Conquistador (58 page)

The sheaves got a little heavier as the day wore on, the sun went higher in the cloudless blue sky and the temperature went up to the low eighties, although it was a dry heat that sucked the sweat off his skin. There was less chattering, as most of the workers fell into a steady rhythm that didn't call for thought. He did himself; it had been a while since he'd worked on a farm, and never like this, but it wasn't as bad as humping the boonies in body armor and full pack with an M240 machine gun in his arms.

Much better, in fact; more like backpacking. He wasn't fighting to keep alert all the time so some
shaheed
—or just plain “shithead,” as the army slang put it—the sensors missed couldn't shoot him, or wondering if he was about to step on a mine.

The sound of a long spoon beating on an iron triangle jarred him out of his trancelike state. His back twinged just slightly as he stood erect and peered from under the brim of his hat; that happened when you repeated the same sequence of motions over and over, and especially if they weren't motions you were used to. A tractor and flatbed loaded with wicker boxes were parked under one of the oak trees.

“Lunchtime!” someone shouted, which raised a ragged cheer; he looked upward, and then confirmed it by a glance at his wrist—one o'clock in the afternoon.

Everyone stacked their forks and headed toward the valley oak near the edge of the harvested zone; he'd asked someone why any of the big trees were left in the fields, and the reply had been, “For nice.” The dappled shade felt very nice indeed; the native turf had been left out to the drip line of the tree, in a smooth oval eighty feet long. The long grass was getting dry and prickly with the season, and the asterlike blue flowers that looked pretty from a distance had fanged stems, but the flatbed's cargo included blankets. Those gave evidence that horses could sweat, but he was fairly pungent himself by now. Adrienne settled down not far away, stretching like a cat.

“Stiff?” she asked.

“Well . . . a little,” he said. “Maybe I should have listened more carefully.”

The flatbed also held two large oak casks, used ones that had once held wine for aging; from what he'd heard, you could do that only once or twice before switching to new. Now one held ice-cold water, and the other fresh-squeezed lemonade, equally icy. He sluiced the dust out of his throat with a mug of the lemonade, downed three of the water to replace what had left rimes of salt on his T-shirt, then took another of the lemonade, savoring the cool tart-sweet taste. Eager hands helped to unpack the wicker baskets. They held wrapped piles of sandwiches made by splitting long loaves of crusty bread in half—bread so fresh-baked that the butter had half melted into the inner surfaces. The filling was shaved honey-cured ham, slathered with homemade mayonnaise, onions, pungent cheese and garlicky mustard. There were also crocks of potato salad speckled with bits of pickled red pepper and laced with boiled shrimp, and . . .

“Roast quail?” he said dubiously. “Bit fancy for lunch in the field, isn't it?”

Someone laughed, picked up a rock from the dusty soil and shied it at a section of bound sheaves not far away. A dozen quail who'd been pecking at grain on the ground—and still in the ear—ran or flapped away.

“Watch out for the birdshot,” the wag said, and got a round of laughter.

“Point taken,” he said, loading his plate; saliva was flooding into his mouth at the smell. “No objections.”

He began stoking himself, then stopped for a moment to spit out a piece of the predicted birdshot and chuckled. At Adrienne's lifted brow he went on: “I was remembering times I was so hungry even MREs tasted good,” he said. “I'm not quite that hungry now . . . but this is a lot better than MREs.”

“Mmmphf,” she said, taking the meat off a quail's drumstick, then waving the bone around. “Not quite the gulag-style horror you were expecting, hey?” she added with an ironic tilt of an eyebrow.

“Well, not so far,” he said grudgingly. “Pass the salt, please.”

She did so with a shrug, still smiling slightly. The whole party had been working since dawn, and working hard. When the chatter began after the first wolfish assault on the food he listened and then joined in cautiously; he
was
here to gather information, after all. Most of it was nostalgically familiar from his own boyhood in the upper Midwest: crops, weather and gossip. A few of the older teenagers were going steady and sat together; the rest tended to clump by boys and girls, with a lot of mutual teasing; the older residents of Seven Oaks made a clump of their own, and the
nahua
sat off to one side. A few of the youngest of the contract workers were picking dubiously at food strange to them, but the rest were tucking in enthusiastically. Nearly everyone was ready enough to chat to the newcomer; they assumed he was a friend of Adrienne's, which gave him massive status.

The kids from town were having a reasonably good time; this was harder work than other summer jobs, but paid a lot better too. They and the estate-born seemed to have similar plans, for the most part: finish high school and do their two years of national service. That would be nominally military for the boys, but he got the impression that it involved more time laboring on public works; they did get basic infantry training, and every adult male had to keep his militia weapons at home. Girls did their service as teaching assistants in elementary schools, helpers in hospitals and nursing homes, or various types of government jobs. Both regarded the service with a mixture of resignation, excitement at getting away from home, and a straightforward corn-fed patriotism that indicated that ironic cynicism wasn't well regarded here.

A few were going to try for the University of New Virginia afterward; evidently you did that only if you were extremely bright, or wanted to be a doctor or high school teacher or something of that order, or had parents who could afford to pay a stiff price for putting on a little polish. The domain—the Rolfes—would pay the fees for a student who did well enough on the entrance exams. The majority said they'd just look for jobs, which none of them were very worried about, and get married. A few wanted to be policemen or sailors exploring worldwide, or Frontier Scouts or troopers in the Gate Security Force; most of the Seven Oaks youngsters planned to work here, or on other estates, or to become farmers on their own eventually.

“Ever wanted to set up for yourself?” Tom asked Henning.

The
mayordomo
shrugged and ate a fig—they were finishing off with those, and cherries, and watermelons. He was a middling-tall man in his forties, with graying brown hair and a slender, wiry build. Tom ate some of the cherries; he'd always liked them, and these were right off the tree, with a dark, intense sweetness better than anything he'd tasted before.

“Couple of my brothers did take up allod farms here in the domain,” he said. “Mrs. Durrant—Miz Rolfe's great-aunt—loaned 'em what they needed to get started and said a good word for 'em with her kinfolk. I like it better working here at Seven Oaks. Money's about the same, year over year, and it's steadier—I don't have to worry so much about prices and such.”

He waved around at the estate. “Managing a bigger operation's more fun, too, plus it's less grunt labor. A lot of what you're seeing is my work, and my father's and grandfather's—our sweat, and our brains too.”

“I meant own land, not rent it,” Tom said.

Henning laughed. “Like my grandfather?” he said. “
He
came through the Gate as a man grown, and
he
owned land in Oklahoma. Leastways, he thought he did—until the bank taught him different.”

He shook his head. “Heard enough about it from him! He was a good farmer and a hard worker; just not someone to be always figuring how to swallow up the neighbors. So one of his neighbors ended up swallowing
him.
No, thanks. I'd rather answer to a real human being I can talk to, not some set of flesh-and-blood computers who chew you up and spit you out whenever the numbers say they should.”

Tom winced slightly.
Well, yeah,
he thought.

Unless you were doing something like growing individually manicured organic zucchini for a high-powered gourmet restaurant, American agriculture meant getting bigger every year or going broke and getting sold up—that was what rising costs and falling prices in a static market meant. As far as he could tell, an allod tenant's rent here in New Virginia was considerably less than most on the other side of the Gate paid in mortgage and taxes. The tenant here lived better on the whole, and wasn't under anything like the sort of relentless competitive pressure his American equivalent was. Landholders competed to get tenants instead; it certainly sounded a lot easier for a young man to get started—there were reasons the average farmer back home was in his fifties.

Of course, here you have to defer to a patron from the Thirty Families,
Tom thought.
Of course number two, they don't seem to be as nasty as the Internal Revenue Service, most of the time.

“What's Ms. Rolfe like to work for?” he went on.

“Not bad,” Henning said. “Bit wild as a kid, but that was in Mrs. Durrant's day. Settled down good after that. She knows she's boss, but doesn't think she's great God almighty, if you know what I mean, or that she knows everything.” The older man got up and dusted crumbs off his shirt. “No rest for the wicked—I don't like the sound of the engine on Maconi's rig. Better have a look at it before we start up again.”

Tom rejoined Adrienne; something she'd said back in Napa had come back to him. “What was that bit you said to the kids at that soda joint in town? That you weren't asking for their votes? What votes?”

“For the House of Burgesses.” At his quirked eyebrow she went on: “The name's from Old Virginia's history. Sort of a House of Commons to the committee's House of Lords; it votes on taxes and suchlike. Of course . . .”

“. . . we don't need no steenkin' taxes,” Tom said. “And I'll give you any odds you want the Families put up most of the candidates, right? Competing by proxy in this burgesses thing.”

“The Old Man set it up that way,” she said; they were a little apart from the others, a social space she seemed to get automatically when she wanted it. “He's not what you'd call a fervent advocate of democracy, but he does believe in checks and balances. People need the Families, but every member of the Families needs the support of his Settlers, his affiliation. If he tries riding roughshod over them, they'll go find someone else.”

Everyone dozed for an hour after lunch. The rest of the day was harder; he was thinking too hard, and couldn't get his mind back into an easy working rhythm. The working day in harvesttime continued until sundown, too, which was around eight—longer, for those whose turn it was to take shotguns or rifles and night-sight goggles and try to keep the wildlife out of the cut grain. There would probably be more quail for lunch tomorrow. By the time he'd ridden a flatbed back to the manor, showered, and wolfed down an enormous portion of stew and bread and steamed vegetables, he was also feeling the truth of what Adrienne had said—muscling the sheaves high all day had been a bad idea. Individually their weight was trivial, but doing some quick mental arithmetic showed how many tons of the stuff he'd been heaving, mostly to a height well above his head.

I'll feel worse in the morning,
he thought.

He did.

“I always find a map helps me think,” Tom said, looking up at the one he had pinned to the corkboard, as the people summoned to the meeting trickled casually in.

At least I'm not too tired to think,
he mused. After four days of the harvest his body was adjusting nicely; he had plenty of energy for the after-dinner planning session.
I think I'm even losing a little weight—and I didn't think I had any surplus.

“Feeling better?” Adrienne asked, bending to thump the ribs of one of the big dogs that hung around her. The white-bibbed cat looked down disapprovingly from the top of a big globe mounted in a wheeled frame of oak and polished brass.

“Somewhat,” Tom replied.

In fact he was feeling excellent, better than he'd felt since his last long hiking trip, up in Glacier National Park. The aches had gone; he was in fundamentally good condition, after all. He also felt loose-limbed and strong and quick, as if a spring in muscle and bone that had been fading for the last few years without his being quite conscious of it had come back sometime in the past week.

“I always get the sensation my body's flushing out poisons after a spell FirstSide,” Adrienne went on. “Whether or not it's true.”