Wedding (10 page)

The awareness of battle and potential
destruction made me recall my attempt to seduce Dominic before he
left. I had been afraid for him, and afraid for myself at the
thought of losing him. Yet now, ironically, with the evidence of
war occupying my senses, I grew increasingly calm. Although I would
not have dreamed of endangering Dominic by staying in communion
with him at such a time, there was still some faint mental
connection between us. I knew he was alive and unhurt, and hoped my
placid exterior might be mistaken for ladylike self-control, if not
courage.

Without knowing it, I had passed an important
test. I had behaved as any ’Gravina would when her man was at war.
To fret and worry without reason would simply prove I had no
crypta
. If Dominic were dead or wounded I would
know
.
Otherwise, all signs of battle should leave me unmoved. People
noticed my few days of unease followed by the return of composure,
my face losing its sternness, able to smile again, and were
reassured. “The master is safe,” they told each other. “The rebels
are getting the worst of it.” Even Naomi accepted it, giving a
respectful reply to my greeting when we passed in the corridor.
Whatever she found in my mind seemed to have forced a grudging
approval from her, convinced her I was not faking—about my gift, at
least.

And while I brooded on my own problems, and
remained secretly apprehensive over Dominic’s safety, I roamed the
halls of the castle, and the grounds on pleasant days. Everywhere I
saw the smiles, acknowledged the happy salutations to “Lady
Amalie,” and wished I would be staying, to see the crops harvested
that were being sown, to enjoy the newborn lambs on our dinner
table, to taste the cheese that was aging in the dairy house.

One rainy, cold day, I discovered a room I
had overlooked on the ground floor. A young man was sitting at a
desk, poring over a set of heavy parchment sheets, folded and bound
together in a sturdy spine—a book. The pages were not printed like
the books in Dominic’s library; they had handwriting on them, neat
rows of penmanship traced on lines ruled onto the paper, with
numbers in columns along the edge. The man was mumbling to himself
as I peered in through the open door, and did not hear me. “Five
hundred bushels of oats from Kwame’s farm, and three hundred from
Ranulf’s, and two hundred and fifty from...” He turned a page,
frowning. “But why does it say a thousand?” he asked the wall.

I crept closer, my sandals silent on the
stone floor, stealing a glimpse over the man’s shoulder as he
pondered, pen in hand, a bottle of ink at his right. As I got near
enough to read, I was intrigued to see that the alphabet resembled
Terran characters, although in a more elaborate form that could be
drawn by hand, given training and practice. It was script, designed
so that all the letters connected to each other. A person would dip
his pen in the ink and write as much as he could without lifting
the pen from the paper. I made out a few words with
difficulty—“farm” and “oats”—but the numerals were easy, the same
as Terra’s. The 500 and the 300 and the 250 stood out clearly. On
the turned page, the 1000 was big and confident, and wrong.

“Because when you copied it over to the next
page you wrote two hundred instead of two hundred and fifty,” I
answered his question, startling the man so that he upset the
bottle, spilling ink all over the desk and onto the floor. He swore
and leaped to his feet, saw me, flushed bright red, bowed and gave
the inevitable greeting to Lady Amalie, but looked gloomily at the
mess.

When a servant had been called and the worst
cleaned up, he introduced himself: “Berend, Margrave Aranyi’s
steward.” He collected himself enough to thank me for pointing out
the error, which made him think. “You can read and write? And do
arithmetic?”

“A little,” I said. “I used to work in the
offices of the Terran Protectorate.” I was getting smoother with
the lies, knowing I could admit to the work, and to living among
Terrans. It was being one that was inconceivable.

With the mystery of the one thousand solved,
Berend was happy to show me his work. I had observed so much
industry, all within walking distance, aware that there was a great
deal more going on a day or two’s ride away. I had no idea how it
was all organized or recorded. Now I began to see the system. A
couple of hours flew by while I learned the basics, recognizing the
words in the elegant curling script, hearing them in Berend’s
thoughts while his finger pointed to the characters on the
page.

The Realm of Aranyi encompassed servants,
laborers, tenant farmers, freeholders and villagers. Servants and
laborers lived in the fortress itself, or on nearby holdings, and
did the work of Fortress Aranyi and its lands. They received wages
in kind: room and board, clothing and food for their families, and
an allotment of the realm’s goods. Tenant farmers, freeholders and
villagers occupied their own semi-independent properties, keeping
some of what they raised or grew, paying rent or making an annual
contribution to the stores at Aranyi, and receiving portions of
other commodities in return.

It was fun, and educational, seeing all the
goods that were produced here. The first settlers had brought with
them the genomes to create an entire ecosystem, but had not been
certain what sort of climate they would find on their new world.
Luckily, although Eclipsis was cold and dark, it had a functioning
sun, and life that had evolved only to the stage of rudimentary
plants. Much quicker than anyone had dared hope, through a kind of
punctuated equilibrium, those pioneers replicated the sort of
alpine biodiversity that had existed in parts of Terra before the
Great Climate Catastrophe reduced almost the entire surface to
desert.

By now Aranyi, like the other realms, grew or
raised or manufactured just about every kind of food and material
Eclipsis was capable of supplying. Grains and vegetables were
farmed on the terraced fields; trees bearing fruit and nuts grew in
orchards on the edge of the forest; a row of enormous greenhouses,
fantastic in appearance with snow melting off their peaked roofs,
gave us precious tomatoes, citrus fruits and melons. Sheep, goats
and cattle roamed the mountain pastures under the care of Aranyi
herdsmen, providing meat and milk, leather and wool, tallow and
lard for baking, to provide light and make soap. There were many
kinds of domestic fowl, for eating and eggs, feathers and down.
Flax for linen grew near the lakes and streams that abounded with
delicate-fleshed freshwater fish. There were grapes for wine and
grain to make spirits and ale. Herbs and spices were grown in neat
allotments, and every farm had at least one apiary to house the
bees that did the work of pollination and provided honey. A smoky,
pungent tea could be brewed from the leaves of a hardy
mountain-growing bush, and the berries of another plant, when
roasted and ground, and combined with resin from the evergreen
trees, made the execrable beverage that Eclipsians drink in place
of coffee.

The areas of pasture and farm were
interspersed every few miles by villages, each with its own
blacksmith and butcher, miller and weaver, to turn iron into
horseshoes and plowshares, animals into meat and hides, grain into
flour, thread into cloth. At the edge of the forests, copses of
trees were harvested and replanted in a slow, sustainable cycle,
aging most of the wood for fuel, the rest used to make furniture
and utensils. Otherwise the forest was protected and pristine,
off-limits to human settlement except for the isolated families
permitted to trap game animals for food and fur and to collect wild
nuts and berries.

Aranyi needed little from the rest of the
world. What we could not grow, gather or manufacture—silk, sea
salt, iron ore, bladed weapons, and glass—could be obtained for
trade from traveling peddlers or at the seasonal fairs, where the
specialties of lowland or maritime realms were offered, or
commissioned from artisans in Eclipsia City. Glassmaking and
ironwork were the only industries, as they did not require modern
technology, and each had its own community of skilled workers.

It was a kind of socialism, although not
equality. Dominic was the master, and he and his household ate well
and lived well, but every Aranyi resident had a stake in the
collective resources. Once the emergency stockpile at Aranyi was
full, and enough had been kept back for trade, the remainder was
allocated to the workers. As I had sensed earlier, in the
workplaces and with Magali, all these people together made up
Aranyi. They were industrious because they were working for
themselves, sharing out the results of their labor. By working and
producing, whether providing a service, growing a crop or making
finished goods from raw materials, they earned the right to a
portion of all the other things they needed.

If Terrans had more choices, receiving
credits which they could spend as they pleased, here there was less
of a divide between rich and poor. In a good year people enjoyed
the abundance; in a bad year everyone endured the straitened
circumstances. In times of famine, of poor harvests or other
adversity, all who needed it received help from the common reserves
at Aranyi. No one was left to starve while others ate. Children did
not go begging if their parents were sick, or died, or could not
work. The Aranyi household enjoyed its high standard of living, but
it would not squander the wealth through unrestrained consumption
while impoverishing the people who worked to create it.

No wonder Dominic was so proud, born to
administer all this; nor was he merely hereditary overlord,
benefiting from others’ labor while contributing nothing in return.
Dominic protected and governed his dependents. He patrolled our
borders, ensuring that bandits, a perennial problem in the no-man’s
land of the high mountain passes, posed no threat to travelers or
the remote inhabitants. In time of war or during a siege, families
with their provisions and animals were brought into the fortress,
given shelter within the outer wall. Dominic also acted as
magistrate at a regional court that met twice a year, judging the
difficult cases that his tenants and villagers had not been able to
resolve among themselves.

We
, I heard my thoughts.
Our
land. I had begun imagining that I was ’Gravina Aranyi, a part of
this establishment.
Just for a while
, I comforted myself,
it will do no harm to learn a little bookkeeping.

When it was time for dinner I stood up and
stretched. What I had seen so far was mind-boggling. Without
currency beyond iron coins, most transactions an exchange of goods
and services, everyone’s contribution was registered and valued
appropriately, each holding’s requirements balanced against its
yield. And one young man maintained a record of all this production
and distribution. Berend, like his predecessors, kept track of it
all by hand, ink on paper, week by week, season after season, year
after year. The walls of the room were lined with shelves, filled
with books like the ledger Berend and I were studying, the accounts
of generations of Aranyi economy.

It was true that the villages and the larger
holdings had their own stewards who did the same kind of
accounting, but at harvest time they all assembled at Aranyi and
Berend kept the master account. “How do you manage this all by
yourself?” I asked.

“I was apprentice, then assistant, to my
father, who was Master Steward,” he said. “But he died last
autumn.”

I apologized for reminding him. “Can’t we
hire a helper for you?” There, I had done it again.
We
.

Berend focused on something else. “Hire? But
I am Master Steward now.” He was defensive, as if I had suggested
replacing him.

“Yes, of course you are,” I said, assuming
the role of ’Gravina Aranyi, confirming him in his post. “But
couldn’t we find you an apprentice, to learn from you, as you did
from your father?”

Berend shook his head. “My son will be my
apprentice.”

Eclipsians married early, I knew, but Berend
looked barely out of his teens. “How old is your son?” I inquired
hopefully.

“He’ll be a year old at Midsummer,” the proud
father replied, “and he’s smart as a whip. He can talk already,
calls me ‘Papa’.”

I smiled. “Nevertheless,” I said, “he’ll have
to learn to add and subtract, and even smart children take a few
years to learn that.” Berend flushed at my mild humor, and I
hurried to smooth things over. “In the meantime, perhaps I could
help.”

“Lady Amalie,” he said, “that would not be
right. Margrave Aranyi will not want you straining your eyes over
books and bothering your head with arithmetic.”

“But surely the lady of the household must
work as well as the rest?” After all I had seen I was convinced of
that much. “I cannot be idle all my life.”

Still Berend hesitated. He was overworked to
the point that the offer I had made was most appealing, but he had
one more worry. “Forgive me, my lady, but in your condition—”

“Even pregnant I can sit and add numbers,” I
said, touched by his solicitousness. Obviously Magali had seen no
reason to keep the fact of my pregnancy a secret, and judging from
this polite young man’s reaction, there was truly no shame in
carrying Dominic’s child, in or out of wedlock. “I thought I could
simply check your results at first, until I get the hang of it.” I
didn’t want to undermine his authority, nor did I care to take on
too much responsibility. “And you are Master Steward,” I
reiterated. “There should be only one person in charge, to keep the
potential for error to a minimum.”

As we went in to dinner Berend was whistling,
relieved to have help, thrilled that ’Gravina Aranyi herself would
be his apprentice. I, too, was happy, having found a real
occupation, one that was more interesting than planning the dinner
menu, or supervising the maids’ work.