Chapter 84 - The Farm in Irttat

 

Chapter 84: The Rotting Garden 01

The first image they had captured on the photographic emulsion was now mounted on the western gable wall of the house, facing the street, playing on a continuous loop.

People had given it a beautiful name: the Curtain of the Milky Way — after the way it sometimes caught the light of sun and moon at odd angles, scattering a rippling shimmer that set the imagination wandering.

A conch shell from the Kraken Coast east of Irttat sat on the attic windowsill. The merfolk's song drifted through every daylight hour, calling and answering the music playing on the gable wall — together, they became one of the curious sights of the Briar Street neighborhood. 

Word spread, and people came from all around. Foot traffic in the area increased noticeably, much to the delight of the nearby vendors, who were smiling at every passerby from morning to night.

The gramophone conch had been purchased from Irene's general store back in Irttat. Its making was drawn from an ancient book of magical implements — the same source as the craft behind the Sturgeon-eye Lamp and the Messenger Feather-Box.

Simply put, the making of such things was not difficult: one shell of a marine mollusc, seawater from the same source brought to a boil, dissolved edible gold, powdered lapis lazuli, shed snakeskin, and dried nettles, all subjected to repeated soaking, polishing, and treating, until the nature of the shell was altered, and the faint thread of its capacity to hold and carry sound in the mystical world was preserved.

For Irttat, with its small size and long-lived inhabitants, there had never been much need to record sound via gramophone conch, and in Irene's shop it had gathered dust for years.

No one had imagined it would find such an unexpected purpose in the human world.

Beyond the conch shells Linnea had shared with her young companions, merchants had begun, one by one, plucking up their courage to knock on Lucita's door and ask whether the gramophone conch was for sale.

To this, Lucita's answer was: soon.

With a lull in her schedule, Lucita turned her attention to her shop.

It was not specifically the gramophone conch that had brought her around to the matter of a shop.

In fact, long before she arrived in the human world, she had been turning over the question of how to earn an income here.

In the end, Lucita's plan was to sell seeds.

Where there are elves, the yield of plants can be continuously enhanced through the nurturing of life-force. 

In Irttat, with its fertile land and abundant resources, crop yields reached three times that of the original strain, a figure that balanced well with the vitality drawn from the soil.

But beyond the deep mountains, after the elves had been driven away, people went on year after year sowing their crops in exhausted earth, yields pitifully low. A single infestation of pests, a single flood, one unexpected drought… any of these was enough to wipe out an entire year's harvest.

People who should have lived had died by the millions.

And so —

Seeds from Irttat, she thought, would be a very fine commodity here.

This was the first time in over a month that they had taken steps toward earning a livelihood.

Shelves and a counter, everything was already in place.

She had a carpenter make a wooden sign reading Lucita's Seed Shop to hang above the doorframe, gave the place a thorough cleaning, and the seed shop was ready.

Lucita did not advertise, as she had when she first went into business in Irttat. At this point, she was not particularly short of money.

She busied herself in the shop for an entire day, putting everything in its proper place.

It was not until the sun was nearly setting, its golden-red light burning from the horizon all the way to the front steps, that Lucita reluctantly stopped, and looked around her new domain with satisfaction.

On the shelves in the corner, a whole rack of gramophone conches was arranged. Each about the size of a hand, all soaked in lapis lazuli and glowing with a mysterious blue sheen. Their raised ridges caught the evening light and refracted it in shades of gold and red, like fish scales.

All of the conches had, for now, been loaded with only one piece of music: Starfire. After each piece finished, there was a spoken announcement crediting the composer and the singer.

"Composed by Franka. Dedicated with reverence to my teacher, and to all my people living beneath skies of cloud and shadow. Sung by Linnea. Accompanied by Franklin…"

Franklin, Linnea had explained, was currently one of her closest companions among her young friends.

Linnea was also quite interested in the project of recording songs and planned to record several more pieces later, but that was a matter for the future.

On the two central rows of shelves, seeds were laid out in bags.

Lucita had borrowed from the display style of Garcia's seed shop in town: large bags of seeds arranged neatly along the shelving, each bag stitched with a small square of colored fabric, its contents written on it in ink.

Wheat, rice, soybeans, peanuts, the grain varieties were the most numerous, placed in the most prominent position. All had been brought over from Irttat.

Beyond these, a separate row held vegetables: potatoes, peas, radishes, Chinese cabbage, tomatoes. And then there were the flowers unique to Irttat: Christmas rose, mountain peach, blue fescue, and pimpernel.

Judging seed quality typically takes the better part of a year, and with the shop newly opened, business would not be easy. So Lucita planted the seeds one by one in flowerpots, used the life-gift she had only recently awakened just before leaving the village to coax them into rapid growth, and devoted a dedicated shelf to displaying these instantly fruit-laden plants.

The heads of wheat were astonishingly full and plump. Bean pods hung in clusters. Out-of-season fruits bent their branches low. In a riot of different colors, vivid and striking, they were arrayed within the otherwise plain shop. The effect was quite arresting.

Beyond that, double-headed roses, hydrangeas, and white-edged camellias rustled in the draft, wrapped in the dim evening light. The whole shop took on an atmosphere that was strange, lively, and gentle. 

Lucita’s pricing was not high. One pound of seeds cost just two and a half copper coins — twenty-five sous. At that rate, twenty pounds of seeds, which cost five silver coins, would meet a household’s planting needs for an entire year. 

That price was roughly three times the market price for ordinary seeds, which was admittedly high, especially given that people had long since learned to save seeds from each harvest for the next year, and seeds on sale were rarely seen.

Five silver coins was approximately the net income of a seamstress working five full days, not a trivial sum, but hardly an unbearable one. Even a dockworker, selling her labor, could earn enough for a bag of seeds in a single day.

Lucita had no desire to distort the market by turning ordinary commerce into charity, but she also had no intention of earning her living off the backs of the poor.

The business that would truly fill her pockets lay neither in the gramophone conches she intended to sell to the middle classes and merchants, nor in the seeds she sold to the poor, but in a far broader and more promising market: selling storage spaces to those wealthy enough to afford them. 

On the first day of opening, they carried the richly blooming out-of-season flowers and plants from the flowerpots to the doorstep, layer upon layer of leaves and branches overlapping — abundance and flourishing pressing against each other like waves — as though it were the mythical kingdom where famine never came and flowers never ceased.

Lucita's Seed Shop was officially open.

The first customer was a brown-haired young woman, impeccably dressed, with a grave expression.

On stepping inside and seeing Lucita herself seated behind the counter, she was visibly startled. She paused, then bent into a bow. "Lord Cameron. Good day."

The young woman's manners and dress were unmistakably telling. Even to Lucita, who was not especially well versed in human etiquette, it was clear who she was: a respectable household steward.

Lucita's shop had opened, and those who had been watching her closely could no longer restrain themselves; they wished to probe and gather information.

Ever since receiving her title, Lucita's actions had grown bolder by the day. Not only because a Marquis had opened a modest little seed shop, but because of the astonishing out-of-season crops she was displaying.

Some mages guessed she kept a rare captive elf to stimulate plant growth. Others speculated more boldly, believing she had once again blazed a trail in the magical world and mastered an entirely new branch of esoteric magic: life magic.

Both guesses were accidentally half-correct.

Lucita was not particularly interested in what anyone thought. In any case, if a wealthy fool had shown up on her first day, she would not have been foolish enough to turn away business. 

She smiled pleasantly. "Good day. What can I help you with?"

The steward had not expected Lucita to conduct business in person and hesitated for a moment, then displayed impressive adaptability. “I…I need some potato seeds.” 

Lucita moved obligingly to go and weigh out some seeds for him.

The steward would not dream of making a person who stood as her master's equal go to such trouble, and had never encountered a Marquis quite like this. She said hastily: "I can fetch it myself. I wouldn't presume to trouble you."

And with that she made her way to the shelves, working carefully to read the letters on the bags and trying to locate the ones containing potato seeds.

Then, through the sparse shelving, the steward's gaze fell upon the row of shelves along the back wall.

Was that not the recently rather mysterious gramophone conch glittering and shimmering there?

Lucita had already come around to her side.

The steward abandoned any thought of potatoes, and pointed directly across. "Is that —"

"A gramophone conch," Lucita said, equally pleasant. "I noticed everyone has been quite interested in them lately, so I made up a batch to sell as novelties. Are you interested as well?"

"Of course!" The steward's eyes lit up at the word sell.

How unexpected, sent here to probe and gather intelligence, and there was an unexpected windfall waiting for her…

Such a miraculous thing, and this Lord Lucita not only allowed her own children to give them out freely to playmates, but had them sitting boldly on a simple shelf, sold like vegetables at market!

She asked with some urgency: "Might I ask, my Lord, do these conches also sing?"

"More precisely, they record and carry sound." Lucita smiled and reached casually into the air, producing a large conch shell and holding it out. "Have a look first. Shall I play you a piece so you can hear it?"

The steward swallowed. Her gaze fixed tightly on the hand from which Lucita had produced the conch. Her mouth opened, and then no words came out.

"Oh, there's another customer," Lucita said, glancing back toward the doorway, where a girl of about ten had wandered in with a look of complete bewilderment. Lucita smiled at her, then pressed the conch firmly into the steward's hands without leaving room for objection, and went to attend to her new customer.

Lucita had long worried that after opening, the parade of noble spies arriving one after another would frighten away her real customers. And true enough, the respectable figures hovering outside the door, itching to come in, were already beginning to drive off the farmers who had been drawn in by the seeds.

Fortunately, there were always children who "couldn't read a room". This one had simply blundered in, heedless of the situation, and held out a coin damp with sweat. "Sis, I want to buy some rye seeds."

Lucita accepted it with a warm smile. "Hello, we don't carry rye seeds here. Would ordinary wheat work for you?"

That smile alone was enough to swallow the steward's half-formed "how dare you" before it even reached her throat.

Even the girl knew that ordinary wheat was considerably more expensive than rye seed.

She hesitated. "My mother said to use one silver coin to buy eight pounds of rye seeds. We can't afford wheat…"

"What a coincidence!" Lucita said, with apparent surprise. "Today we have an opening discount. One silver coin buys exactly eight pounds of wheat seeds!"

The girl's eyes brightened. "Really? Can I really get eight pounds of wheat seeds?"

"Of course." Lucita scooped up several handfuls of seeds, placed them on the counterweight scale, and repeated the process a few times, before saying: "Exactly eight pounds, not one grain more or less."

The girl checked the scale several times, thanked her repeatedly, and picked up the package.

Eight pounds of seeds was still a fair bit heavy for a child of ten or so. The girl heaved it up, panting with each step, and made her way with considerable effort toward the door.

Lucita blinked, and called her back. "You're our very first customer today, you get a small gift."

Even though she could barely carry what she had, the word gift was enough to make the girl stop. She looked up at Lucita with a hint of anticipation.

The steward inwardly shook her head.

The poor are always so greedy!

Lucita caught the steward's thought, and gave the barest twitch of a smile.

She reached into her spatial storage and produced a shell left over from an old container-making project. With a single directed thought, she fashioned a small storage space of several cubic units within it.

She held out the simple shell to the girl, whose expression of expectation had begun to fade. "Put a drop of your blood on it, and it will belong to you."

A girl of ten didn't understand the significance of blood. When she heard Lucita's instruction, she complied with guileless obedience.

She extended her finger. Lucita produced a needle seemingly from nowhere, and pricked the tip of her little finger. A single drop of blood welled up.

Lucita pressed the girl's fingertip against the shell —

In an instant, the bewilderment on the girl's face slowly resolved, then her lips curved upward in a dazed, wondering smile.

She looked up at Lucita with urgency, and saw something in that calm, composed face — a small, quiet encouragement.

The girl's eyes fell half-closed. In the next breath, the eight pounds of wheat in her hands vanished.

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