A Modest Kingdom

    “What brings you to Greenbough, strangers?” The gate guard asked as the two of them walked up to the village palisade.

    “Just food and a place to stay for the night,” Sean replied. “If you have an inn we could find a room at, that is, otherwise we’ll keep on our way.”

    The guard smiled, “That we do! It’s not large, but the ‘Tipsy Thistle’ on the village square should do for you. The food is decent,” the guard waggled his hand from side-to-side, “but the ale’s quite good. The innkeep makes it himself from the local rye, it’s got a bit of spice to it but it goes down smooth.”

    “It sounds perfect, we’ll go and grab a table.” Sean replied.

    “Ah, sorry for the trouble, but I’ll need your names and hometowns before you enter. I’ll need to collect the gate bond as well.” The guard’s smile turned apologetic. “You seem like trustworthy enough folk, but the village elders like me to keep a record of who’s visiting in case there’s trouble. The fee’s five copper pennies a head – it helps keep out vagrants and the like. It will be returned to you when you leave minus a penny each for the gate fee so long as you behave yourselves.”

    “Of course! Just a moment.” Sean fumbled at his waist for his coin purse. Sifting through the coinage inside, he saw large and small coins of copper, silver, and gold. As he selected ten of the small copper coins, he used the time to think back on the map he’d been shown by Mog.

    He didn’t want to say they were from close by in case the guard was familiar with the villagers. On the other hand, he didn’t want to say they’d traveled from the other side of the island either. He tried to remember something somewhere in the middle that could seem plausible.

    Sean handed the coins to the guard. “I’m Sean and this is Flick, we’re travelling from Kent’s Hollow looking for a new place to settle.”

    Flick favored the guard with a grin, “Sean here had all the lasses back home fighting over him, so I told him we needed to move on before he caused a riot.”

    The guard laughed, counting the coins and putting them away. “I’ve never heard of the place, but hopefully you’ll find it quieter here in Greenbough. Maybe even enough to stay, eh? If not though, the name’s Ryan. Make sure you either leave from this gate or ask for me before you depart so I can give you your bond back.”

    Sean nodded to Ryan in thanks, walking through the gate and into Greenbough. He noticed that the majority of the buildings were of modest size, almost uniformly raw timber and white clay. As far as he could tell they looked to be in good repair. Like Corvane had reported, the people they passed seemed lively and in good spirits. The raven himself circled the village, his white body blending with the wispy clouds dotting the sky.

    The first thing Sean noticed beyond the walls was the smell. Whiffs of woodsmoke and drying peat mingled with the scent of fresh manure. It wasn’t strictly unpleasant, but it was a far cry from the city smells he’d been used to. A pair of young boys walked past the two of them, each carrying a bundle of rushes. The older of the two nodded in their direction in greeting, but nudged his companion to give them a wider berth.

    “I guess ‘Stranger Danger’ is a thing even in another world.” He noted quietly to himself. He couldn’t help but smile a little.

    “Busy folk,” Flick muttered beside him, ears and eyes following the bustle of the village. “I suppose there’s too much to do in a village this size for them to waste on idle chatter.”

    “Oh, I don’t know, I’d say the practice of standing around at the water cooler is very much alive and well” Sean replied, catching the way a gaggle of women had paused doing their laundry to surreptitiously eye him and Flick. Their whispering turned to loud discussions of the weather the moment he caught them staring. He waved awkwardly and nodded, hoping he wasn’t gesturing offensively by accident.

    “What’s a water cooler?” Flick asked after a moment.

    Sean couldn’t help but snort. “A magic device that turns productive people into gossipy old hens.”

    The lane led them into a small green space between homes. Rows of fruit trees lined the path, creating a small orchard that was currently being tended by a pair of older villagers. The fruit themselves looked similar to apples in shape and size, but were a bright lilac rather than red. Small hand baskets full of the fruit were scattered around the orchard, a small harvest for a small copse of trees.

    One of the men was shaving the skin off of one of his prizes, the light purple rind spiraling off to reveal familiar white flesh. He raised a hand in greeting, thankfully putting Sean’s earlier concern to rest, right as Sean heard an indignant honk from the ground in front of him.

    Sean glanced down in alarm to see a gaggle of birds strutting unconcerned across the grass, their mottled green and brown plumage having hid them from notice. One large goose stood between him and the rest of the flock, eyeing him with what could only be construed as indignance.

    “Stranger,” the man called. “Mind your step! Those geese are meaner than they look. Old Aaron here is still nursing a bruised shin from his last tussle with that gander!”

    The old timer dodged a fruit thrown by his companion with a laugh, leaving it to hurtle towards Flick. The woman deftly snatched it out of the air before it could hit her, taking a loud bite out of the crisp meat.

    “Thanks for the gift, lads.” She said around the mouthful, winking in the men’s direction. Their good-natured jibes followed the pair out of the orchard and around the corner, fading as they entered a market square.

    The packed dirt of the square was dotted with small stalls and tents, no more than a dozen of the cloth-covered frames occupying the space. Permanent structures ringed the area, each bearing a shingle announcing its purpose and owner. Villagers, mostly women, moved to and from the various shops and booths, gathering the day’s necessities.

    Sean watched a woman exit what looked like the smithy and hurriedly make her way over to a group of women perusing a hawker’s eggs. The concerned look on her face and the urgency in her step made her stand out in the crowd even more than the red hair that was poking out from beneath her kerchief. Before he could think on it further, Flick tugged his sleeve.

    “Look, lad, the forge is cold. The smith must be taking a breather, which I reckon means we’ve come at just the right time to settle in for a nice lunch.”

    Sean’s stomach growled in agreement, protesting the morning’s lack of sustenance as he scanned the rest of the square. The smithy the woman had emerged from was one of the few stone buildings in the village. The forging area was open to the air of the village its roof blackened with soot. A sturdy looking anvil dominated the center of the forge, while a variety of specialized tools hung against the back wall. The shingle read simply, “Colin’s Smithy”.

    “Colin,” Flick read. “If you’ll be ruling here that’s a name you’ll need to remember. A smith is like a village’s beating heart, right alongside its miller and its baker.”

    Sean nodded, but something was bothering him. He’d done a fair amount of studying on the medieval era – both in school and for personal curiosity - and he knew that most towns of the period made their church a central fixture to the town. Looking up and at the village’s sparse skyline, he didn’t see anything that looked suitably holy.

    “Flick, does the village have anywhere to worship the goddesses? A temple or something?”

    Flick looked at him quizzically. “Temples’re a city thing, lad. In a village this size, a person’s relationship with the gods is up to them and them alone.”

    Sean grunted in understanding, but it did make him wonder. The goddesses had asked him to rebuild their faith, so something had to be wrong with the existing system. Maybe temple access was part of it, or maybe his own expectations were skewed by his past life.

    Flick directed his attention to the various other trades on offer around the square: a carpenter hawking rough furniture and simple utensils, a weaver displaying her goods beneath a rough fabric awning, a basketmaker plying her trade using the local reeds, and a baker who at the moment was pulling out several loaves of delicious smelling bread.

    Each trade was modest, but together they spoke of a community that knew how to use what bog and forest gave them. Later he would need to look beyond the palisade, at the farms and fields that fed the village, but that was a concern for a different day.

    What struck Sean most about the activity in the village was the rhythm. Everyone worked with a steady confidence, neither frantic nor idle. Where he was from the idea of children wandering unattended in daily life was almost foreign, but in Greenbough even they had a place in the running of things.

    It also surprised him how open the people here were to strangers. They had noticed him, certainly, but there was no fear in their glances – only curiosity. It gave him hope that maybe things weren’t as bad as the ladies had implied.

    Flick’s head went up, surreptitiously sniffing the air. “We’re close, lad, I can smell our quarry.”

    “Our ‘quarry’, Flick?”

    “Aye,” she said, seeming to completely miss the teasing tone in Sean’s question, “our quarry. There’re roasting chestnuts in the air.”