Editing Sigil:Gholibin (section)

== Work and Provision ==

Gholibin communities do not maintain rigid divisions between a permanent warrior class, a permanent laboring class, and everyone else. Necessary work is distributed according to ability, circumstance, experience, age, and immediate need. The same person may spend part of the year gathering or tending food, another period repairing a Hollowhold, and later take a turn among those responsible for defense.

This flexibility is one reason Gholibin communities can establish themselves quickly and survive disruption. Building, harvesting, gathering, cooking, hunting, carrying, repairing, tending children, caring for the injured, maintaining stores, and watching the approaches are communal requirements rather than the permanent identities of separate castes. Specialists certainly exist, particularly where a skill requires long practice, but specialization does not release a person from all ordinary responsibility to the Hearth.

Food varies enormously with region. Gholibin living in wooded hills have different resources from those near marshes, mountains, or cultivated Rhone country. Hunting, trapping, gathering, gardening, trade, preservation, and small-scale cultivation can all contribute to the stores of a Hollowhold. Their ability to exploit a wide range of local foods has helped them inhabit country that larger peoples sometimes consider marginal.

Storage receives particular attention. A community that may need to conceal itself, endure isolation, or move on short notice cannot afford to discover that nobody remembered how much food remained. The apparently cluttered storerooms of a Hollowhold conceal careful knowledge of what is present, what will spoil, what can be spared, and what must be saved.

Here too music has its uses. Children can learn quantities, sequences, and warnings through little counting songs long before they understand why the information matters. Adults working together use rhythm to coordinate repetitive labor, while short sung formulas preserve procedures too important to trust entirely to improvisation. A Gholibin does not necessarily sing because a task is solemn.

Sometimes singing is simply the easiest way to remember how to do it.