Chapter 4 #5
“Look.” She stopped and pointed. In the distance I saw a village.
I wasn’t expecting to see one, not that close to the sea, in a country so close to the home of all the Sherden. “So what?” I said.
She didn’t reply. Instead she picked up her pace, so I had to jog-trot to catch up with her.
“Waste of time,” I said to the back of her head.
“You can tell just by looking at the countryside, everybody round here is dirt poor. We can beg till we’re blue in the face.
You can’t give alms if you haven’t got anything to give. ”
Two hours of fast walking, or in my case fast limping. We reached a farmhouse.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Stacheldorn.
If you haven’t, don’t bother. It reminds me of where I grew up in the Mesoge, except it’s warmer and flatter.
Before the Fall it was a prosperous, integrated part of the empire, parcelled out into estates belonging to noble families, well organised, fully developed; they rotated their crops on the four-field system, producing high enough yields to pay substantial rents and still have enough to be comfortable.
After the Fall the Rosinholet drove away the survivors and pastured their goats on the overgrown stubbles.
Goats don’t improve pasture. Within a couple of generations, when the Rosinholet went back to where they’d come from, they left behind a wilderness of brambles and withy brakes.
After a while a few hardy, desperate souls turned up to try their luck, but they were refugees from cities and had no idea what they were doing, and the few of them who stayed and didn’t starve ended up being snatched by the Sherden and sold in the East. It wasn’t until someone pointed out to Duke Sigbeorn that, technically, Stacheldorn was his property that anyone made a serious effort to reclaim the land.
Sigbeorn imported settlers, mostly northerners recently made homeless by the Aram no Vei, and laid out good money on livestock, ploughs, seed corn, building materials; during his lifetime the settlers did well and made progress, but after he died his idiot nephew let it all go to hell and eventually gambled it away in a game of dice with the archdeacon of Nidlich.
Since then, nobody’s bothered with it. The few remaining villages pay no rent but get no help.
There are no horses left in Stacheldorn now, only donkeys.
You can plough with a donkey, but only about a fifth of the area.
Nobody ever told them about the four-field system, so the most they can do to keep the land in heart is sprinkle a little donkey shit and grow the occasional crop of beans.
Actually, it’s not like the Mesoge at all.
In the Mesoge, the land is a thin layer of peat over rock, but people live there by working hard and doing things the way they’ve always been done.
In Stacheldorn, the land is basically good, but the people haven’t a clue and there’s nobody to give them one.
The farmhouse door was open. She walked in. Nobody home. She looked around until she found the flour jar. It was nearly empty. There was the stub end of a flitch of bacon hanging over the hearth. She found a knife, cut off a small strip, chewed it and spat it out. “Told you,” I said.
She frowned. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What do these people live on?”
“Nettles,” I told her, “a lot of the time. Your nettle’s got a long growing season, and it does best on what used to be arable land, after it’s been neglected a hundred years or so.
Then there’s goosefoot and wild garlic and a load of other stuff we think of as weeds, but you can live on them, just about.
And there’s rabbits and various sorts of bird.
You can live here, if you’re not too picky, but there’s not a lot of point to being human.
Wild pigs and foxes can do anything you can do, only rather better.
Of course, once upon a time there was a seminary here, for particularly bright sons of peasants.
A lot of them went on to good careers in the imperial civil service. ”
She scowled at me. I was being boring. “We still need money,” she said. “You’re the bloody know-it-all. Where’s the money in these parts?”
“There isn’t any,” I said.
“Wrong answer.”
Suddenly it was my fault. “The nearest cash money,” I said quickly, “would probably be somewhere along the Great Eastern Road, heading south-east from Heldenbach to Erritz in the saddlebags of a salt merchant. He’ll have sold his salt at Heldenbach Fair, and he’ll be heading back to where his barges are waiting.
But that wouldn’t be any good to us, because the margins in salt are wafer thin these days, and nobody in the trade can afford to give alms to a couple of tramps in habits.
The best we could hope for is hitching a lift on the back of an empty cart, and maybe some of their onion soup, if we ask really nicely. And we’d be going the wrong way.”
She looked at me, and I got the impression her aspirations went a bit higher than onion soup. “Don’t even think about running out on me,” she said. “I need you.” Then she grinned. “For one thing, you’re a mine of information, some of it relevant. So stay close, where I can see you.”
“Noted,” I said.
“Good. Now make yourself useful and find us something to eat.”
I found a chicken. It was mostly bone and feathers, and I discovered that I’d almost forgotten how to kill it. Mind you, I was never particularly good at it when I was a kid. For crying out loud, my mother used to say, you’re like a pig with a trumpet.
Nobody came back to the farmhouse while we were there, which I don’t suppose was a coincidence. You can see a long way in the Stacheldorn valleys. I imagine the farmer and his family waited till we’d gone, then another half a day just in case we came back.
“This Great Eastern Road of yours,” she said as we walked up a steep hill. “Where would that be?”
I stopped and took a look around. “I’m guessing it runs along the top of that ridge over there. So, about a day’s walk.”
“Piss and fuck.” She wasn’t happy at all. “I’m starving. What was that stuff you were talking about? Goosefoot or something.”
“Wrong time of year,” I told her. “Also, you need to boil it for about four hours, or it’s poisonous. Our best bet around here would probably be wild chives, or watercress. Trouble with that is, you need to eat practically your own weight in the stuff to get a decent feed.”
I was getting on her nerves. “How come you know all this shit anyway? Don’t tell me, you read it in a book.”
“Some of it,” I said. “Mind you, most of the imperial books about that sort of thing that survived the Fall are wildly inaccurate. That’s to say, bits of them are true but most of them aren’t.
They were copied out of books which were copied out of books which were copied out of books, mostly by gentlemen scholars who’d never done a day’s work in their lives.
The rest of it’s what I remember from when I was a kid. ”
“Well, remember something we can eat,” she said. “This is a complete shambles. We need to get home, we can’t spend the rest of our lives in this shithole.”
I took another look around. “I remember how my father used to dig for badgers,” I said. “He always reckoned they taste just like pork. Personally, I think badger’s unspeakable. But there’s a sett just over there, if you’d like to give it a try.”
The worst thing about digging for badgers is actually finding one, which we managed on our third attempt.
Badgers don’t come quietly, and for a relatively small animal they’re deplorably strong.
I nearly let it get away, but she caught it by a hind leg, threw it up in the air, caught it and throttled it.
“It stinks,” she pointed out, and I had no grounds on which to contradict her. “You sure you can eat this?”
“We used to,” I said. “Mind you, I’m not sure that answers your question.”
She skinned it with a sharp flint, and we cooked it over a fire of dead heather twigs.
The result was burned on the outside and raw on the inside.
Maybe that’s why it tasted marginally better than I remembered.
“This is hopeless,” she said with her mouth full.
“It’s taken us the best part of a day just to find and catch one meal. ”
I nodded. “That’s country life,” I said.
“We need to get moving. They’re waiting for us back home. We need horses, and money. Why is everything suddenly so fucking difficult?”
Because you thought it was a good idea to come to Stacheldorn, I didn’t say.
“In that case,” I said, “we’d better grit our teeth and plough on until we reach the road.
At least we’ll stand some chance of falling in with someone who’s going somewhere.
Even if it means we end up heading south-east, at least we’ll be moving, and eventually we’ll get somewhere where there’s ships, or mailcoaches.
And don’t forget, we’re clergy. People think we’re good luck.
If we can bum a ride to Erritz, we can probably flannel the monks at the Flawless Diamond into giving us the price of a passage on a barge going downriver to Mordlich, and from there we can walk to Nagelfest. A lot of pilgrims go to the Blessed Hand at Nagelfest, so we ought to be all right, and from there—”
She wasn’t listening. Oh, hell, I thought.
Eventually we made it to the road. It was a good road once, built by the emperor Cascianus to supply the garrison towns on the east coast. A thousand years later it was still a damn sight better than trudging through heather and couch grass.
Cascianus’s engineers tended to follow the high ground, for drainage and because you could see trouble coming well in advance. “Right,” she said. “Which way?”