Time started passing quickly as it does for all of us when we have too much to do and not enough hours in the day. Before I knew it, several months had passed but at least we had something to show for it.
The deed to the property was recorded the next day, and we spent the morning loading up on supplies. I purchased a small table that could be used for drafting, a low stool, a bunch of parchment from Urul and some quills and ink for Werner. Paper was available but extremely expensive, while parchment was much less dear, so I decided Werner could use that. I had no doubt he would bitch about it as soon as I delivered it to him. When I received the deed from Nulrik, he told me the better lumber mill was managed by a human named Ferka. Ferka and I hit it off immediately. It probably had something to do with the quantities of material I talked to him about purchasing. I bought three quarters of a wagon load of lumber to start, but told him I would be back for more. Much more. By the end of the transaction, gold in hand, he was beaming at me.
Then, it was on to the blacksmith for tools, nails and other fasteners. Young Nulrik didn’t lie. The blacksmith was a dwarf, the first one that I had ever had a conversation with. Her name was Sathebeena, and she was stout and heavily muscled. She had taken a couple of young orcs as apprentices and the way she bossed them around I believed her to be a spare the rod and spoil the child sort of employer. Somewhat surly when I first met her, she also warmed up a little when we started talking business. Money has a strange way of greasing the wheels of business relationships. I also had no doubt she started talking shit on me as soon as we left but that’s alright. I started shit-talking her, too. It was all in good fun on both sides, I am sure. I bought a plow, several scythes, and a variety of other tools – hammers, crowbars, knives, rakes and the like – and a keg of nails.
Then, it was time to head back home. When I got there, I found that Patrick had gotten everything squared away in my absence and people were already out and about doing the little work they could without adequate tools. I assume that after the initial shock wore off, everyone decided to make the best of things. I do mean everyone. Even Helvia was out working, which was a nice surprise. Mariam approached me and explained that it was too late in the season to plant most things, but we could work on preparing the fields for planting next year. I am glad she knew what she was doing. I certainly didn’t. The emphasis for the rest of the year, if we were going to provide any of our own food, was livestock. I put that on my list for the next trip into town.
Oh, and Werner did bitch when I gave him the parchment instead of paper. He perked up a little when I presented him with a ballpoint pen I dug out of my backpack. I assumed the ink in the pen would soon run out because it was one of those cheap hotel pens that never have very much ink to begin with. But, for a few moments he was satisfied.
Several days after we moved in, we were visited by a family of orcs, our closest neighbors. Goulug was the father, Ugor was the mother, and they had a whole troop of children whose names I had difficulty remembering. They came by to introduce themselves. Their farm was half a mile away, although they did more herding than farming. I liked Goulug. He was a down to the earth, quite personable orc. I told him if they ever needed help to feel free to ask and he did the same. They stayed the whole afternoon, and he even ordered his children, four boys and three girls, to pitch in with the work we were doing. I asked him where to obtain livestock, and although he didn’t have much to sell he gave me a few leads. We fed the whole bunch late that afternoon and they left happy. It’s nice to have good neighbors.
We were always short of supplies. Over the course of the next several weeks, I probably returned to Greynard every second or third day. As promised, I rotated who accompanied me. I even took Mero one day, and although he was older than most of the other children that were idle, as they put them to work early in these parts, he seemed to enjoy playing with the other children. I could hear some of the little ones making some nasty comments about him being five-fingered, and they tended to gang up on him, but it didn’t diminish his enjoyment one bit. That was true even though he couldn’t understand a word they were saying. Maybe it was because of that.
One day when I was in town, I encountered a small group of ugly, bald, three foot tall humanoids with green skin. Ah, the goblins, I thought. Never having spoken to a goblin, I walked over and introduced myself, trying to engage them in conversation. They were all armed with primitive weapons and stared at me with their beady red eyes but seemed very surprised that I could speak goblin. I wasn’t quite sure how to explain that one away, so I didn’t try and they didn’t press. Although I could sense a certain tendency for violence and wanton cruelty in the way they spoke to one another, they were cordial enough to me. Their village was located high up in the hills quite a distance from our farm, so I didn’t believe I would be seeing them much. As a parting gift, though, I bought them a small cask of ale from a local brewer whose brewery was located close by, and I think by the time they left they had a favorable impression of me.
Many of the other locals weren’t particularly warm to me, demonstrating a certain clannish attitude. To them, I guess that your family had to have spent several generations around the village to be worthy of attention. Like any other group of people, there were squabbles and feuds aplenty in the village, some going back decades. Even when someone wanted my opinion on a disagreement of some sort, I took great effort to maintain neutrality. It made those who wanted me to champion their side a little unhappy, but I really didn’t want to step in it. I didn’t know who I could afford to piss off, and who I couldn’t. See, even I can learn.
Over time, we made fairly extensive progress on our farm. The fields were quickly cleared. First, we tore down and reconstructed the barn and located the new one a little more conveniently to the house. It was nice and large, with a raised loft we could use for storage. We built a couple of new privies and made certain the corral was stable and secure. Then, we started work on the house.
It took a month and a half of hard work to build our home. It was a sprawling, single-story affair with a steeply pitched roof, and quite expensive to build I might add. I may or may not have fallen off the roof when we were shingling it. We overbuilt things quite a bit. I had my own bedroom, while all of the others had roommates. I told myself that I had to have my own room to keep up appearances, but secretly I was glad to have the excuse. The room assignments were Patrick and Jahhaf, Helvia and Mariam, Lapina and Aleyda, Bowen and Xeng, and Mero and Werner. The bedrooms even all had small fireplaces for heating. We also had three other rooms for guests or future additions to the group. The rest of the house included a spacious kitchen, a dining area, a room for bathing, and a larger great room with a huge, wide stone fireplace where we could all gather and socialize when the day’s work was done. Werner tried to work out some method for indoor plumbing, but the lack of adequate materials stymied him, so we had to make due with the new outhouses. I knew in the heat of the summer thy would start to stink, and wondered if anyone around here sold lime.
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By the time the house was completed, winter was encroaching. Yes, this world did have seasons. After asking around, though, I found out that winter was not particularly mild here. Although snow was not a daily occurrence, several times annually there were substantial snowstorms. I am glad we decided to build the roof with a serious pitch. We didn’t need it collapsing in the middle of one of those storms.
Of course, once the house was completed we realized that we didn’t have any decent furniture. There was certainly enough skill among us to cobble together some crude furnishings, but those wouldn’t feel too homey. Therefore, it was back to town with a whole stack of gold to hire every carpenter that did furniture work to supply the house. We also had to lay in our supplies for the winter. We didn’t want to get caught with our pants down during a major snowstorm, isolated and starving. So once again, my wagons trundled back and forth over the increasingly well-worn path to Greynard.
Oh, we also needed clothing for everyone. That we could manufacture ourselves, but we still needed to buy the supplies, and I was coming to understand that supplies were never cheap, especially for a newcomer like me.
I had given over the original house to Werner, who had essentially moved in, making it his combined living quarters and workshop. I didn’t hear many complaints from Mero when he lost his roommate. Werner actually managed to cobble together a somewhat usable pedal sewing machine, which caused clothing production to speed up. I say somewhat usable, because it broke down at least once a day and required hours of maintenance.
By begging, overpaying, wheedling, and pleading I was able to obtain some livestock. We reconstructed the chicken coop and had eggs most mornings. We had three roosters originally, and a dozen hens, but one of the roosters kept chasing Mero around squawking and pecking at him and that rooster made good soup. I acquired four porcine animals, the pigs of this world, somewhere between the domesticated pigs of my youth and wild boars. We would need a smokehouse and spring house eventually, but with the weather turning colder food preservation was becoming less of a concern. We also put together a small herd of elands, which were indeed the creatures that Levan had been herding. I hoped to acquire more in the spring, during birthing season.
While we were busy building, Xeng took it upon himself to harvest a good supply or firewood. His powerful musculature made him an efficient lumberjack, and it was obvious that he had split wood before.
Once the house was built and people started relaxing a little bit more, our internal squabbles subsided. Of course, they didn’t go away entirely. I can’t think of a week that passed when someone’s feelings weren’t hurt, but usually the hurt feelings were soon mended. I could tell that people were buying in to the group identity, even Bowen, and relationships were stabilizing.
Once the barn was complete, we resumed our weapons practice in it, secured from prying eyes. Everyone’s language skills were improving, some more than others. When the first snow of the season blew in over the hills, I was content to sit in front of the fireplace on our new furniture, reading.
Where did I get something to read, you ask? From time to time, peddlers would make their way through the village, staying for a day or two. When our visits coincided with theirs, I would browse their wares, and at great expense was able to pick up a book or two. It was worth it, though. One set of books, a three volume history of this land, started filling in the gaps in my understanding of the political structure of the world.
Apparently, there were two large continents split by an inner sea. A large island occupied the middle of the sea, the seat of the government. Each continent was split between three great lords, there being six in total. Feudalism was the government of choice, and titles split again and again as they descended down the feudal food chain. From context, I learned that I had landed in this world in the ass end of nowhere. Even the nobles from this area where considered provincial by their contemporaries, and much larger cities existed closer to the shores of the inner sea. We lived in flyover country. That’s fine. I did on Earth as well.
Apparently, not every lord practiced slavery of five-fingered humanoids, but from the descriptions I read, my people’s lot in life was not particularly good anywhere. Even where they were free, my people were considered the lowest of the low, confined to the poorest neighborhoods.
I spent a lot of time that winter considering what I could do to make things better. After I had outfitted the farmstead, I had only spent around a thousand gold on everything including the purchase price. That left some money in my pocket, but not nearly enough to effect social change. If I put Werner to work, I could maybe introduce some new products to market and profit from them, but there wasn’t much of a market where we were living and I didn’t want to move everyone again.
Instead, I began thinking about the island, a place where people new to the world frequently popped in. We might not be able to save everyone, but for those people we could make a difference. Of course, that would mean leaving, taking the best fighters among us out to Shroud Hallow. We would have to sign on for an expedition. And once we got there, we would have to make some sort of plan to save who we could. I didn’t know what challenges we would be facing but I knew myself well enough to realize that I couldn’t anticipate them all. I also couldn’t take everyone who could fight. Some would have to stay here and protect everyone else. We would go in the spring, after planting was done. I desperately wanted to take Patrick, but he was the glue that held everyone else together. After much consideration, I decided it would have to be me, Bowen and Aleyda.
I hoped the rest of the winter would pass in peace, but as usual fate had other plans.