48: Busy Hands

There is a famous Shallyan parable called the Parable of the Seventeen Farmers. That there were exactly seventeen people at the farm, I took to be a sign from Shallya that they should be afforded her mercy. That Solvej was the eighteenth person to join the farm, just as the parable recounts, I took to be another sign. Though I have no idea what of.

Once there was a farm with seventeen farmers. It was a normal, hard-working farm like any number across the Reikland and beyond. But one day, a new law came from Altdorf about how the farm work was to be split up. According to the new law, a half of the farmers had to plant the seed, a third of the farmers had to milk the cows. and a ninth of the farmers had to feed the pigs.

So, the village elders got together and tried to work out who should do what to accommodate the new laws. And of course, as there were seventeen farmers, they did not know whether eight or nine of them must now plant the seed. And they could not work out whether five or six of them should milk the cows. And they did not know whether one or two of them should feed the pigs.

Then a traveller came to the farm and asked why no one was working. And the elders explained that they could not follow the new laws. The traveller said that she would help them. She told them that she would stay at the farm, and then they would be able to work. The elders wondered how this could be, but the traveller just told them to obey the laws.

Now there were eighteen farmers, and the elders knew that nine of them must plant the seed. And they knew that six of them must milk the cows. And they knew that two of them should feed the pigs. And those seventeen farmers went to work in accordance with the law. And the traveller was free to go on her way.

And that is how Shallya moves among us.

Solvej rushed back to tell us about the eyes in the forest. And we went up to the top of the watch tower to check them out. It looked like they weren’t marching on the farmhouse, after all, but merely standing at the edge of the forest seemingly watching the farm. Maybe they were waiting until we fell asleep when they would come in and murder us. We decided we needed to make sure the farmstead was defendable as soon as possible. The first step was to remind Solvej she had to go back out to the courtyard and shut the gate.

Kurtis grabbed a bow from the bunk room. He seemed to think he was an expert archer, as well as all the other expert things he thought he was. He reminded me of the archery contest he went to when we were about thirteen, but all I recall of that contest was Kurtis standing behind a girl that he fancied and strumming his lute every time she tried to shoot. The fact that she got angry with him and threatened to shoot the arrow at him just confirmed to Kurtis that she had really fancied him. It was funner and simpler back then.

Watching the glowing eyes, we could sort of tell that six pairs were lower than the others, and their relative sizes confirmed to Solvej that they must belong to her colleagues who were running the farm.

Otto went to the stables to see if he could catch one of the green-eyed rats. We thought that it might give us a better idea of what was going on with the green-eyed villagers if we could study a rat. Schnitzel managed to kill a rat for him, but it looked pretty normal, so he laid a few traps around the stables and found some pickled onions to bait them with. He put the dead normal rat in the pickled onion jar to study it as a sort of scientific experiment. If you can’t get a live rat to study the effects of its green eyes, get a dead one with normal eyes, I suppose.

Erhardt went to a lot of trouble organising the defence of the farmstead, ordering us which doors to block and which defensive positions to take up. I don’t really have much of an opinion on that sort of thing, but even I noticed Erhardt was being a bit pushy. Kurtis was definitely getting annoyed by it all and wondered to me and Otto who had put Erhardt in charge. Otto told him that Erhardt was educated, which seemed a bit like a Halfling accepting someone’s leadership because they were tall.

We ended up watching the eyes for some time. The shorter ones went away quite soon, but the others hung around. Some went and then perhaps came back, but there were always a few of them there.

We eventually decided that the eyes wouldn’t be coming for us that night and grabbed some bedding from the bunkhouse and set up a watch, two in the watch tower while the other three of us got some sleep.

Solvej and Otto did the first watch. Solvej explained that she had been content at the farm, and it had been the safest she had felt for a good while. She said she enjoyed the hard work and had a vague ambition to retire to her own farm one day. Otto agreed that ‘busy hands keep angry hands busy.’ And so Solvej had to explain that she wasn’t angry, and got a bit angry about it.

After a couple of hours of not much happening they woke up me and Erhardt for our shift. I can’t really remember all the details, but I had had some strange dreams. I had been dreaming about the opera when Gulgad had died. I’m not sure why, because I hadn’t even been there, but I guess enough people had told me things about it that it was playing on my mind. Nobody at the opera had a face, or something, and a gate opened on the stage and there were pink strands of mist coming out of it reaching out for the players and the audience.

Then I saw a vision of abandoned farms and rural buildings. The Newstead farm was among them. And there was a murky green-brown mist covering them. And then, briefly, I saw an image of thousands of mutated people and beast creatures, like we had seen in the minotaur forest, and they were flooding into Altdorf and overwhelming the place. And then they woke me up.

It was more of a vivid dream than I usually have, and I think it was some sort of divine vision. I wasn’t sure about the opera details or the strange colours of the mists, and so while we were on watch together, I asked Erhardt about it. He told me that he recognised the various spell of the college wizards by their colours, which wasn’t really a colour but more of a metaphor. The colour of the magic surrounding the gate at the opera and the club for fighting was also recognisable and similar. But he said the colour he could see coming from the glowing green eyes of the farmers was different again.

He asked me about the miracles I perform and whether there was some sort of underlying colour or other distinction which could differentiate the various divinities. Apart from some glowy hands and the odd bird flying by, I had to say there wasn’t.

Then we got into a sharp scientific debate about the nature of divine magic compared to that of college magic and although it’s not necessary to put the details down here, we concluded that divine magic was far superior because it came from the gods and college magic only came from humans so was inherently flawed and dangerous.

Fortunately, it was soon time to change the guard and we woke up Kurtis and Otto. Just before I went back to sleep, I felt the need to wake up Solvej to see whether she had also had strange dreams, but she hadn’t.

Kurtis said he was happy enough to do the watch on his own without disturbing Otto, which was unusually selfless of him, but Otto offered to keep him company anyway, which was nice of him, too. Otto asked Kurtis where he got his musical ideas from, and Kurtis was happy to talk about that for two hours. But then they got talking about Otto becoming a priest and whether Kurtis was married to servant aunt Clara. And in the end, Kurtis ended up calling Otto an idiot.

In the morning light, the green glow from the watching eyes dissipated, and we made breakfast. I got down Matthias’ birthday ham and made sandwiches for everyone. Meanwhile Otto collected three rats from his trap. One of them was still alive. It was bigger than the rest and had green glowing eyes and so we put it in the pickle jar to see what would happen. Then he helped me with the sandwiches.

We had decided to go and take a look in the forest to see what the deal with the farmers was. Erhardt managed to convince Otto to leave the rats behind. He said that he didn’t want diseased thing with us, but Otto was adamant that once a rat dies everything living on it died, too. My eyes were feeling a bit itchy, so I went to the bedroom and had a look in the mirror, but everything looked fine.

We followed the farmers’ tracks out to the forest. On the way Kurtis got a bit upset that Erhardt was telling us what to do, and he seemed to think he should be our leader as he had been the gravin’s champion. Solvej insisted that she was brains of the outfit and was leading us anyway.  Solvej and Kurtis told Erhardt that he had not been like this before because he was scared of Gulgad because he was immune to his magic, but Erhardt insisted Gulgad was a genuine friend. From what I could tell Erhardt and Gulgad had been friends, and Solvej and Kurtis had actually been scared of Gulgad. Solvej was really backing Kurtis up, though, as I think she was angling to be made manager of his farm.

On the edge of the forest Solvej checked the ground and expertly discerned which direction the farmers had travelled. And Schnitzel picked up their trail, too, and ran after Solvej. I have to say that for someone who couldn’t find a tavern in Marktplatz when we first met her, Solvej had matured into an impressive expert hunter and tracker. Otto made an effort to tell her what a great tracker he thought Solvej was, but I don’t think she thought he was being sincere.

I noticed that once we got out of the sunlight into the shade of the trees my itchy eyes began to feel a lot better. I thought the bickering was over but Solvej and Erhardt kept going on about Erhardt saying that perhaps he had fallen over and impaled himself at the opera on purpose, to get Gulgad in trouble, or something. And they pointed out that all this bad luck and dark god influence that we had been suffering had only happened since we began hanging out with Erhardt. Personally, I don’t have a problem with Erhardt, apart from his magic, and his mysterious ways, and his cryptic comments, and the messages he keeps getting from his college, and his always ordering us about, and calling us menials, and his changing facial features, and the way he frightens Otto about Schnitzel, and his misunderstanding of divine power, so I think they were being a bit unfair on him.

With all the arguing we were lucky to hear some voices ahead of us within the woods. Erhardt said he heard someone saying to protect the children. And then we saw a large tree that had been undermined causing a cave-like shelter beneath it, and the farmers were stood in front of it, and we could see the farm children huddled behind them.

I walked towards them and told them they had nothing to fear from us, which seemed to put them at their ease, and I told them we wanted to help them. Solvej recognised Gustav and Emily and the rest of the farmers she had been living with and asked them to come back to the farmhouse with us. They told us they couldn’t and that something had happened to them. They were obviously very frightened of something, but it was good to see that they looked normal and healthy. But I think Erhardt looked at them with his magical scrutiny and determined that they had a hint of the murky green-brown magical wind about them, and every now and again, their eyes seemed to glow green.

I was glad that Ursula was not with us, as I suspect that she would have already been flailing them all to death in the name of Sigmar.

I decided that this group needed to see the power of Shallya at work. I beckoned one of the children towards me, it was Tina the daughter of Emily and Gustav, and prayed to Shallya for a miracle to rid her of whatever ailment was affecting her. Even Otto joined us for the prayer. Although I felt the mercy of Shallya course through us, and the purity of Tina’s heart, when I had finished, I looked into Tina’s eyes and could still see the green taint. I think it was clear then, that this was no disease, but a permanent mutation, something that even the power of Shallya couldn’t combat.

Anyway, we handed over the ham sandwiches we had brought with us, and although the farmers were plainly hungry, they refused to eat them. They said that they suspected it was the latest batch of grain that they had turned into bread that was responsible for their changes. I hoped this was not the case as we had been eating plenty of that bread since we arrived, I thought, as I rubbed my eyes.

Kurtis told the farmers that as he was the owner of the farm, they would be able to stay there, but I think they feared what would happen as soon as any outsiders visited the farm. They would soon be reported to the witch hunters. And so we left them there, in the forest. I asked them if there was anything they needed, but they didn’t want anything, and so we told them we would come back to visit them first thing tomorrow, to make sure they were ok.

So we made our way back towards the farm. We had barely gone out of earshot of the mutant farmers before the row erupted. Erhardt and Solvej were adamant that the farmers needed to be killed. I think they said something about putting them down like animals. Then they had the idea to poison them. Even Otto was for killing them, saying they were like rats who carried disease and that if they were killed then maybe everyone would stop blaming rat catchers for the plague.

I think I had always suspected that my colleagues would react like this if we were ever put into this sort of situation, and I wasn’t disappointed. I missed Gulgad, suddenly, as I didn’t think he would be driven by fear and ignorance like the rest of them. The only ally I could find was Kurtis, who said they were welcome to come back and work on his farm, but it was clear to me that he was only thinking about the income from the farm.