...

Fields of Fishgrain

2022/01/18

We were working the fields when the news came out that our lord, Tengron, had sold the Feifdom to Parron of the south, and that we’d be joining together. We talked among ourselves sitting in the ditch while we waited for the water cart to arrive.

“Parron” sighed Tip “Do you think they’ll be any better than Tengron?”

“I hope so” I said, lying down in the cut crops.

Tengron had owned the fiefdom for 17 or 18 years now, and as a lord is to do, they buy up or conquer a surrounding fiefdom, with the assets (that is, the land, the villages, and the serfs) to go along with it. In the 2 decades Tengron had bough up all the surrounding lands, with the fields turned to the cash crop of Fish Grain. Their last was a village of toymakers, who had made toys for the lord for some time, but papers were signed, and now the entire village was raised and turned into Fish Grain fields.

We call it fish grain because it’s grain that smells like fish.

I was brought to Tengron’s fiefdom after a year of imprisonment for being unable to work, appealing to many different lords for my skills in tractor and small engine repair. Every time they had found another repairer who had specific knowledge of the tractors or machinery that they used. It was frustrating because, well, farm equipment across the land is always extensively modified for individual crops and harvests, not to mention terrain. It was terrible to read the words “you aren’t a good fit” from the light of a jailhouse candle, as if I were a cog that were simply made in the wrong shape. The equipment used by Tengron’s were very old, having been modified and maintained for Fish Grain over the years, nobody working outside the fiefdom could decipher the tangled mechanics of it, so learning on the job was a must. By some fortune they acquired me.

I enjoyed this work, such as it was, until the end of the harvest, when we processed the grain by hand. The grain grinder machinery had to be manually operated, and was equally cobbled together hastily for the harvest. We resulted to manual tools. Deliveries were constantly late. I thought I could relax after the harvest, but we were working harder than ever. My hands were bleeding by days end, and I collapsed into bed every night with my comrades, wondering how long I could keep going.

I knew tractors and I knew mechanics, I had to learn grain processing, and this was now my job, one I could not stand to do.

For months this went on, I had told the foreman I could not go on, but we went on, and I told them I was thinking going offland, which is slang for running away without work, something that would land me back into prison from which I had been so desperate to get out of. Nothing had changed and the work had been grinding on, until today, when we got the news.

“I hope we switch to another crop” I said, with the water cart approaching.

“Did you hear the news?” Davies asked, who pulled the cart and was a welcome sight, said as he ambled up.

“We’ll still be processing this grain, by hand, for months” Tip muttered “I do hope we switch to another crop, something that doesn’t smell so bad”

“Nobody can be as bad as Tengron” Davies said. Tengrons atrocities were widely known, he was widely hated by the other lords (not to mention us serfs, but our true bile was reserved for codewords). I speculated he would die on the throne before abdicating, but selling out never entered my mind, as the land he owned was far too big for any sum of money. Turns out, if you have enough gold, anything is yours.

As I turned this over in my head, I thought about the old Citroen 2CV that was rotting next to the shed. It looked worse than it actually was, I knew with a few bits of wire and some new spark plugs, and a clean of the fuel system, it would fire up. I’d throw some tarp over the the top for a roof, and get some blankets to put on the seat springs. Me and Tip could be gone into the night. And Davies too. but where would we go? This last question, it kept me there, for so long. I did not have an answer.

With the purchase, Parron was now the third largest Fiefdom, and perhaps building up to a battle with the other biggest two. But what difference does a new master make, anyway?