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A bit fewer than you'd expect from the cultivated land, he thought, in the quick estimate any farmer-or warrior-could make.
This Victrix place had around four hundred acres of plowland and lea, not counting rough pasture; and apparently excellent equipment to go with the fine fat land-reapers, disk-plows, mowing machines, hay balers, cultivators, and threshers-so they probably produced a hefty surplus as well.
Children and dogs were playing in the lanes, or working at chores with the chickens and turkeys and gardens and homes. Field workers were walking in, or riding bicycles home, or dropping off from a couple of wagons fitted with benches, and he could see a woman putting pies to cool on the ledge of a kitchen window. Smoke rose from chimneys, and a smell of cooking food filled the air along with the homey scents of any village; his stomach growled-it had been a long time since a not-very-good lunch. The folk he could see looked well fed, well if roughly clothed, and not overworked; they greeted their lord's son with easy courtesy
But less of bowing and forelock-knuckling than yo u 'd see in, say, Barony Gervais, he thought dryly, as the wagons headed off towards the storage sheds and the guardsmen to their homes.
Besides the homes the village had a schoolhouse shuttered for the summer and flanked by a small reading-room-cum-library, a bakery, a butcher's, a tavern and two small shops selling sundries, a smithy, a leatherworkers' shop and a carpenter's, a clinic and doctor's office, two churches with spires, a baseball diamond with bleachers, and a drill field with an armory attached where the local militia's gear was stowed. It had a sign that read NATIONAL GUARD SPECIAL RESERVE.
"And we've got piped water to all the vaki houses now," Heuisink said, pointing to a row of great three-story windmills that turned briskly with a metallic groaning noise and poured their yield into earth-walled water tanks. "Plus hydraulic power for grinders and so forth. And a swimming pool for the vakis, not just one for the house."
He spurred ahead to carry the news of their arrival. "Vakis?" Rudi asked Ingolf when he'd gone.
"What they call the work-folk here," Ingolf said. "From evacuee; you know, city folk moved out to the farms, what they call refugees most places. Though the Heuisinks treat theirs well-they all get a share in the crop and what the Colonel sells of the farm, and they can run stock of their own on the pastures. A lot of these Iowa farmers still just give vakis their rations and a little pocket money, the way they did when all they could do was hoe a row if they were pointed at it and shown how."
Odard and Mathilda nodded-the Portland Protective Association had done something much like that before the War of the Eye forced reforms on them, although under the newfound aristocracy that Norman Arminger had created from his Society cronies and gangster allies, rather than the pre-Change owners of land. Edain snorted quietly, voicing his feelings on that matter, but then the Mackenzies-meaning mainly Juniper Mackenzie and her friends-had split up their land into family units as fast as the refugees had learned the skills they needed. Sam Aylward had been a farmer's son in England, too.
Ingolf shrugged. "Don't use the word in front of the Colonel, by the way; he doesn't like it. They're bigger than most even here in Iowa, of course. Back home in Richland, the Farmers and the Sheriffs need their refugees to back 'em up come a fight, of which we've had a fair number, so they rent them land of their own and don't try to make them work full-time on the Farmer's fields. Here…"
"You'd be pretty silly to try and treat cowboys bad. You wouldn't see 'em for dust, if they didn't just shoot you," Virginia Kane said. "In the Powder River country we never allowed any of that slavery nonsense the Cutters have. Though I've got to admit, some refugees did end up doing chores on foot around the ranch house all their lives, if they couldn't learn to be useful with the stock. Not most of 'em, though, and surely not most of their kids."
"Yeah," Fred Thurston said. "But a ranch isn't like a farm, Virginia. Dad left the Ranchers pretty much alone back home in Boise, but he made people who owned big crop farms split up their land as soon as people could handle it-had to use troops to make 'em do it, sometimes. And he used the army to bring land under the furrow, then settled guys on it after they'd done their three years. He wanted to keep hired workers expensive and scarce, and for everyone to serve in the army and then the militia."
"I don't think your brother, Martin, will necessarily continue those policies," Father Ignatius said thoughtfully.
"No," Fred replied, his lips compressed. "But I will."
"We Dunedain don't do much farming at all," Ritva said with satisfaction. "Something I've never regretted. We do Rangers' work, and we hunt."
Mathilda sighed. "We Armingers don't farm either," she said dryly. "But we need the peasants or we don't eat-and neither would you Rangers, unless you didn't mind no spuds and bread with the venison, and nothing but buckskin to wear. You just do it at second remove."
"One more thing," Ingolf said, his voice dropping as much as it could and still carry to ten riders. "Colonel Heuisink's first wife and the kids he had with her were in New York on a visit when the Change hit. He gets sort of out-of-sorts if it's mentioned, even now. Or at least he did when I met him before, and I doubt he's changed."
They all nodded; that sort of thing was common enough among their elders. The pain of never knowing what happened to your kin was made worse by the grisly knowledge of what had probably happened to anyone caught in the big cities, which started with quick death by fire and violence for the lucky and went downhill from there. The stories brought back by explorers from Oregon who'd probed into California were still enough to chill the blood, and they'd heard Ingolf's tales of what lay in the death zones of the East Coast, where scattered wild-man bands still lived out their grisly game of hunt and dreadful feasting.
Grooms came to take their horses when they drew up on the curved graveled driveway before the house; Rudi had the usual minute's trouble persuading Epona that the stranger wasn't someone she should hammer and bite. When he looked up, Colonel Abel Heuisink was walking down from the veranda.
The master of Victrix Farm was about the same height as his son, but older than Rudi had expected-in his sixties, with only a fringe of cropped white hair around a bald dome. His spare frame was erect and vigorous, though, and his eyes bright as turquoise in a seamed, ta
"A pleasure to see you again, sir," Ingolf said.
"Always a pleasure to see the man who hammered some sense into my boy Jack, Captain Vogeler," the older man said. "It was more than I could ever do."
"You couldn't put him on the latrine detail for a month. That helped."
The master of Victrix turned to take in the rest of the party, blinking a little at Rudi's kilted height. When he shook hands it was a brisk no-nonsense gesture.
"Come on in," he said. "Plenty of room at di
Showered and in his set of clean clothes, Rudi felt much more human. The room he'd been given was larger than his at home in Dun Juniper, with a window that overlooked the gardens behind the house; it smelled pleasantly of rose sachets, and there was even a shelf of books above the desk, and the luxury of a private bathroom. The floor was interesting; he recognized broad heart-of-pine planks, worn but beautifully fitted-they must have been there since the house was built a century or more ago.
Our host's kin are old in this land, he thought. Good for folk to have roots.
A servant girl knocked at the door. "Di