Page 24 of Circle of Days
It was a long walk, but Ani enjoyed the bright wildflowers and the endless grass and the vast blue sky. Living in a large village next to a river, she was liable to forget the magnificence of the Great Plain. She felt lucky to live here.
The ancestors of the Great Plain people had liked to bury their dead in tombs covered with earth. Such little hills, called barrows, were everywhere, but most of all near the holy Monument. As Ani passed them, she wondered why the ancestors had done this and how the practice had died out. Today’s people burned their dead. Sometimes they scattered the ashes and sometimes they buried them, but they built no tombs.
Ani’s aim on this trip was to avoid a battle and thus prevent the need for many funeral pyres.
They reached the farmer country late in the afternoon, and had enough time and daylight to take a first look at what the farmers had done.
South River formed the southern border of the plain. Parallel with the river was a long, narrow wood. Between river and woodland was fertile soil, which was what made farming possible. In this stretch of woodland was the Break, which divided East Wood from West Wood and gave the herd access to the river.
Or it had. Now it was farmland.
The farmer men had used scratch plows, probably two men topull each one, to break up the grassy soil. Then they had turned over the sods with wooden shovels. This allowed the seeds to sink into the ground. At this time of year they would probably plant barley, which grew quickly.
As Ani looked she became more worried. This seizure of land by the farmers would outrage many in the herder community. It could lead to something more than a battle. There could be war.
There had been no war on the plain in her lifetime, but she remembered her parents talking in solemn tones about a war that had taken place when they were young, a war between the herders and the woodlanders. The issue had been herders coppicing hazel trees to make them grow the thin, bendy branches to be woven into wattle for house walls. Coppiced hazel produced no nuts, and hazelnuts were a staple in the woodlander diet. The war had ended with a compromise whereby the herders agreed to coppice only the trees on the outer fringes of the woods. But a lot of people had died before peace was made.
“These farmers!” said Scagga. “They’re just thieves! They think they can take whatever they want!” Scagga had bulging eyes that made him seem even more aggressive.
Keff said mildly: “So it seems.”
Ani said nothing. It was best to let Scagga rave. He might be more reasonable afterward.
They went to the nearest herder settlement, a hamlet called Old Oak, and spent the night with a young couple, Zad and Biddy, who had a new baby. Living in this remote spot, Zad and Biddy were thrilled to host visitors from the sophisticated east. The elders were woken in the night when the baby had to be fed, butthey had all suffered that with their own children, and no one really minded.
In the morning they walked to Farmplace, the village on the north shore of the South River.
The farmers did not work collectively. Each man had a large field, a pasture for a few livestock, a house, and a small storehouse. Now, early in the summer, people were weeding the fields where green shoots of wheat were coming up.
Looking across the water, Ani saw that the farmers had already expanded to the other side of the river. A strip of fertile land there ended in a range of hills. The farmers had cultivated that strip even where it was only a few paces wide. Their hunger for fertile land drove them.
The elders found Troon in the center of the village, with a group of young men carrying heavy carved wooden clubs, a show of force. Troon had small dark eyes and a permanent scowl. He had been Big Man here for two years. Ani had met him before and found him to be clever, ruthless, and angry. Right now he seemed to be suppressing a burning hostility.
A small crowd of villagers watched. Ani saw Pia and Stam, and was about to greet them when she remembered that they were not supposed to play with herder children. She saw Stam gazing at his father with an adoring look. Just don’t grow up like your Dadda, she thought.
Pia’s mother, Yana, was in the crowd. Ani had acquired some of Yana’s cheese and liked it. Yana introduced Ani to her husband, Alno, who smiled pleasantly. Ani had seen Yana again later that Midsummer Day, when the revel had begun. Yana had been handin hand with a handsome herder man a good deal younger than Alno, and they had been heading eagerly for the outskirts. The farmers were keen on the revel, no doubt because their community was so small that everyone was related to everyone else, and inbreeding could be a serious problem.
Ani picked out two other familiar faces in the waiting crowd. One was Katch, Troon’s woman, the mother of Stam. She came across as nervous and fearful, as who would not be, stuck with a bully such as Troon? But Ani had talked to her occasionally and got the impression she might have hidden strength.
The other familiar face was that of Shen, Troon’s right-hand man, a sly individual with an ingratiating smile and ever-shifting eyes. Ani noticed that Shen was wearing a flint axe attached to a leather belt, in imitation of Troon, who had exactly the same.
The elders approached Troon, and Ani tried to set a friendly tone, saying: “May the Sun God smile on you.”
He did not give the conventional reply. “What have you come here for?”
Ani smiled. “You’re an intelligent man, Troon.” She spoke in an emollient tone, but her words were uncompromising. “You know we’re here because you’re trying to steal grazing land that has been used by the herder community since before any of us were born.”
He was unapologetic. “That’s rich soil, wasted on grazing,” he said. “It’s good farmland and we need it.”
Scagga, standing next to Ani, said angrily: “You have no right to make that decision. It’s always been grassland and you can’t change that.”
Behind Troon, little Stam was making a noise. He was shouting: “I’m a hunter,” and prodding other children with a stick, making them cry. Troon turned and slapped the child’s face. It was an open-handed blow, but forceful enough to knock Stam to the ground. He burst into tears. Katch quickly stepped forward, picked him up, and walked away with him in her arms.
Stam was going to have a black eye. Ani believed that children had to be chastised sometimes, but knocking them to the ground was going too far.
Troon resumed the argument as if nothing had happened. “You herders have plenty of grazing land—almost the entire Great Plain! You don’t need the Break—we do.”
Scagga was bursting with indignation. “You can’t steal something simply because you need it!”
