Page 15 of Beyond

“It’ll be in the records, but at a guess, I’d say three for every family,” Hakkon replied, his lips moving a little as he counted hulls under his breath. “We could ship out every grain of the emergency stores in the manor at once using about three quarters of these hulls stored here.” He turned to his cousin. “So it might be time to start the half-year plan.”

* * *

Like all of the Dukes before him, on every fine day, Kordas rode out to some part of the Duchy to personally see that all was well. This served several purposes. It kept him in touch with almost all of his people. With thousands of them, obviously he couldn’t know them all by name, but he could ensure that they saw him, saw him as approachable, and would not hesitate to talk to him if there was something that needed his personal attention. It also drove the Imperial spies mad, because it meant that they would have to leave their comfortable little niches where they were pretending to be road workers, itinerant laborers, or some other unnoticable entity and follow him around on foot while he was on horseback. And it reinforced that image he so carefully cultivated, of a jumped-up gentleman farmer; bucolic, more concerned with drains than politics, and utterly dismissable.

So today he was going to visit one of his very favorite people in this part of the Duchy. Squire Lesley, the pig farmer.

Lesley was not just any old pig farmer. Half the Duchy depended on him and his herds to grub up and manure their fields every year once they were harvested. He not only had his own herds of pigs, but for a fee he kept individual pigs for anyone who wanted one to butcher in the fall and didn’t want the trouble of tending it. Lesley was the supplier of all things pig to the manor, and he knew as much about breeding and raising them as Kordas knew about horses.

And it drove the spies insane when Kordas went to visit.

When they were not out running in someone else’s fields, churning up the soil with their snouts and disposing of anything not wanted by eating it, the pigs were in spacious pastures dotted with little shelters—made of the same stuff as the boat hulls—that would have served equally well for sheep. Today about half of those fields were empty, and by that, Kordas knew that the early cabbages, parsnips, broad beans, peas, and radishes had been harvested, and the pigs were out doing their duty, making the fields ready for the next round of crops. He rode up to the low, broad stone farmhouse with an eye out for Lesley’s distinctive yellow hat. Unlike most farmers, the wide-brimmed hat Lesley wore was never made of straw; after one too many incidences of his hat blowing off and a pig eating it, Lesley’s wife had made him one of yellow canvas, coated with a bitter wax that the pigs found too distasteful even to mouth.

Kordas spotted his target at the side of a very special pen. This beautifully crafted stone pen and stone pig-house was the home of his prize sow, the Empress.

Lesley’s prize sow was always named the Empress. If the name carved into the stone of the pig-pen was anything to go by, that had been the case for this Squire and probably his ancestors going back to when this farm had been established. The Empress was kept in conditions that matched any that Kordas provided for the Valdemar Golds. Her house had a thick bed of immaculately clean straw at all times. Her yard had a stone water trough filled with spring water, and a stone food trough filled with the best possible foods. There was both a dust-wallow and a mud-wallow, and the rest of the yard was covered in more straw. The yard was never allowed to get dirty.

Kordas tied up his horse in the shade next to the house, and rambled over to the Squire, who was leaning over the wall, talking to his pig. The unobservant would have said that Lesley was paying no attention whatsoever to his liege lord, but as Kordas got within range, he heard a very soft voice saying, “And there’s our Kordas, Empress, come to have an audience with you.”

“Heyla, Lesley,” said Kordas, just as softly.

“Heyla, Kordas,” Lesley replied, comfortable and calm. “Come have a piece of wall.”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

He joined Lesley in laying both arms up on the top of the wall, gazing down at a sow that was easily the size of a sofa, surrounded by what looked like a sea of pretty pink piglets. “Farrowed, did she?” he observed.

“A full dozen, all healthy,” Lesley said, not trying to keep the gloating out of his voice. “Reskin is going to be beside himself. His Nonesuch only had a litter of eight.” Kliff Reskin was Squire Lesley’s chief rival in the matter of pigs. Reskin had been injudicious enough to challenge Lesley’s supremacy in the matter of pigs in the Duchy, and had become Lesley’s mortal enemy from that day forward. It did not help that Reskin was not a farmer, but a pub owner and brewer, that he fed his sow on leftovers, scraps, and the spent barley from his brewing rather than following Lesley’s example of free-ranging his pigs or supplying them with good fodder like turnip-tops and cabbages that had a touch of worm. It was worse that Reskin was openly contemptuous of Lesley’s knowledge.

“Well, that’ll disappoint some bettors,” Kordas observed. “He was awfully sure Nonesuch would have a bigger litter than that.”

Lesley snorted. “As if he could tell!” the Squire scoffed, and as the Empress ambled over to the wall, looking for a scratch, he handed Kordas a stick. Kordas took it, and obliged the Empress and Lesley both by gently scratching her pink rump while Lesley did the more delicate work around her ears.

“Anything to report?” Kordas asked.

“If the weather’s aught to go by, and I reckon it is, the Emperor’s war in the west is a-heating up,” Lesley pronounced with authority. “Wizard weather’s going to make it chancy for hay, so I’d advise Hakkon to tell your men to cut early, cure quickly, and get ’er in as fast as they can. If you get a second and third crop that way, all the better. If you don’t, you’ll still have the early crop. It’ll be a good year for pigs and a chancy one for sheep, and keep your horses out of that field down by the canal that likes to flood unless you want to be treating hoof-rot half the summer.” He cocked an eye at Kordas. “Anything to report?”

“We’ve had some success on the Plan.”

If there was anyone outside of Hakkon that Kordas trusted without question in this entire Duchy, it was Squire Lesley. The same had been true of their fathers and grandfathers. And the Squire signaled his appreciation of this news with a low whistle.

“Welladay. I can have my second son, daughter-in-law, their brood, and half the herd ready to go with two days’ notice,” the Squire said. “The others will take some uprooting, but we’ve been hoping for this as long as you have.”

“That bad?” he asked in surprise. Had the Emperor’s people been harassing his without his knowledge?

“No-oo, not exactly,” Lesley assured him, calming his alarm. “Just—I’m Landwise, as was my da, and my da’s da, and his before him. I can feel it, Kordas. It’s like a great big lump of poison sitting out there to the east and south of us. All my life, it’s been spreading, getting stronger, and that spreading and strengthening has gotten a good lot worse in the last five years. Eventually, something’s going to break, and when it does, I don’t want to be here.”

“But this has been your home for—as long as it’s been my family’s,” Kordas protested, with a touch of surprise. He had not expected this result. He’d expected he would have to argue with the Squire, apply some pressure, at least, and some persuasion. To hear that Squire Lesley was perfectly willing to load up his pigs onto a barge and flee into the unknown on two days’ notice …well, it took him aback.

He was not Landwise, which was a very, very old form of earth-magic; it didn’t confer any particular sort of power other than the ability to read the health of the land and do some modest predictions about crops and animals. But if Lesley was reading that much awful in the Imperial Capital from this far away? Well, things must have accelerated for the bad quite a bit in the years he’d been gone.

“Right, then. If you need hulls, come get them as soon as you have a chance. I’ll leave word you’re to have them for free.” The Empress wandered away, her needs satisfied for the moment, and lay down so her piglets could suckle.

“That’s a generous offer,” said the Squire.

“You have a lot of pigs,” he pointed out. “It’ll cost you a fair bit to convert the hulls to pig-barges.”

“True, that,” Lesley admitted. He straightened and looked up and over to his fields. “I do believe,” he continued, “that my shelters need replacing. Too small.”