"You'd think they'd never seen a human before," Denat snorted.
"Buncha rubes," Tratan agreed with a grunt. "Ripe for the plucking." He looked down at the diminutive human striding along beside him under his huge rucksack. "What should we teach them first?"
"Poker," Poertena replied. "Always start wit' poker. Den, I dunno. Maybe acey-deucy. If they really stupid, cribbage."
"They pocked," Cranla said with a grunt of laughter. He waved at one of the harvesters. "Hello, you stupid peasants. We're going to pluck your merchants for all they're worth."
Julian pointed at the Mardukan tribesmen with his chin.
"They've taken quite a shine to Poertena," he said to Despreaux.
"Birds of a feather," the other squad leader responded absently. "Is it just me, or does this place look fairly run down?" she went on.
The company was approaching a fork in the road, where the travelers had to choose between Marshad or Pasule. There was another official looking building on a mound where the roads diverged, but although it was in better repair, it had obviously been converted into an agricultural outbuilding.
"Yeah," Julian said, glancing at the structure. "I think the loss of the Voitan trade must have hit them hard."
The company took the left fork and headed for the river. The solid stone bridge which crossed it was the only structure they'd so far seen which appeared to have been properly kept up. In fact, there'd been some obvious renovations—the well-fortified guard posts on either bank looked like fairly recent additions.
The guards on the near bank gestured for the caravan to halt, and Julian looked around as the long train of flar-ta dragged to stop. An outcropping of the underlying gneiss of the Hadur region rose steeply on the right side of the road, he noted. The oxbow river took a bend around it, and an extension of the outcropping acted as a firm base for the bridge.
The hill was surmounted by trees and what appeared to have once been a small park. A well-made road in very poor repair wound to the summit, but it was obvious that the track was rarely used anymore. Only a thin path cut through the layered silt and entangling undergrowth on its lower sections. Despreaux followed his eye, and shook her head as Captain Pahner argued with the guards on the bridge. They obviously felt that the travelers ought to keep themselves—and the business they represented—on this side of the river.
"This place has really been hammered," she observed.
"No shit," Julian agreed. "It looks like it used to be a pretty nice place, though. Maybe it'll get that way again with Voitan back in business."
"We'll see," Despreaux said. "The old Voitan wasn't built in a day."
"No," Julian acknowledged as the caravan lurched back into movement, "but that guy from T'an K'tass looked like he was going to try to do it pretty damned fast."
"That he did," Despreaux said, but her tone was a bit distracted, and she nodded at the sour looking guards on the bridge as they passed. "Those guys don't look happy."
"Probably pissed at all the money they're losing," Julian said. "We're about to pump a lot of cash into the local economy... on the other side of their bridge."
"We hope," she answered.
The approaching city-state was huge, much larger than Q'Nkok, but it had a seedy air. Once past the bridge area, the road was once again rutted and cracked from traffic and ill repair. In fact, it was in worse shape than it had been on the other side of the river, and the peasants plowing the fields to either side of the roadbed also seemed less interested in the passage of the company.
Flar-ta were useless as draft animals, because they were far too large to move effectively in the fields. That meant that the only way to plow was to use teams of Mardukans for traction, which was a remarkably inefficient method. It was also extremely hard work, but while the plowers on the far side of the river had taken the opportunity for a break while they watched the company march by, those on this side all kept their heads down, concentrating on their tasks. And while the majority crop had been barleyrice on the far side of the river, on this side most of the fields were being sown with legumes or a crop the humans didn't recognize. The Marines had encountered the legumes before, and promptly christened them bullybeans, but they'd never seen the other crop, and the locals seemed to be planting a lot of it. At least two-thirds of the fields they could see seemed to be dedicated to producing whatever it was.
"I wonder why there's a difference," Julian said, pointing it out to Despreaux, who shrugged and gestured across the wide expanse of fields. There was another hill barely visible in the distance, but it was apparent that the local city-state dominated a vast area.
"They've got plenty of room," she pointed out. "This is probably just their area for bullybeans and... whatever that other stuff is."
"I guess," the intel NCO said. "But that much change just from one side of the river to the other?" He shrugged. "I'm no farmer, but it seems kinda strange to me."
"I suppose we'll find out why they do it eventually," Despreaux said with a shrug of her own. "But I wonder what that other plant is?"
"Dianda," the itinerant tinker said to the chief of staff. "It is... urdak into wosan... like that," he finished, gesturing to the chameleon cloth uniform the civilian wore.
The local was named Kheder Bijan. It was obvious he expected some sort of reward from the company for guiding them to the clearly evident city which the ignorant foreigners could never have found on their own, but the chief of staff was happy to have him along, anyway. He'd been a good way to update the language program, and he was a mine of information about conditions around Pasule. He was strangely uninformative, however, about Marshad.
"Ah!" Eleanora said. "Something like flax or cotton!" The software had updated the local dialect well enough for Pahner to talk their way across the bridge. She was puzzled by the fact that the officials of Pasule had been more trouble than Marshad's. The local guards had simply stepped aside, almost as if the humans had been expected.
"Yes," the local said. He rubbed a horn in thought while he considered the best way to explain. "We make cloth from it for trade."
"A cash crop." The chief of staff nodded. "Where are the subsistence crops?" she asked, looking around. "I'd think you'd be planting more barleyrice than this."
"Well," Bijan said, fingering his horn again, "I don't really understand farming. I fix things." He gestured with his haversack. "I suppose there must be other farms around here somewhere."
"Who owns the land?" Eleanora had been pleasantly surprised to discover that in the Q'Nkok region the farmers owned their own land, for the most part. The farms were passed down through complicated cultural "rules" that moved them from generation to generation more or less intact. That denied inheritance to most of the "younger sons," but that was a common problem for agrarian societies the galaxy over, and the important thing was that the farms weren't broken into minuscule lots that were impossible to manage. Nor were they sold or lost in chunks to form giant latifundia. The Houses of Q'Nkok had been well on their way to the sort of backward agricultural "reform" which would strip the peasantry of land ownership, but hopefully the destruction of their power would stop that in its tracks. At this level of technology, small-scale "yeomanry" farming was as good as it got.
"I'm not sure who owns it," the tinker said, fingering his horn again. "I've never asked."
The chief of staff blinked, then smiled cheerfully. The "tinker" had blithely nattered on about the minutiae of the inner workings of the council of oligarchs who ruled Pasule, and the different groups of independents and sharecroppers who farmed the land on that side of the river. Now, on the side that he claimed he was from, he suddenly clammed up. She wouldn't have survived a day in the imperial court if that hadn't set off some alarm bells.