The Orc's Harvest

Seven feet and more of orc looked Olwen Morrish over in front of the whole market, without hurry and without malice, and said that she would quit by noon.

The hook rode in the back of the cart wrapped in sacking, newly ground, and Olwen could feel it behind her left shoulder the whole way down the lane, the way you feel a thing you have said aloud and not yet paid for.

"Stop looking round at it," her mother said, without turning her head. "It's a hook. Your father's cut thirty harvests with its brother. It will not climb out and cut this one by itself."

"I was looking at the field."

"You were looking at the field past the hook," Catrin said, which was true, and they both left it there.

The Morrish barley was past the gate and down the slope, the Long Piece first, lying white-gold all the way to the brook willows, so ripe the heads nodded at nothing. Olwen had been born into that field in the sense that mattered: she had carried water to her father's line before she could lift the jug level, and she had bound behind him, and stooked, and driven the cart, and one year of the last five she had done all of it while he stood at the headland and found reasons not to sit down. This year he could not stand at the headland. The hip had gone sour in the spring and come high summer it had put him on a stick, and a fortnight since he had ridden up the valley side and hired the Ilgrath gang to cut his ground, and told her and her mother about it at table, after, as a thing already done. Which it was. A Morrish did not go back on a hire.

But a Morrish did not watch strangers reap Morrish ground from the hedge, either, and Olwen had said so at the same table, and her father had eaten his stew very carefully, and her mother had said, "Eat your stew, Olwen," in a voice that meant the argument was not over but the stew was getting cold.

Market was full by the time they came under the guild-hall clock — ten o'clock by the sun, four minutes past by the clock, the clock being a liar of long standing that nobody had the heart to correct. The horse-lines were strung along the beck end and the smiths' row was already smoking, and the smell of it came across the square in layers: charcoal, frying onions off the cook-tent, crushed grass under a thousand boots, and under it all the green dust-smell of a valley whose barley was waiting.

Olwen had worn the cornflower-blue bodice, square-necked, fitted close, and her hair down loose past her shoulders the way she wore it on market days, because if she was going to say a thing in front of the whole market she intended to look like a woman who had dressed for it on purpose. The bodice laced her waist in and sat the way it was cut to sit, and she was aware, without vanity, that she looked like what she was: a farmer's daughter of twenty-nine with arms that could pitch a sheaf, dressed as well as the valley dressed. Her mother, small and round beside her with her dark hair pinned in its coil, had put on her good shawl, which meant Catrin had known since breakfast how the morning was going to go.

They left the cart with Blew's boy at the horse-lines and Olwen carried the hook herself, still wrapped, held along her arm like something between a tool and a statement.

Hetta's cheese pitch stood where it always stood, at the horse-lines end, with the pitch beside it doing the queue's overspill, and Hetta had watched the Morrishes come in the way she watched everyone — civilly, over a cheese-wire, missing nothing.

"Morrish," Hetta said. Nine years she had been at that board and she called nobody by a given name until the valley had told her she might, and the valley, in its slow way, had got round to the Morrishes two summers back. "There's a bit of the blue going."

"There's a lot of your blue going," Catrin said, "if that's the cut you've been giving people," and Hetta, who did not laugh on market days, made the face she made instead.

Olwen set the wrapped hook up on the edge of the board and unwrapped it enough to show the bright new edge, because it had to be said somewhere first and Hetta's pitch was where the valley's news was weighed before it went to be graded.

"I'm taking a hook in my own line," Olwen said. "When the gang starts. Tomorrow, first light. I'm not standing at the hedge of my own father's field watching it cut."

Hetta's eyebrow went up a quarter of an inch, which on Hetta was a speech. She looked at the hook, and at Olwen's arms where the sleeves of her shift showed under the bodice lacing — round, solid arms, a reaper's granddaughter's arms — and then back at Olwen's face.

"Noon," said a farmer's wife at the poultry crates, to nobody, in the tone of a woman reading out a price. She was a Corran-road woman, brown-skinned, deep in the cheekbones the way the coast families were, and she did not look up from the crate she was pricing. She did not have to. Half the square had heard it the way the square heard everything: by already having been waiting to hear it.

"She's cut before," Hetta said mildly, to the cheese.

"She's cut behind her father," the woman said. "That's a different day's work and everyone here knows it."

"My father," Olwen said, "reaped that ground thirty years, and I was in the row behind him for twenty of them, and I'll thank you to price your poultry."

The woman smiled into the crate. The thing was said now. It would be at the well before Olwen was, and up smiths' row before the noon bell, and down the lower road by supper in Tarrow's wife's satchel, and that was fine. Olwen had not come to market to say it quietly.

That was when she noticed the gap.

It was not a gap anyone had made on purpose. It was simply that there was more room around the whetstone pitch than there was anywhere else in the square — a wide, polite, unacknowledged ellipse of room, with the square crowded everywhere else and the crowd flowing around that one spot the way flood water flows around a gatepost. Inside the ellipse stood the biggest man Olwen had ever seen, and he was buying whetstones.

She had seen orcs all her life — the valley side was nothing else, up there — and she had seen the harvest gangs come down the lower road every summer since she could remember, a line of green shoulders and hooks through the dust. She had never stood this close to Yeskar Ilgrath.

He was seven feet and a bit of it, and broad in a way that made the breadth look settled, like masonry: shoulders that had spent twenty summers swinging a hook, a thick waist, forearms near the size of her thigh, jade-green skin with a cool blue cast to it, gone darker and bronzed across the shoulders and the backs of those forearms where the field sun had had him. His hair was black and cropped down to an inch all over — cut for harvest, the way the gangs did — and his eyes, when he turned to count coin into the pitch-man's palm, were a pale grey-gold that looked like it ought to be cold and was not. His lower tusks came up long and flared a little outward, and the left one carried a plain brass band where it had cracked some year before she had known he existed.

He moved the way very large men move when they have decided early in life to be careful: everything a little slower than it needed to be, everything placed. He took his whetstones one at a time and set them into a horn slung off his belt, and the crowd kept its ellipse, and nobody looked at him at all.

The most feared gangmaster on the lower road, Olwen thought, and found she could not have said what the fear was made of. No gang bid against the Ilgrath gang for a field. Nobody had ever told her why. It was simply a thing the valley knew, the way it knew the clock was slow.

It was Perren who asked it. Of course it was Perren — a farmer on rented ground up the Corran road side, his people two generations up from the salt-coast towns, warm brown skin and black hair and a black beard, and a way of asking the plain question that the rest of the valley had learned to step around. He was not goading. He came a few paces nearer the ellipse's edge and asked it the way you would ask a man about rain.

"Ilgrath. You've the Morrish cutting, I'm told." A nod. "Is it true the Morrish girl means to take a hook in your line? Her own field, her own line?"

The square did not go quiet. The square did something better: it went busy, very busy, in a ring, while leaving the middle of itself empty and listening with its whole body.

Yeskar finished setting the last stone in its horn. He did not hurry it. Then he looked at Perren, and then — for the first time — at Olwen, standing at the cheese board with her father's hook under her arm. She had the sudden, specific sensation of being measured the way a man measures a field: not her face, not her body, but the set of her, what she would cut like, how she would stand up to the work. It was not rude. It was a professional opinion being formed in front of her by the best man in the valley to form it.

"She'll quit by noon," he said.

He said it the way the farmer's wife had said it — a price read out — but deeper, and slower, and without any of the wife's small pleasure in it. There was no malice in it anywhere. That was the insult, and Olwen understood that in the same instant she understood the scale of it: he was not taunting her. Taunting would have meant he cared whether she believed him. He had looked at her, weighed her against a day's reaping the way he weighed everything, and reported the result to the man who had asked, as plain fact, the way he would have reported that a mare would not take a collar or a wall would not hold.

"Noon of the first day," he added, because he was apparently a man who liked a fact to be exact. "It's no shame in it. The line's pace is the line's pace. It's set by men who do nothing else." He turned back to pay for his stones.

"Noon," Olwen said.

Her voice came out level, which surprised her, because her heart was going like a flail. The listening ring of the square got a little wider, a little busier. At the edge of it she could see two orc women in market shawls come down off the valley-side path and arrange themselves where they could see, with the settled air of women who had smelt a thing worth hearing from four fields away. Hetta had stopped cutting cheese.

Yeskar looked back at her. Up close, in the sun, the grey-gold eyes were not cold at all, and that was somehow worse: there was nothing in them to fight. He was not her enemy. He was a man stating weather.

"Noon," he agreed, pleasantly.

"Then I'll tell you a fact," Olwen said, "since we're telling facts in front of the market." She stepped out from the cheese board into the open, into the middle of the ellipse of room the crowd had given him, so that she was standing in it with him, five foot five of her against seven foot three of him, and the top of her head came to his breastbone and she did not care. "I will last the harvest. Every day of it. First light to dusk, in the line, on Morrish ground. Not at the hedge. In the line. You cut it, I'm behind you, and at the last sheaf I'll still be there, and you can tell the valley you watched it."

She did not offer him her hand and he did not offer his. There was no stake to name and no terms to fix. It was only two sentences, said in the open, one of his and one of hers, and the whole market to remember who had said what. The valley did not need paper. The valley had never needed paper for a thing said at market in front of witnesses.

He looked down at her for a moment, and she had the odd thought that he was rechecking his figures — not in anger, just rechecking, the way an honest man does when the field contradicts the forecast. What he found did not seem to change them.

"We'll see at noon," he said, and it was not unkind, and that was the worst thing anyone had ever said to her in the Marrowvale market square. He picked up the whetstone horn, settled his belt, nodded once to Perren — a courtesy between men who had asked and answered straight — and went out of the square with the crowd's careful gap opening ahead of him and closing behind, his stride long and unhurried and with a small hitch in it she had not expected, an old knee, a thing he carried without comment.

The square came back to life around Olwen all at once, too loudly, the way it did. Hetta finished her cut of cheese and wrapped it.

"He doesn't say things he doesn't believe," Hetta said, to the cheese paper. "That's the trouble with that one. Everyone on the lower road knows it."

"Then he's about to learn," Olwen said.

"He's about to learn," the Corran woman repeated from the poultry crates, in exactly the tone of someone entering a thing in a ledger, and Olwen knew it would be up and down the lower road before supper, and did not care, because it was true and she had said it and she would make it so.

Her mother bought the bit of blue. It took some time. Catrin took it with complete calm, paid the exact coin, and said nothing whatever.

The ride home went up the lane with the barley on both sides, white-gold and waiting, the Long Piece first and then the Well Field, and down by the brook the Low Field, the heaviest of the three, standing thick as a mattress. Swallows were working low over the heads of it. Twenty-four days, Olwen thought, or thereabouts — the time the gang would take on Morrish ground, and every day of it she would be in the line. She had reaped behind her father since she was nine. She had never reaped at the pace of men who did nothing else. She was not a fool; she knew which of those two facts Yeskar Ilgrath had been weighing, and he had weighed it correctly. What he had not weighed — because you could not weigh it from across a market square, because nobody could weigh it but her — was what she had instead.

Gwilym was in the yard on his stick when the cart came in, and he had heard. Of course he had heard. A man who had not come to market sat in his yard and the market came to him, in fragments, off every cart that went by.

"You've told Yeskar Ilgrath, in front of the whole market, that you'll last the harvest," he said, before she was down off the cart. "Yeskar Ilgrath. Who has cut every field on the lower road since you were a girl, and who said you'd quit by noon, which is — girl, the man does not say things for sport. Do you know what he — when the Vaughan gang tried to bid the Hendre field against him, do you know what—"

"I know he bought whetstones," Olwen said. "I watched him. He's going to need them. So am I." She took her father's hook off the cart and set it against the wall of the byre, where it hung every harvest of her life, next to her father's own. "He said what he believes, Da. So did I. One of us is wrong, and we'll both know which by the last sheaf."

"He said noon," Gwilym said, to the yard, to the stick, to the whole situation. "He said noon in front of the market."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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