Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 585: Chapter 580: The Harvest

Location:The Herb Farms, above Tiller’s Row

Date/Time:5 Cinderfall 9943 AZI, Grindday

Realm:Lower Realm

Hessen Bar had gone down on the twenty-sixth with a line of three and had cost them nothing, and Jayde had put eleven words about it in the book and had not written the rest.

The rest was that Yinxin came back in twelve days instead of eleven, and that one point is not a measurement, and that Eden said so out loud before anybody could ask her.

Twenty-two left.

She went up to the farms on the fifth because Ryo had asked her to, and Ryo asks for things about twice a year.

***

The farms are on the long south-facing shoulder above Tiller’s Row, and there are nine blocks now, and from the top of the track you can see the whole of it at once, which is the thing Ryo wanted.

Four of them are bath stock, and that is most of the ground. Lung-leaf, which is the broad dark-green one and the body of every sachet; cutstalk, which is the gray-green and goes in with it; ember-root, ashvine, greywort, and the rest, in strips along the lower edge where the water sits.

One block is the salve and the field dressings — silverleaf, bloodcap, knitroot, the coldmoss that has been on Takara’s leg for a month.

One is the infant mix and nothing else.

Two are pill stock, which goes down to Daishan’s furnace at Kaelport and comes back as something with a number on a paper.

And the ninth is Bai Shu’s trial ground, which she is proprietorial about and which nobody else is allowed to weed.

Only two of those blocks are old. Yinxin put them in during the Harrowing with a dozen people and no instructions, on the theory that a bathhouse would be worth having if anybody ever came back, and they are the only ground on that hill carrying a two-year crop. The other seven went in this year. Everything on them is annual, and this is the first cut off any of it.

And people in all of it. Four hundred and some, on a Grindday, cutting.

”How much?” asked Jayde.

”Not yet.” Ryo had his hands behind his back. ”Walk down to the third block first.”

***

She walked down to the third block first.

It took twenty minutes, because the track is not a road and because every second person on it wanted to say something to her, which happens now and which she has stopped finding strange and has not stopped finding difficult.

The third block is lung-leaf, two years in, and about sixty people were cutting it in a long ragged line with children running the baskets up to the carts.

They were singing. Not well.

”That is not a corps song,” said Jayde.

”No.”

”That is a harvest song.”

”It is a harvest song, and it is about ninety years old, and it belongs to the Suhe side, and about half of them are not from the Suhe side and have learned it this week.” Ryo watched the line move. ”They started it. Not us. Nobody in the corps has ever told anybody on this hill what to sing.”

***

Ryo gave her the figure at the top of the fourth block, sitting on a cart tail with the whole slope below them.

”Fourteen thousand six hundred sachets, if the drying holds,” he said. ”That is the first cut off all nine blocks. Last year, off the two Yinxin put in, it was four thousand one hundred — and nobody ever graded last year’s, and this year’s has been, so I would rather not see them written in the same column.”

Jayde sat with that for a moment and found she had nothing at all to put after it.

”Three and a half times last year,” said Ryo, and let it sit the exact length of time it needed. ”And it is not that it was a good season. It is nine blocks instead of two, and the two-year lung-leaf coming in for the first time, and Bai Shu’s people got the drying right in Emberwane and stopped losing a fifth of it to mold.”

”That is not why you asked me to come on the fifth.”

”No.” Ryo looked down the slope. ”Bai Shu will tell it better than I will, and she has been sitting on it for eleven days because she wanted a second count.”

***

Bai Shu told it in the fourth block, standing in two-year lung-leaf with a cut stem in her hand, and she told it the way she tells everything, which is badly and in the right order.

”It’s graded.”

Jayde turned round, and then turned round properly.

”That is the order. That’s the end of it, and I’m giving it to you first because if I build up to it you’ll think I’m being careful.” Bai Shu had the stem in both hands. ”We have been calling this a medicinal herb. We have been watching people go up a tier at Tiller’s Row since Emberrise and putting it down to the soak and the rest and the time off work, and it was not any of that. It was this. Last autumn’s cut was already graded, and nobody on this hill knew, because nobody on this hill had ever stood near a graded herb to know what one looks like.”

She said it flatly and her hands were not steady.

”Grade One. All four bath blocks. The salve block. The infant block. Everything. And what’s left of last autumn’s in the sheds, weaker, but Grade One as well. I’ve had it checked twice by Eden’s people and once by a woman at Suhe who’s been grading for a clan house for thirty years and who charged me four silver and then gave it back.”

***

Jayde stood in a field and did not say anything for a while, because she had been on this world for four years and knew exactly what that sentence was.

A spiritual herb does not grow in open ground. It never has. The ambient out of doors is too thin to put anything into a plant, and so the only two places a spiritual herb has ever come from on this continent are a clan’s walled garden — a formation over it, spirit stones burning under it continuously for two to five years, which is why the great houses guard a garden the way other people guard a mine — or the Dark Forest, where you do not pick herbs, you hire a company by the season and pay them up front and count a good year as one where most of them come back.

That is the whole of the trade. That is why a Grade Two root costs what it costs, and most of what it costs is the men who went in for it.

”On a hillside,” said Bai Shu, as if Jayde had said it out loud. ”No formation and not one spirit stone, and nobody doing anything differently from the year before.” She dropped the stem. ”I planted that block myself. I know what went in it.”

***

”What is it worth to us?”

”That’s the part I’ve been sitting on.” Bai Shu started walking up the row, and Jayde went with her. ”Grade One reaches Ashborn. It reaches Sparkforged. And it reaches Flamewrought.”

Jayde stopped walking.

”Flamewrought.” Bai Shu turned round, because she had heard the boots stop. ”The bottom three tiers. That’s what Grade One is, and that’s what it’s always been in a clan garden, and it is what we have now got four blocks of.”

”A bath has never reached Flamewrought.”

”Until this year, a bath had never reached anybody. That’s the thing I keep having to say out loud to myself.” She held up a hand and ticked it off. ”Two years ago we were putting mundane plant matter in hot water. It mended a chest, and it eased a knee, and it did not touch one person’s core on this continent, because there was nothing in it that could. Then the ground started coming up, and the plants came up with it, and we went on packing them as if nothing had happened. Every tier anybody has gained at Tiller’s Row was this. Not the water. Not the method. This.”

Jayde stood in the row and did the arithmetic she had been doing wrong all year.

”Then we have been putting a graded herb into a tub at a mundane weight since Emberrise.”

”Three and four times what it wanted.” Bai Shu’s mouth went flat. ”Nobody has been hurt that I can find, and I have looked. I have had the better part of two weeks to be sick about how close we came.”

***

”And every Flamewrought on this continent,” said Jayde.

”Has spent their whole life knowing that a bath is a thing for the people below them.” Bai Shu started walking again. ”Anything that would move them comes out of a clan garden or out of the Dark Forest at a price they can’t pay, and they’ve made their peace with it the way you make peace with weather.”

”How many are there?”

”I can’t tell you, nor can anybody. Thousands. Tens of thousands.” She shook her head. ”And it doesn’t go past them. Grade One stops at Flamewrought — it does nothing for an Inferno-tempered, nothing at all, and more of it doesn’t help. Four Grade One baths aren’t a Grade Two bath. That’s the first thing anybody’s going to ask me, and the answer is no.”

She pulled a folded sheet out of her coat, which she had plainly been carrying for days.

”So every mix in the book is wrong. The whole formulary was built for mundane plant matter. You put in a great weight of it because most of it does nothing. Grade One isn’t a stronger version of the same thing — it’s a different thing, and the old weights are at best wasteful and at worst they’ll hurt somebody, and I will not put another sachet out at last year’s ratio.”

”Then do not.”

”I’d already stopped. Eleven days ago, on my own say-so, and the sheds are packing to a holding weight that I know is conservative and that I can defend.” She held out the sheet. ”That’s what’s stopped, and that’s why. I’d like it countersigned, because I shut down a line on a hunch and somebody should have to put a name next to that besides mine.”

Jayde read it standing in the row, and signed it against her knee.

”How long to rebuild it?”

”Eden and me and four people, a season. Longer if I’m honest with you, and I’m going to be honest with you.” Bai Shu folded the sheet back into her coat. ”And we do it properly. Soak counts on real people, written down, including the ones where it doesn’t work. I’m not having a formulary on this continent that was arrived at by somebody being clever.”

***

Ryo was still on the cart tail when she came back up the row.

”And next year,” said Jayde.

”If the four new blocks go in this winter and nothing burns, forty thousand. The year after I will not guess at, and I want that noted, because somebody will write my guess down and hold me to it.”

She sat down beside him and did the arithmetic and did not enjoy any part of it.

One sachet, one soak, one person — and one soak is not a tier. The ones who go through on a single bath were already pressed hard against the ceiling, like Meifen’s father after forty years at an anvil, and they are the minority.

Call it three, on this year’s crop.

Four thousand eight hundred people lifted off the bottom of the ladder in a year.

”How many people are there on this continent?” she asked.

”Nobody knows.” Ryo did not move. ”The Temple’s roll says eleven million, and the Temple’s roll is forty years old and was never honest. Hu Bing’s people think fourteen. I think it is more, and I have no basis for thinking so beyond having stood in a great many market squares.”

”What is that as a fraction?”

”Four thousand eight hundred out of fourteen million is one in three thousand.” He said it without any inflection at all. ”At forty thousand sachets it is one in eleven hundred. If every block on this shoulder were planted and cropped and the drying never failed, it is one in five hundred, and that is the end of this hill. The shoulder runs out.”

***

Jayde sat on the cart tail and looked down at four hundred people singing a ninety-year-old harvest song badly.

That is the whole of it, she thought, and did not say.

It is not a war you win. It is not even a war. It is a quantity of dried lung-leaf coming off a south-facing slope at a rate set by weather and acreage and how well a woman worked out the drying, and against it is a number nobody can count.

One in five hundred, at the absolute ceiling of what this hill can ever produce.

And every one of those is a person who will be alive in ninety years when they would have been dead in forty, whose children start from a different place, and whose grandchildren will be born into a family that has been Sparkforged for three generations and will think it ordinary.

She had been doing this long enough to hold both at once and had stopped expecting it to get easier.

”You brought me up here to see the numbers,” she said.

”I brought you up here to see the hill.” Ryo got off the cart tail. ”You have had the numbers in a report every month, and you read them. Nobody reads the hill.”

***

A woman stopped her on the track going back up.

She was somewhere past fifty, with a cutting hook through her belt, and had plainly decided on this four days ago and rehearsed it since.

”You won’t know me.”

”I do not.”

”No. Only I wanted to say it to the right person, and I kept being told that was you.” She had the hook in both hands. ”I’ve been up here since Ashwhisper. Nine blocks now. And I know what it’s for, because my sister-in-law went through at Tiller’s Row in Sparkfall and she’s forty-four and she’s got two hundred years.”

”She has.”

”Yes. Well.” The woman turned the hook over. ”I’m fifty-three, and I’m on the list, and I’ll get mine in Frostforge, they say, and that’s as may be. What I wanted to say is that we are cutting near four times what we cut last year and it still isn’t enough, and I know that, because I can count, and nobody up here is stupid.”

Jayde said nothing, because anything she said would have been management.

”So what I want you to know is that we know,” said the woman. ”We’re not being kept cheerful. We’re cutting as fast as we can cut because every sack is somebody’s mother, and we’d like more ground, and we’ve been saying so to the yard man since Emberwane, and I don’t know whether it goes anywhere past him.”

”It goes past him. It has just gone past him.”

”Good.” She put the hook back through her belt. ”Then I’ve said it.”

She went back down to the line, and Jayde stood on the track with the whole of the afternoon’s arithmetic in a different order.