17. Two Hands
Two Hands
Kain rose before the light and rode back down to the Copper Kettle, and the rain hadn't let up overnight. The caravan had pitched its camp on a hillside just outside the town, and the morning found it a sorry sight.
The tents hung heavy and sagging under the wet, and the animals stood picketed in the open with their heads down and their coats running.
The guards hunched in their cloaks at the edge of the camp while the merchants and appraisers picked through the churned mud as though the ground itself had insulted them.
A line had already formed out the front door of the Kettle, the folk crowded under the eaves to keep out of the wet. Kain swung down off Roan, tied him in under the lean-to where the rain couldn't reach, and shouldered his way in through the press at the door.
Inside, Duke Wilhowser stood at the bar with his hands spread on the wood, haggling with Sasha over the price of feeding his train their breakfast. The room was packed to the walls with folk crowding in out of the cold, and the smell of frying sausage hung thick over all of it.
"Fifty silver, and not a copper more," the duke said.
"Three gold." Sasha turned a row of sausages in the pan and didn't look up. "Sausage runs dearer than steak."
"Sausage is peasant food."
"Wholesome, though." Kain came up through the crush and clapped the duke on the shoulder. "A steak you carve off the animal and you're done. Sausage you grind and case by hand, and work has its price."
"Spare me how it's made." The duke raised a hand, and the tired eyes he turned on Kain were those of a man who had already lost. "Name your figure, then, and let me eat."
His voice had gone thin, and there was no mystery in why. He had come meaning to bleed the town dry, his criers and performers ready to put on a show that would leave every soul in Tillamore certain they couldn't live without whatever he peddled.
The rain had drowned the whole of it. No one would stand out in the wet to watch a demonstration, and Kain had made plain besides that he saw the man for what he was. Little of it had gone the duke's way.
"A gold and a half for the lot of them, same as I told her to hold you to last night," Kain said. "Two if I hear one of your people scratched so much as a fence post in the dark."
The duke's jaw worked, but his caravan had behaved itself. Kain's few words by the road the evening before had seen to that. The man counted out a gold piece and the silver to round it to a gold and a half, and laid it on the bar.
Kain picked up the gold piece and held it to the lamp, turning it slow, as though he could read the milling along its edge.
He couldn't have told a shaved coin from an honest one to save his life, and the duke didn't know it.
A heavier piece took its place on the bar a moment later, and the duke wore the look of a man hoping nothing further would be said.
Kain slid the gold down the bar to Sasha, who swept it into her apron without a word. "Pleasure doing business," he told the duke, and went to help carry plates.
The caravan didn't clear the town until past noon. They rolled their wet tents into bundles and stacked them on the wagons, and the long train went creaking off down the road into the rain.
Kain stood under the eaves and watched them go, until the last wagon dropped from sight over the rise.
Sam came and stood beside him with his hands tucked up under his arms against the cold.
"Reckon we ought to send word ahead?" Sam said. "They'll be making for Redwater next, and Redwater won't see them coming."
"Wouldn't hurt." Kain watched the empty road. "Send your man the back way, though. If the duke decides we turned the town against him, he might come back with hired swords, and I'd as soon he kept walking."
"I know just the lad." Sam clapped him on the shoulder. "You're a good man, Kain."
Sam made to turn for his store, then stopped and dug a thick booklet out from under his coat where he'd kept it dry. "Near forgot. New almanac came in for the coming year. Thought you'd want a look before the rest of them wear it through."
"What do I owe you?" Kain took it, the cover stiff and new under his hand, the pages still crisp.
"Bring it back when you're done and we'll call it square. Two copper if you want it for keeps, but most folk just read off what they need and pass it on. I haven't the stock for everyone."
"You'll have it back in a few days," Kain said, and shook the hand Sam held out.
By the time Kain got home the rain had thinned to a drizzle, and the caravan had cost him the better part of a day and the night before it. He built the fire up in the hearth, and Ghost padded in out of the wet and stretched out long in front of it, its one eye sliding half shut in the heat.
Kain cut bread and cold meat and ate standing at the counter, hardly tasting it, then took the almanac down off the table and pulled his chair near the fire.
On a whim he took Mark's guide down off the shelf as well, the loose sheets gone soft at the folds from handling, and settled into the chair with the almanac on one knee and the guide on the other, and opened them both.
"Let's see," he said to the empty room. "Practical steps toward a fuller harvest." He ran his eye down the page, and some of it he knew already, the working of the soil, the use of potatoes and other roots to break hard ground.
Then a line halfway down the page caught and held him.
"New work out of Greyhaven shows that turning your crops in a set order, season to season, can raise a yield by as much as half.
" He read on, and the almanac laid out an order.
"Begin with the heavy feeders. Potatoes, corn, the hungry crops.
They break the soil and eat the most, so set them in first, while the ground still has plenty to give. "
He glanced down at the guide, where Mark had set the same thing in his own loose scrawl, plainer: break the new ground with potatoes, then move on to something easier. The scholar and the soldier agreed down the line.
The almanac sent him on to the light feeders next, the onions and herbs and peppers, the thirsty crops that took less from the ground and still bore well. Mark's sheet said as much in half the words.
"For the third turn," the almanac went on, "put in a crop that gives back to the soil instead of taking from it. Field beans answer best by a long way. See Page 37 for what our partners can offer in seed." Nitrogen, the page called it, a word Kain had never once heard.
He turned to Page 37 and found the note.
"Nitrogen is a nutrient only lately given a name.
Certain plants, the legumes, grow small nodules along their roots that seem to put it back into the earth.
A crop sown after legumes will near always come up stronger, and will outdo the same crop raised in plain soil. "
Mark's scrawl ran on down the same road. After the light crops the ground would be poor, he'd written, so put beans in to set it right; green beans would do, but field beans did better, and never mind the why of it, that was just what everyone said.
One line sat below it: never sow wheat straight after corn, nor into old sorghum stalks, or the whole crop would take sick and rot. Mark hadn't known the reason for it either, only that it was so.
"After the beans, give the field a season of rest," the almanac said. "Compost it, work in wood ash, and let it lie. Let the good of it soak down into the ground. It feels like waste, and it pays you back at the next harvest."
Mark had written the very same thing, only warmer. Spread the compost before the snow, he'd set down, work in the ash, and let the melt carry it down through the winter. Let the field take its rest, like it had earned one. You will have earned one too, by then.
Kain sat with the two pages open across his knees while the fire worked and Ghost breathed slow against the hearthstones. Then he set the almanac aside, took up the pen from the table, and spread Mark's sheets out flat under the lamp.
He'd learned a thing or two his first year that belonged on the page.
He found the place where Mark wrote of breaking the new soil and set his own hand down in the margin beside it.
Till it more than once, he wrote, slow and careful with the letters.
Take it a few inches at a go, down a bit and then down again; try to take it all in one pass and you'll only ruin the spade and your back with it.
His writing settled in next to his brother's, the two hands sharing the one sheet. Mark had been the younger by six years, and Kain had stood a step behind him the night he made his first kill, near enough to catch him if it went wrong.
Now it ran the other way, with Kain coming up behind, walking the road Mark had laid out and never got to walk himself.
"Don't get comfortable up ahead, brother," Kain said to the page. "I'll have caught you up before you know it."
He turned back through the sheets to the planting Mark had set down for the first year, the small drawings of how wide to space the seed and how deep to set it.
None of it was wrong, and Kain added what the year had taught him anyway.
Cut your furrows with the corner of the hoe and drag, he wrote, it beats clawing them out by hand.
Water slow, only enough to wet the ground, and pull off the moment it starts to pool.
When the margins had taken all the writing they would hold, he folded the sheets over and set them back on the shelf where they lived, Mark's hand and his own pressed together now between the same folds.
The rotation had laid itself out plain in his head, four turns and a rest, season on season into the years ahead. He banked the fire and went to bed.