Knots in the Roots

The Guild lowered its price eleven days later.

It did not announce it. Guilds never announced anything. But one morning, the bakers of the Shelf were selling wheat bread at four coppers a loaf again, and the Guild barges were coming down to the Shelf docks in daylight, and the sacks of wheat that had been sitting in the dark under the Guildhall since the autumn were suddenly, mysteriously, available to anyone who could pay. Osric Fell, it seemed, had discovered that there was no profit in holding grain that nobody needed to buy from him.

Teo heard about it from Mira, and laughed until his ribs ached.

'A price is a message,' he thought. 'And now the message is that he's a liar.'

The famine did not end that day. Famines did not end on a single day. People went on dying in the Sump for a while longer, the oldest and weakest, the ones who had been hungry too long to recover. But fewer. Then fewer still. And by the middle of the month of the Thaw, Teo's cart came back from its rounds with only the usual handful of the winter dead, and he began, cautiously, to sleep through the night again.

It was Bram who started the conversation about the fields.

He said it one evening in the cellar, in his slow, deep voice, apropos of nothing, while he was carefully mending a tear in the oilcloth of his barge with a bone needle.

"Valley fields are tired."

Hesk raised his head.

"Tired?"

"Tired." Bram pulled the thread through. "My mother says so. Every year, the valley farmers grow wheat on the same fields, or rye, or barley. Same fields. Year after year. And every year, a little less comes up. Ground gets tired. Gets thin. In the Fens, we don't do that. We move the grain around. Wheat one year. Then beans. Then barley. Then grass and clover, for the cows. Then wheat again." He bit off the thread. "Fens had a better summer. But it isn't just the summer. Fen ground is never tired. Hasn't been in a hundred years."

Teo frowned.

"Why beans?"

Bram shrugged his huge shoulders.

"Beans feed the ground. Clover too. Everyone knows that."

'...Everyone in the Fens knows that,' Teo thought, with a strange mixture of amusement and exasperation. He was starting to think that the Fens knew more than the whole of the Crown put together.

But Hesk had gone very quiet in his chair. And then, slowly, he began to smile.

"There's a Leaf," he said. "Isn't there always? A small one. Grey crate, the bundle tied with red string. I remember it because it had a picture of a plant pulled up by the roots, and I had it read to me twice and never understood why anyone would care about the roots of a bean."

The page was badly damaged. Half of it was stained brown with old water, and the bottom corner had been torn away. But the drawing at the top was still clear. A small, leafy plant, laid out on its side, with its roots spread beneath it in a pale tangle. And among the roots, dotted along them like beads on a string, a cluster of small round lumps.

Teo read it aloud.

Plants needed many things to grow, the Leaf said. Water, and light, and air. But they also needed food from the soil, and one of the most important of those foods was a thing the Makers called nitrogen. It was everywhere. The air itself was mostly made of it... nearly four parts in every five. But plants could not eat it from the air. They could only take it from the ground, and every crop of wheat or barley pulled a little of it out, and took it away when it was harvested, and the ground grew poorer, year after year. Tired, as Bram said.

But some plants were different. Beans, and peas, and clover, and a few others, which the Makers called legumes. Their roots carried small knots, nodules, and inside those knots lived small lives... the same kind of small lives that Teo had seen swimming in the water of Saint Orlen's pump, but harmless, even helpful. These small lives could do what no plant could do. They could take the nitrogen out of the air in the soil, and turn it into food. The bean fed them sugar. They fed the bean. And when the bean died and rotted back into the field, the food it had made stayed behind in the ground, for the next crop.

...This is why farmers have rotated crops for thousands of years. In 18th-century England, the four-field system known as the Norfolk rotation, popularised by figures such as Charles "Turnip" Townshend, grew wheat, turnips, barley and clover in turn. The clover restored the soil, the turnips fed livestock through the winter, and the livestock's manure fertilised the fields. Yields rose dramatically, helping to feed a rapidly growing population...

The rest was water-stained beyond reading.

Teo lowered the page.

"Turnip Townshend," Nell said from the stairs, delighted. "That's a stupid name."

"It's a wonderful name," said Hesk. "A man who was remembered for six hundred years for growing turnips. I can think of worse things to be remembered for." He turned his face toward Bram. "Do your mother's people grow turnips, ferryman?"

"For the cows," said Bram, a little defensively. "In the winter."

"Of course they do."

Teo was not listening. He was looking at the drawing of the bean plant, and at its small knotted roots, and his mind was running ahead of him the way it had on the night of the map.

"Bram. Do you have any beans? Dried ones, for planting?"

Bram reached into the deep pocket of his coat without a word, and brought out a small cloth bag, and tipped a handful of pale, speckled beans into his enormous palm. Fen beans. His mother's seed.

"Always," he said.

They planted a dozen of them that night, in a cracked clay pot full of river mud, and set it by Hesk's lamp for warmth. And two weeks later, when the first pale shoots had pushed up through the mud and unfolded their leaves, Teo pulled one up very gently and washed the mud from its roots in a bowl of water.

They were there.

Tiny, pinkish knots, no bigger than a grain of sand, strung along the fine white threads of the roots. Teo cut one open and looked at it through the lens, and inside, he saw them... a dense, crowded swarm of small lives, packed together like grain in a sack.

He sat back on his heels and laughed out loud.

"What?" Mira demanded.

"They're farming," Teo said. "The beans. They're farming the small lives. And the small lives are farming the air." He shook his head in wonder. "Everyone in the Fens knew it worked. Nobody knew why. And it's this. It's been this the whole time."

That was the beginning of the gardens.

It was Mira's idea, at first, and then Bram's — and then, somehow, it became everyone's. The Sump had no fields. It had no soil, to speak of... only stone and rubble and mud. But it had the broken buildings. There were dozens of them, Maker ruins and newer ones, whose roofs had fallen in and whose upper floors had collapsed into heaps of brick and timber and rotting plaster. Nobody used them. Nobody wanted them.

And they faced south, into the sun, along the foot of the Spillway.

So in the month of the Sowing, as the last snow melted off the rubble, people began to dig. Bram brought down mud from the riverbanks by the bargeload. Tobin the brewery foreman donated the spent mash from his vats, sour and steaming, which Bram said was the best food for ground he had ever smelled. The pyre-men brought ash. And the people of the Sump... slowly, suspiciously at first, then with a sort of grim enthusiasm... carried it all up onto the roofs and the rubble heaps in buckets and baskets and broken crates, and spread it out, and planted.

Beans. Peas. Bram's mother's clover, which grew anywhere. A few rows of barley where there was enough soil. Turnips, because Nell insisted.

It was not much. A few hundred little plots, scattered across the broken roofs of the poorest district in Calder Reach. It would not feed the whole Sump. It would not feed a tenth of it.

But it was theirs. And the beans were feeding the ground, and the ground would feed the barley, and next year there would be more.

Teo stood on the roof of the old chandlery on a warm evening at the end of the month of the Sowing, looking out across the Sump. Everywhere he looked, there were small squares of green among the grey. People were working in them, bent over, talking to one another across the rooftops in the long golden light. Children were chasing pigeons off the seed beds. Somewhere, someone was singing.

Above them, the Spillway rose up into the sky, vast and grey and ancient, weeping from its thousand cracks.

'...Huh,' Teo thought. 'It actually looks like a place where people live — not just die.'

He went to bed that night happier than he had been in years.

He woke to the smell of smoke.

It was not the smell of the pyre-yard, or of a cooking fire, or of a chimney. It was close. It was coming from below... from the back stairs, from the dark water, from the cellar... and with it came a sound that Teo knew from a hundred nightmares.

Boots. Many of them. On the brick ledge along the wall.

And a heavy iron door being broken open.