stjorthotic Chapter 74: Red Horse and Grey Pancake
Chapter 74: Red Horse and Grey Pancake
The first real heavy snowfall sealed off the Blue Fork River.
This wasn't the kind of light, easily scattered snow that falls in early winter; it was dead snow, like lead weights pressing down on rooftops and tree branches. The snow fell for a day and a night, without wind, only that white that filled the sky and earth, blindingly bright and endlessly cold.
The smell in the longhouse has changed.
Two weeks ago, the sour smell had a hint of the raw, pungent odor of boiled beans, but now even that pungent smell was gone, leaving only a dry, earthy, and rotten woody smell. The pot was no longer simmering porridge, but rather the "ash cake" ordered by Pollifer. It was a lump made by mixing the last bit of old wheat with the bones and scales of dead fish smashed from the glacier, along with crushed tree bark powder, and then baking it dry over a fire.
Eating this kind of thing will cause a person's gums to bleed, and their feces to become as hard as a rock, sometimes even with dark red streaks of blood.
In the coldest corner of the longhouse, a vagrant belonging to the second labor group was shivering against the stone wall. His right foot was swollen out of his tattered straw sandals, his toes had turned purplish-black, and the edges were covered with a layer of greasy yellow fluid. It was frostbite.
Gareth, holding half of the ash cake he hadn't finished eating, walked up to the vagrant, squatted down, and handed him the ash cake.
The refugee glanced at him, but didn't take it; he just shrank his head further into his tattered sheepskin coat.
"Eat something," Gareth said, his voice low but insistent. "You'll need the strength to get through this."
The refugees didn't move.
An older laborer nearby glanced at Gareth and shook his head: "Sir Knight, he can't eat anymore. He had bloody diarrhea all night yesterday, and his intestines have been torn apart by those fish bones. Eating now would only hasten his death."
Gareth's hand froze in mid-air. He looked at the half-eaten, grayish-brown, hardened pancake, then at the refugee's blackened foot, his brow furrowing into a deep knot.
He took the half-eaten pie back and stood up.
Toren stood at the other end of the longhouse, holding a coarse stone and sharpening the short sword. He saw Gareth's movements and the waiting-to-die refugee, but he didn't go over, nor did he even falter in his sharpening rhythm.
Gareth walked over to Toren and glanced at the short sword in his hand.
"No blood today, coach," Gareth said. "No need to sharpen it so much."
Toren paused for a moment.
"If the knife is dull, chopping wood is difficult; if a person is dull, they won't even know how they died." Toren's voice was hoarse and rough, as if it had been soaked in ice water.
He turned to look at Gareth. There was something in those greyish-brown eyes that Gareth had never seen before.
"You should go to the market outside the town and listen to what those merchants who have sneaked in from the south have been gossiping about lately." Toren lowered his head and continued to test the sharpness of the sword blade with his thumb. "They say that our ruthless baron, back in Fair City, for a few coins, hired a monk in white robes to bleed a believer of the Old God who had kowtowed to the Heart Tree alive onto the Seven-Pointed Star."
Gareth was stunned.
“That was a trial by combat,” Gareth retorted. “Although I wasn’t there, Steward Polliff said it was legal.”
"Whose law?" Toren's voice suddenly lowered, as if squeezed out between clenched teeth, "Southern law, or the law of his ledger filled with numbers?"
Toren didn't look at Gareth again. He put away the whetstone and sheathed his short sword.
He rubbed his rough thumb heavily against the frayed leather of the scabbard.
Then he stood up and strode out of the longhouse.
At the bottom of the stone tower, the fire in the charcoal brazier was about to go out.
Otto sat behind the stone table, draped in his heavy grey linen cloak. He used his right hand to flip through the inventory list on the table, which had seen no new arrivals for three consecutive days.
Pollifer stood by the table, his face as pale as paper.
"My lord, the caravan from Haijiang City hasn't come for ten days. The last time they came, they brought nothing but moldy, stale beans. They said the heavy snow blocked the roads, but I checked the tracks of passing merchants; there were only full carts heading towards Haijiang City, not any heavy carts coming this way." Pollifer's finger drew a heavy line on the record board. "Earl Jason isn't collecting taxes; he's waiting for us to starve to death so he can come and collect our corpses."
"To the south."
"The blockade of Blackwood has been tightened. They've erected stakes on the ice, and any ship without a pass to Raventree City that approaches the shallows will be shot at with crossbows. The waterway is completely cut off."
Pollifer swallowed hard, his voice trembling slightly.
"My lord, those golden dragons in the inner treasury... if we use them now to buy a batch of grain at a high price on the black market in Haijiang City, it should at least be enough to get the people in the second labor group through this month. If this continues, we'll rot inside before Blackwood even attacks."
Otto raised his head; his grey-blue eyes held neither anger nor pity for death.
"If I touch that money, Sea Frontier City will know that Hohenzollern has revealed its hand." Otto's voice sounded hollow and cold in the icy stone chamber. "A baron who has revealed his hand doesn't even qualify to mine for Sea Frontier City. They will triple the price of grain until they have squeezed every last copper star out of us."
"How long has Maria been gone?"
Pollifer paused for a moment, then immediately checked the records in his mind: "Fifteen days, sir. She took thirty cans of white salt and went around the eastern mountain path. By now, if she hadn't been intercepted by Blackwood's scouts, she should have reached the south bank of the Red Fork River."
Otto did not speak.
He was calculating the time, the weather, and also the greed of those powerful nobles in the south.
Just then, a sharp, distorted long whistle rang out from the watchtower outside the stone tower.
It wasn't a short, urgent siren indicating an attack, but rather a warning sound signaling the approach of a large convoy.
Pollifer abruptly turned his head and looked out the window.
Amidst the wind and snow, a long, black dragon appeared on the main southern road leading to the Blue Fork Valley.
It wasn't a dozen or so people, but a huge convoy of more than twenty heavy-duty horse-drawn wagons. The wagons were pulled by purebred southern draft horses, their hooves shod with iron hooves that made a dull rumble as they trotted across the snow.
At the very front of the convoy, a dozen or so cavalrymen clad in chainmail and wielding long spears led the way.
The wind and snow made the flags in their hands flutter loudly.
It was a reddish-brown background with an embroidered image of a proud red warhorse with its forelegs raised.
Stonewalled City. The Brecken family.
Otto stood up, his stiffness causing him to pause for a moment, but he quickly straightened up.
"She did it!" Pollifer's voice cracked with extreme excitement. He looked at the red banner as if it were a lifeline falling from the sky. "My lord! It's the Brecken family's caravan! They've broken through the blockade of Raventree City!"
Otto picked up the longsword leaning against the wall and hung it at his waist.
"It's not a breakthrough." Otto pushed open the stone door, the cold wind whipping his gray robe. "It's Jonos Brecken who has finally found an excuse to openly hold a knife to Tytos Blackwood's neck."
The convoy stopped in front of the outer gate of the gray stone wall.
Maria Frey jumped down from the lead carriage. Her dark windproof cloak was covered in snow, and even her eyebrows were frosted.
She walked up to Otto, took a heavy leather pouch from her waist, and handed it to him with both hands.
"My lord. The Earl of Brecken has taken all thirty cans of white salt."
Maria's voice was a little hoarse from the wind, but every word was clear.
"He gave us 20,000 pounds of rye for the winter, fifty barrels of cured fat, and two carts of the finest Southern pig iron ingots."
She looked up and stared directly at Otto.
"The Earl of Brecken has asked me to tell you that as long as the salt kilns of Hohenzollern are still burning, merchant ships and caravans flying the red horse flag will have no trouble on the Blue Fork. He wants to see if the Raventree guards of Tethos Blackwood dare to shoot through the Brecken family's grain wagons."
Otto took the leather pouch, which contained the remaining gold dragons from the transaction, as well as a trade contract sealed with the Brecken family's sealing wax.
He looked past Maria at the Brecken soldiers unloading their cargo. The heavy sacks were being tossed onto the snow, the sound of grain hitting the ground.
The refugees in the longhouse heard the commotion, and eyes crowded through the cracks in the doorway to look out. When they saw the grain sacks marked with ears of wheat, some gasped with excitement, but no one dared to run out.
Pollifer's hands trembled so much he could barely hold the charcoal stick.
"My lord..." Pollifer turned his head, looked at Otto, and waited.
Otto looked at the grain sacks bearing the red horse emblem, then at the distant, snow-covered mudflats where the Blackwood boundary markers once stood.
"Polliver."
Otto withdrew his gaze and handed over the trade contract.
"Check the supplies. Store them in the warehouse. Starting tonight, all labor service groups will resume full rations."
He watched as Pollifer turned to a new page.
"Have the kitchen pick two pigs from those fifty buckets," Otto said, his voice strained by the wind and snow. "Wash them clean. There should be some oil in the pot tonight."
Pollifer wrote it down.
"Yes, sir."
The wind whipped snowflakes against the red horse banners, making a rustling sound. Otto looked away from the grain and turned to walk towards the stone tower.