The Malicarn Lowlands
THE FIRST YEAR IN THE REIGN OF KING PRION V
Another pig was dead. Marion found it in the morning on her way to collect eggs. It had collapsed in the night on top of the trough, knocking it over and pouring slop all over the ground. The other pigs slurped up the food, standing over their dead friend and eating.
Marion told you right away, but you had to finish milking the cows before you could walk over to the sty and inspect the situation.
By then the flies were buzzing around the dead animal, and the heat was baking the leftover slop into the mud.
It took most of the morning for you to hitch up the horse to a cart and back the cart into the sty.
You tied the pig’s hooves together with rope and lashed the other end to the cart.
The horse dragged the body away, and you led it to the refuse pit at the far end of the pasture behind the barn.
There was no sense saving any of the pig, not just because of how long it had sat out but because of how sick it had been the day before.
Pus streaming out of holes in its side, walking deliriously.
Not safe to eat. The final payout would be less, but you figured that would be all right. There were still three other pigs.
Your parents used to take you to a farm down the street from the high school, one of the last ones that hadn’t been turned into tract housing yet, where they sold ice cream and let you look at their show pig. The pig was always sleeping and you ordered butter pecan in a waffle cone.
Marion fed the sheep and tended to the other horses.
She was feeling better now in the mornings, but her belly was large and she moved slower than she used to.
Most afternoons her feet swelled and she had to sit down in the house.
You carried on alone, checking on the blueberries and hanging ribbon to scare off the birds.
You might need to hire a hand, but with one less pig there likely wasn’t money for that anyway.
You already waited too long to hang the ribbon, and the blueberries were half eaten.
At dusk you returned to the one-room house and found Marion asleep in your bed.
A half-eaten peach pie sat on the table, but you didn’t feel like eating it.
Instead you wiped as much mud off your boots as you could and walked up the hill toward the old mill.
Just past the mill was the Black Crow, a cramped pub on a cliff overlooking the sea, with a fireplace that put out too much smoke, and not enough seats.
The ale was cheap, however, and you usually found a handful of other veterans commiserating in the corner.
You didn’t use to drink much. Even in college, that was never your scene.
These men, this special breed, recognized each other at once.
Even from a distance, they walked with a certain haggard bearing.
A dull-eyed glassiness, the look that said, I have seen what normal men dare not dream.
If a man fought in the Wizarding War, had seen lightning fry a company of soldiers, fields choked by frozen bodies, men transformed into beasts by their wizarding overlords, he carries that with him.
That night you brought your past into the Black Crow, where you and your fellows drank pints of ale and sang the songs of youth into the night.
“I counted out his money and it made a pretty penny. I put it in me pocket and I took it home to Jenny. She sighed and she swore that she never would deceive me, but the devil take the women for they never can be easy.”
You stood on a table, slapping your knee while Tibalt, who had one arm, and Kilwin, the butcher who screamed in his sleep, harmonized.
“Mush-a ring dumb-a do dumb-a da, whack fall the daddy-o, whack fall the daddy-o. There’s whiskey in the jar!”
No one asked about your pigs, or your farm, or your wife, and you never brought them up.
You didn’t remember walking home or falling into bed.
You did remember that you dreamed of crying during Little League practice and your dad shaking his head, saying, “Terry, you have to be tougher.” Then you dreamed you were wearing your soldier’s robe from the Wizarding War, and there was a mirror, like in your bedroom on the Chestnut Drive house, and when you looked into it you were not your father.
Or rather, the you in the robe was not you the father but you the son. Marion jolted you awake.
“Another pig is sick,” she said. It was midmorning already. You had forgotten to milk the cows, and your head felt split wide open. You stumbled into the daylight. The pig was stumbling worse than you were, foaming at the mouth.
“Shit.”
Marion did what she could, herding the two healthy pigs out of the sty and into a separate pen, which you had hastily erected with leftover wood from a fence built the previous winter. It wasn’t very big but it would hold.
You then returned to the sick pig, looking him over for sores, and tried to clean out the sty as best you could, hoping that the infection would slow in a cleaner pen. As you shoveled week-old pig shit out of the pen, the pig waddled over and sniffed your leg.
“Get on away, now. Get away.”
You heaved a shovelful over the fence and lost your footing, falling on your back and spooking the pig.
It leapt away, its rear hoof smashing against your skull.
You yelled out and grabbed your forehead, blood running down your hand.
Dizzy. Slowly you stood and climbed out of the pen, walking with one eye open.
At the house Marion wrapped your head with cloth and you drank from the bottle of spirits you kept in a cupboard.
The bleeding stopped but the pain didn’t, shooting down the side of your face.
You had been injured plenty of times. Falls off horses, arrows clipping your arm during the war.
You broke your leg crashing your bike in seventh grade.
But somehow the kick of a pig’s hoof was like nothing you had felt before.
Sharp and bright. You sat inside the house for a long time.
This wasn’t what you had hoped for, what you expected.
Every day was this same nonsense. You never saw knights or wizards or monsters.
Had never even been far from the farm, this little patch stuck on the edge of a hill by the sea.
Why won’t you leave, go out for some grand adventure?
You try to tell yourself to do this, to go become a hero of the Malicarn, to fight with the great men of the realm, but you just sit inside and nurse your head.
When you finally returned to the pen, a man stood against the fence. It was Jack the pig buyer, holding a length of rope.
“Morning, Frank. Thought I could stop by if the pigs were ready. I don’t have payment with me but I can come back with it tomorrow.” He looked over the nearly empty pen, and saw the pig lying on its side, breathing heavily. “What’s going on here?”
“Some trouble,” you said. “Sickness. Killed two already. Now this one’s got it.”
“I was hoping for five hogs.”
“Well, I can offer three.”
“Two, I’d say.” Jack walked to the separated pen and looked over the two healthy pigs. “Not spreading, I hope?”
“Not anymore. You come back with that money tomorrow and you can have the pigs.”
“How about I come back next week, see what’s left?”
“I could use that money sooner, Jack.”
“I could use healthy pigs. I’ll be back next week. I’ll bring the money with me.”
There was nothing to be done. Jack left and you went to milk the cows. Too late today. They were going dry. Marion was afraid to ask you what you planned to do, because what you planned was simple: You would go back to the Black Crow that evening and then sleep until midday.
Two days later the pig was dead and another was sick.
You separated the two remaining pigs, moving the sick one back to the original enclosure and dragging the dead one out with the horse again.
You worked through a headache that would not abate.
But Marion’s back was hurting, along with her feet, so she rested and you said you’d go into town to look for a farmhand to help, at least for a little while.
You didn’t tell her you planned to sell the horse.
The Old Village took half a day to ride out to, and the markets were already closing down when you arrived.
Finally, a place where something interesting might happen.
You found a stable near the wizard’s tower.
You waited outside with your horse, looking up at the tower, wondering where the wizard was, if he couldn’t come down and help a poor farmer cure his pigs. Or whisk him away on an adventure.
The stable boy didn’t like the look of your horse.
“We’ll give you two sols for him. But he’s old, ain’t he?”
“He’s old but he’s strong!”
“Two sols.”
You didn’t haggle. You took the money and asked if he knew anyplace you could find farmhands looking for work. He recommended the inn on the far side of town. “Always men looking for some kind of work there.”
You found the inn by following the sounds of singing. Inside you saw a group of old men, all veterans of the war. You could tell instantly. They stood, arms on each other’s shoulders, singing and swaying as pints were passed from man to man.
“While the world did gaze, in deep amaze, at those fearless men, but few, who bore the fight that freedom’s light might shine through the foggy dew.”
You ordered a pint, and found your way into the circle.
You recognized Denny Porter, who served in your old company, and Olly Tenyson, a former pikeman who owned a farm not far from your own.
You and Denny sang your company anthem, and you fell to talking with some of the older men, who had served in wars as far back as the old Mages’ Rebellion.
You saw the movie about that one with your dad at the theater with the sticky floors and the burnt popcorn.