The Season of the Plough

by Luke R J Maynard

  The weekday of Grim’s death was not recorded in the Chronicles of Widowvale—at least, not at first, and not by the Reeve. There was no need, in such a small and new place, for such luxuries as weeks: worship in the town, for those who cared for it, happened daily and followed the hours of the sun. Days of work and payment followed the white moon and her changing faces. But when Karis emerged from her days of mourning, she went straight away to the moot-hall to meet with the Reeve, seeking permission to alter the book in accordance with what would have been Grim’s wishes. He ought to have refused her; but he was her brother, after all—and in truth, that stood him as a potential heir to Grimstead if the laws of inheritance in the Empire, the laws of men and men alone, overruled the old laws of men and women alike. So out of courtesy, deference, greed, even brotherly love, Marin the Reeve acceded and took her to his home, where she recorded in the margins that Grim died on Jornsday—the last Jornsday before the start of winter. At the time of the last crop, before the soil could freeze, he was laid in the ground by his oldest boys. It was a custom foreign to his ancestors, but one he would have wanted, and a fitting end for a man who lived and died on rich tilled earth.

  We know, then, that Poe returned on Jornsday also. For six days, Grim’s family mourned, and Aewyn worked the field alone. Darmod Pick refused to release her from service to mourn, for she was not Grim’s natural child, nor even a child of Karis, and she had no legal claim to a day of mourning. Twice a bastard, he called her, a child with no right father, nor mother either; and though it was thought unkind, the debt was hers to shoulder—sixteen seasons it would be, now, twice the indenture of the two of them together, for half the work would come of it. Corran Oltman brought food and drink to her in the field, which he need not have done, and for that most called him a kind man like his father before him. But for six days Aewyn laboured feebly, alone with her tears in the desolate field. When she was too weak to walk the heavy hand-plough, Alec Mercy towed it away and brought her the light one; when she was too weak for that, he brought her a hand-held loy spade; and with little else but that loy and determination, she made the Oltmans’ south field ready for winter seed in the days after Grim’s death. Her hair had gone shock-white now with the change of seasons, and her eyes hard; often she wept, and in the odd hours between her efforts she would fall to her knees and pine loudly for Grim, for she had never known death and was slow to comprehend it.

  On the morning of the seventh day, when Corran Oltman walked out to the south field with apples and cheese, he saw the karach crouched in the field with her, stroking her head as a mother soothes a child, speaking some strange tongue as she wept against its broad chest. Although it had grown a head taller than it had been the previous year, it was definitely the same one as before, judging from the way it turned and stiffened at his approach. It remembered the smell of him, perhaps, or remembered the ox-yoke he had carried for it, and suddenly big Corran felt very small and ventured no closer.

  Whatever words it might have shared with Aewyn, he saw it the next day also; and on the third day, it took up the loy and began to work for her, though the silly tool looked like a toy in its clawed hands. When it proved too strong for the loy, it turned to the little push-plough; when it was too strong for that, Alec Mercy brought the heavier one; when that proved little challenge, Alec came for the first time with a proper cart-plough of the sort drawn by an ox or bull, and Corran brought up the yoke. Finally, the karach bent his head low and suffered the big man to tighten it over his shoulders.

  “I unarrstan,” the karach growled to Corran, pointing at the yoke, which put the big man not even slightly at ease. But it was clear he had been made to practice the words.

  Through much of the autumn, the karach laboured with Aewyn. They planted Oltman’s south field and ploughed in the north and west before the frosts of Teurmaunt came. Then was the time for gathering acorns in Alec Mercy’s fields; when that was done, and the snows had come, they returned to Darmod Pick’s farm. The sheep would come nowhere near their old foe, knowing the karach’s looming shadow all too well, but the two worked in the gardens around Darmod’s home and replaced the shoddy fences between meadows with walls of waste stone quarried from the mines. Aewyn’s hands were skillful at stacking, her walls stood the old way, without mortar or pitch, and the karach tirelessly brought enormous loads of rubble in a great bronze-banded wheelbarrow. In the cold of the winter, Aewyn would sometimes sleep at the Oltman farm, though her work was done there, and bring the karach there for a few hours after nightfall. Corran and Ard would serve them winter cider and the meat of the fall slaughter. The karach, whose name they learned was something like Poe, learned to say “hello” and “welcome” and “thank you” in the Merchants’ Tongue, though it never sounded smooth, and it found their well-furnished home a place of much curiosity as it stooped through the hall, asking the names of things.

  Word of the karach’s return was, of course, quick to circulate. Stout men came at first with spears and board-shields, but these men had been hand-picked by the Reeve, who chose cool-blooded men with level heads. One of them, Aewyn was sure, was Alec Mercy, though he kept his distance and only watched a little from the field’s edge. He looked sad, though at what she could not tell; perhaps he had felt Grim’s death as a heavy weight on his breast, as she did. In any event he came for a few minutes every day, with two or three other men elected to watch the beast. But after the first day he came no more with weapons—only with grey eyes that seemed jewels of sadness.

  The townsfolk of Widowvale took the whole winter to decide what was to be done with Aewyn after that, and especially with Poe, though he did not shelter with them, retreating to the trees after dark to work some unknown mischief in the woods. Aewyn Half-Dryad (or, as she was less charitably known, Aewyn Twice-Bastard) was something of a communal child, but it was known that she had taken strongest to the family of Grim. Word was sent from the house of the widow Karis that she remained welcome in their home as one of their own. But that news came by way of fair-haired Arran, and not by way of Karis herself, who stayed at Grimstead. Except for the one meeting with her brother to record Grim’s day of death, she would not come down from her house.

  Aewyn, for her part, was quite insistent she could survive in the wild. She had grown up there, after all, and had grown taller and stronger from her work in the field. But this was not given real consideration by the Reeve or anyone else. When Darmod Pick offered to make her up a bed in his home, even the Reeve was surprised. His argument landed on sound points: she did most of her work for him, and his own house was closest to his lands. When her debt was paid, she could simply stay on, earning her keep (and perhaps even meat for her friend). And yet there was something in him that had changed; or else he saw something changed in her, now that some of the adversity that had hardened him against the world had come to wound her as well.

  She must have spoken to Darmod in private, for as the cold winter wore on it seemed she was living with him. Rumors swirled, for a time, that the sour old man had taken the girl to his bed, but they did not last: so keen was his dislike for her that few imagined a love, or even a lust, could be kindled there. Like the girl, Darmod had never shown any real interest in women before, or even in men. They had a queer sort of kinship in that, and the townsfolk who speculated that Aewyn’s soul was too pure for the love of ordinary folk were equally quick to judge Darmod’s as too stained for it.

  This arrangement also meant that Aewyn had her share of freedom, and spent the long evening hours in the woods with Poe. The karach still came down to the fields, still tirelessly did the work of five or six men—and in his cleverness under Darmod’s cautious tutelage, he learned the arts of the fields and furrows; thinking like a man and pulling like an ox, he worked better than either one alone. The spring lambing, when it came, was bountiful for Darmod Pick, but now that he had added through his unlikely servants a considerable vegetable crop, he would share now in the riches of the late summer harvest too. W
ith two seasons of plenty to look forward to, Darmod’s temperament seemed to ease, and few were troubled by Aewyn’s presence in his home for long. Corran still brought her lunch in the fields, and Alec Mercy still came to look with sad wonder at the towering beast, hauling earth in the fields as he practiced his halting speech.

  One day in the spring, Darmod came out to meet Alec by the meadow-fence as Aewyn and Poe were transplanting the onion bulbs. A smile, and not an insincere one, split his craggy face nearly in half.

  “Alec Mercy indeed,” he said. “You’ve made me a wealthy man with your mercy.”

  “I haven’t,” Alec said dismissively.

  “Well enough,” said Darmod. “Less poor, then. The whole town talks of that brute; his shadow falls halfway to Minter’s Rock, when the sun’s low. But that wee nothing of a girl—she’s determined, I’ll give her that. Good arms on her, like yew, spindly enough, but they’ll be strong one day if she keeps at the work.”

  “She has the span of a little archer,” Alec said, smiling. “I’ll have Robyn teach her when she rides back.” He looked away wistfully, then. “When she rides home.”

  “Has that to do with the whole prophecy business?” asked Darmod.

  “What prophecy?”

  Darmod waved a hand dismissively in her direction, as if to punctuate his speech with cynicism before he spoke.

  “She tells of it, sometimes,” said Darmod. “Twice-bastard that she is, she swears some king of the druids found her in the woods, and like every foundling in every story, he’s supposed to come fetch her one day and take her away to some great destiny.”

  “Do you believe it?” said Alec.

  “The world doesn’t work that way anymore,” said Darmod, “if it ever did. This mysterious-birth business is no great wonder in my family. I grew up in the First Revolt, and believe me, children who don’t know their fathers are nothing special in these times. Sons of Kyric, they’re called, after the old trickster.” He paused thoughtfully. “Always wished I was one. If you’d known my father, you’d understand. But past that, a mysterious birth means no great destiny. All it means is she’ll have a hard time getting wedded and bedded when the time comes, with no name and no dowry to speak of.”

  “Perhaps that’s why she belongs with Robyn,” said Alec wistfully. “The Havenari certainly do behave themselves better when they ride out with an old maid on point. And Robyn won’t stay unwed forever.”

  “Where I come from,” Darmod said, “archery and militia duty are a man’s work.”

  “We are a long way from Pickstand, sheep-lord,” Alec warned him. “And I’d suffer no one in these woods—man, woman, or child—without a proper longbow. I wouldn’t send a dog into those woods unless he could shoot with his wagging tail.”

  “The woods are safe enough,” said Darmod, “now that the karach’s come down out of them and knows his place and his punishment. I wouldn’t go far as to call him civilized, but we have no more to fear from him. Much to gain from his work, too, and I’m more surprised by it than any. I may even keep him fed on mutton, if he’ll stay on and work when his time is up.”

  But Alec Mercy was far away in his mind, grey eyes fixed on, but not really watching, the movements of Aewyn and Poe in the next field.

  “There are worse things in those trees than karach,” he said, and left it at that.

  FIVE

  THE TWILIGHT OF THAT SUMMER was a time of leisure and bounty for everyone but Arran, the eldest son of Grim. At eighteen years of age, he was as broad as a bull across the shoulders, and so well-muscled from his farm work that he had overtaken Ard Oltman as the largest young man among the generation coming up. Arran the Strong, some called him already—the eldest and healthiest of the first generation of children to be raised in Widowvale. He was well-liked enough, though he was quiet and withdrawn.

  In solitude he walked the rolling fields of Grimstead, though he dared not go too near his reflection in the pond there. He could not bear the sight of himself, come into his full strength. His father, he had come to remember, was not particularly tall, large only around the middle, run to fat at the end of his life, and yet in the sparse hours outside his indenture, Grim whispered and sang up one of the richest crops the vineyards at Grimstead ever produced. Arran had toiled long and hard, and earned his calloused hands and his corded shoulders by sweat in the field—but as the summer wore on, the grapes on the vine struggled against the cool nights and came in uneven clusters of large and small berries, spoiling much of the season’s yield.

  When the fattest berries became sweet to the taste, he left the picking in the hands of the younger children and came more often to the village, trading as he did in place of Karis, who no more came down from the farm. He crossed paths often among the storehouses with Alys, the miller, whose husband Aeric was miller before her. When news of the silver came in the first days, he had schooled her in the trade and gone off to the mines. In time, Arran crossed paths not with Alys, but with her eldest daughter Anna, who had grown tired of Aewyn’s aloofness and taken some notice of him. But though she admired his strength and made a moontouched fool of herself in his broad shadow, he did not at first return her affections: he had grown strong exhausting himself to half-perform the work Grim had seemed to accomplish in near-laziness. The chiseled shape of his young body, in his own grey eyes, was a monument to that failure.

  Anna, now twice-rebuked from the family at Grimstead, leaned heavily on her mother’s ear in those days, and they lamented together the arrogance and aloofness of insensitive farm boys. It was in this way, through the smallest of ripples rather than the great splash of his death, that Grim’s end came to stir the peace and happiness of the town. As the misshapen and underripe grapes were left to the crows, the town’s attention turned to the harvest of the staple crops. An uneasy discontent tempered the bounty of the season, though few really understood why.

  Anna, who only understood that she was the plainest, most unlovable girl in all of Silvalis, stayed close to Alys’s side through the grinding of the first wheat and the baking of the ceremonial loaf for Baker’s Day. While her sister Melia lay idly in the summer grass, awaiting the return of the Havenari, Anna threshed the wheat with frustration and brought it to Miller’s Riffle, where the river bent over the rocks and ran fast enough to grind it for bread.

  The millhouse lay close by Robyn and Bram’s cottage, and in the last hours of summer it smelt morning and night of fresh-baked bread. The Millers had a dog, a talbot hound that had been born lame and could not go with Aeric into the hills. So great was his love for the poor limping creature, and so great Alys’s love for her absent husband, that she made two loaves for Baker’s Day. The first she gave to the dog in its entirety; the second, only she and Anna knew, was carried to town to be given up to the gods.

  So it was to be this year, she knew; for the dog was old and mostly blind, but Aeric’s love for it only grew as its health faded. When Anna came at last to the moot-hall with the first Baker’s Day loaf, she knew that somewhere old Banning was enjoying a holy feast.

  It was tradition in Widowvale that the bread on Baker’s Day came to the Reeve’s wife, who watched over it in the moot-hall, selling slices for a silver rider and morsels for a copper skatt. There were few in town who made worship to gods of any kind—Tûr has no use for bread, said Alys, and the Ten only fight over it—but for many, it was customary to give up the first bread of the season in sacrifice. A few from the Banlands—Grim among them, when he had been alive—bought bread from the Baker’s Loaf and burned it or buried it in a place sacred to their gods, and so gave thanks for the harvest already begun, the wheat and the hay, and for the crops still to come.

  The year that followed the Year of the Twins, known locally as the Year of Strangers, saw the first time that Poe came to the moot-hall unbidden. He furnished the Reeve’s wife, properly called the Lady, with two silver riders for two slices of bread. It was nearly his whole season’s wages, once his considerable appetite ha
d been sated—and he sat for some evenings on the village green feeding it all to the birds. For this he was thought quite mad—but even the songbirds came to him freely, and the sight of the imposing creature sitting so peacefully and gently with them seemed to put many at ease. Few of the townsfolk gave him such a wide berth after that, and fewer still clutched their children when he passed. Anna stood near the green for some time, feeling kinship in the beast’s solitude. She was careful to keep her distance from old Darmod Pick and Alec Mercy, who had scrutinized the karach since his return and perhaps knew him better for it.

  “He is much changed,” said Darmod Pick approvingly, “from the monster Grim captured all those seasons ago.”

  “Perhaps it is we who have changed,” said Alec Mercy. It was all Anna could hear of their conversation before Aewyn came to be with them, and she returned to Miller’s Riffle in sullen silence.

  In the previous year, the Year of the Twins, the Harvest Fair had passed quickly and without incident, and left hardly a mark on Aewyn’s memory. Her thoughts had been on Grim and his family, and on the lessons of the tilled earth. There had been freshly emptied fields to work, and winter grains to put down, and that year the Havenari did not return. But in the Year of Strangers, they came at last with the season, as suddenly and surely as thunder with lightning. It was well known that the Harvest Fair came three weeks after Baker’s Day, once the seasonal census had been taken, and it was three days in advance of the Fair that Tsúla’s roaring horn sounded its unmistakable signal of greeting from the highway.

  As far out as Darmod’s farm Aewyn heard their call, and she ran all the way to the highway to meet them. Time had grown her legs some, and her toil in the field had made her hardy for such a spindly girl. Even over distance, she was one of the first to arrive as the company crossed the south grass and passed the signpost of Widowvale at a trot.