stalks over the largest circle and then under the next one. This way he continued, slipping it over the third and under the middle-one, then over the other side of the middle-one and under the second, over the third and lastly under the largest one at the other side of the circle. He soon realised that he had not done this for a long time as it proved to be pretty difficult. The second stalk, that he threaded between the circles in a straight angle to the first one, proved even more complicated as the first stalk tried to move and go off its place as he was handling the second one. In the end he managed to slip the second through the framework and now it had nice cross-stalks keeping the circles at place. And as he had picked as curved stalks he could find, the basket was starting to get into a shape too. It was not flat, but a bit convex. After I get the two others in here, I’ll have to press the framework a bit to make the basket deeper, he thought, and performed the same operation with the two remaining thicker stalks, threading them through the circles from the middle of the triangles the two first ones had created.

Now the framework felt a lot more secure and threading the thinner ones in to the eight triangles the four thicker ones had formed was much easier. And the overall form began to settle too. It might carry, maybe three pints of berries, Novgorod estimated. That could just be enough...

Oh, if I just had some decent bark now! He thought disappointedly as the framework of the basket was ready. It would be so easy to just cover this framework with them. Well, no can do... So he resorted to a different version of a basket. He ripped a whole lot of grass and carried them to his basket-to-be. Then he took them a small handful at a time and threaded them over and under the stalks he had slipped through the circles. The first handfuls were pretty loose but as he added the stuff, they started to hold more firmly and in the end he had filled the holes between the largest circle and the one next to it. Soon he had all the holes covered and the basket was almost ready.

I need something to carry this with... Novgorod went again to the shrubs, searching for pretty thin but long stalks. In the end he had what he wanted. He moulded them to yield as earlier, but this time he plaited them into a real rope of a kind as it would have to take on the whole weight of the full basket. Then he attached the ends of the self-made rope to the brims of the basket and tried how it bore. That’s okay. It’s not a masterpiece but will do for me.

Novgorod had spent almost an hour with all this and felt he was in a hurry again. He emptied the bushes quite fast and filled the basket with the ripe and succulent Blueberries. The few remaining berries he stringed into a long stalk of grass, like he would have been making a necklage from the berries.

Carrying the basket and every once in a while slipping a berry or two to his mouth from his “berry-grass” he continued his walk, singing the little song the dwarf had taught him years ago. He was in even better mood than he had been at noon. The sun also, was still shining.