Post by lastthoughts on Oct 17, 2009 16:12:23 GMT -5
Edit: I kind of went a little bit crazy with this. Hopefully it’ll make for some interesting reading. Once I got started, it seemed like I should just keep on going. Any missing answers to Mem’s questions will probably come up quite quickly through actual RP, as she keeps on going through everyday life.
I’ve upped her age only slightly (and her height as well, but that’s for jollies). Hopefully this will still be acceptable. I tried to leave it open enough so that you all could assume or not that another person had been made master before her, because I’m not quite sure how she’ll swing into the structure. She is prepped to be in charge of her Craft for the Weyr, but doesn’t have to be. I’ll be happy to play her either way.
Recruitment: Summoned out of retirement <3
Email: Pvt.
~Character~
Name: Annika
Rank: Master-Craftswoman
Gender: Female
Age: 32
Origin: Ponaa
Family:
Grandfather--Erik, Master Farmer (deceased, old age)
Mother--Honesty, kitchen drudge, Ponaa (deceased, childbirth)
Father-- Uncertain
Siblings-- similarly uncertain
Sexual Orientation: Vertical?
Personality: The sharp smell of broken earth, the easy tilt of stems, the subtle buds, shifting colors, and all growth's slow revelations are Annika's foundations. She does not need clever words nor practiced timing; she has no drive to impress or to pull others to her. But, her solidity is like a warm embrace, and those who know her hold her precious. She is content to work and to learn, filling long hours with simple philosophy and observation.
Physical Description:
Sharp featured, fair but heavily freckled, with strong legs and short blonde hair. Annika is tall (just over six feet) and almost skinny, with a well-earned well-rounded behind and rough hands. Her eyes are grey, and just beginning to show age and hours in the sun in crow's feet at their corners.
Hobbies/Skills: Food, comfort, and, of course, growing things.
Pets: None
History:
There was a comfortable predictability to Annika's younger days. Mornings she would work beside her grandfather in the gardens and the waterways of the Weyr. Their work was the suture holding fast the threatening split between the riders' needs and the missing tithes, but he showed her to take pride more in the results alone than in their necessity. By the time she joined other children for their chores or lessons, she had already been awake for hours.
She daydreamed her way through forced theoreticals and repetitions, or concocted her own more rooted examples to pass the time. In the evenings she escaped to tend her own modest jungle: a narrow strip of green along the southeast edge of the weyr bowl, where rampant vines and pungent roots filled lines of baskets fitted with clever reed-tubes.
"Tinkerer," her grandfather called her, and tossed her over his shoulder to carry her back to their shared quarters, "Little plant-smith." His grey smile would wrinkle his face like a newborn's outcry, the eyes disappearing, and he would show her how to tally the yields and add them to the Weyr's ledgers.
These were good times. To Erik-- married to his work, despairing of the passionless efforts of his stodgy journeymen, and slightly broken by his daughter’s death-- the wiry energy and love of living things that poured from Annika was a balm and daily wonder.
Then he moved her from his quarters, trying to avoid the appearance and pitfalls of favoritism when she began her formal apprenticeship. It remained difficult: she was passionate, and had at least a four year head start on the other children. That she was also darling, understanding, and thorough did not save her from the jealousies of parents and her fellows. That she was Erik’s blood kin meant little to them: this upstart beanpole girl, quiet and self-assured, drew their ire like thread draws dragonflame.
There were no threats, no school-bully beatings. Nothing so traceable or open to reprimand from the at times irascible Master Farmer of Ponaa (With one exception: within weeks of her first lessons with the others, someone ran salt water through the tubes of her garden.).
She was ignored. After all, was it not certain that they, her supposed teachers (her grandfather’s journeymen), would be next in line to lead the craft forward (in the weyr if not the world)? It was beneath them to especially instruct witless females.
When it came time to move beyond any basic group lessons or sessions lead by Erik himself, there was no time for her. Always, some chore needed doing, or someone would forget to tell her where to be and when. Her correct answers were brushed aside as simple and her questions dryly ridiculed.
Believing his interference would do more harm than good, Erik kept a painful distance. That was the worst of it. “No special treatment,” he said, his eyes tellingly tight. “I am sorry,” he did not say.
She had to make her own peace if it was going to stick.
She grew more serious, and more reserved. This started her habit of speaking only when she had something important to say, and lit the slow fire in her that would so come to fascinate people later in her life.
Annika’s base was strong and her mind and interest stronger still. Learning became an adventure game for her. She picked at scraps of information, unraveling and reweaving them into understanding. She followed the journeymen to their meetings with the Headwoman—finding extra chores as an excuse—and simply eavesdropped.
And when her grandfather would go out alone to walk the low-slung green skirts of the volcano’s slopes, she would walk behind him at a distance, watching.
All this won her allies, in the end.
Edwin—the herdie they called him, Eddie the heardbeast, plodding and dull-eyed—usually cursed her when she would rise to leave in the predawn hours. But one day he followed her. They walked the caverns in silence, and Annika wondered if he meant to have at her.
“Why do you do this?” he said, scrambling down behind her past rows of tall corn. His voice was almost angry. Frustrated confusion, the dangerous kind.
Anni smiled and took his large hand. She hurried them along the trails, until they could see Master Erik kneeling down by a little patch in the distance. They paused and Eddie grunted irritation. When the old Farmer moved along they went to where he had been and she crouched beside a row of staked tomatoes. Her fingers skimmed fruit and leaves as she explained. “He does his own checks, still, every morning, and when he tests something new or finds a problem, that’s what we all get sent to take care of later on,” she said. “Obsessive, really,” she added fondly.
“So you know what we’re going to do before they tell us?” Eddie half-asked, not so dull after all.
“Not always, but when you don’t it helps you to figure out what you should’ve been looking for, you see? And it’s more fun than lectures” Her eyes grew distant. “Here now,” she pointed to small wet splotches on the underside, just visible in the gathering light.
“Shaffit,” he groaned, “we’ll be grinding brownstone for hours if this has spread even a little way.”
“And washing and picking away leaves in the evening,” she added, with a nod of approval and a twist of the hand that illustrated the task. She pocketed the leaf. “I don’t think it will be that bad, though,” she said, “we should have sprayed them a few days ago. There was that week of rain we had… You know how that is for fungus.”
Eddie nodded, then smiled spontaneously and broke into a brilliant impersonation of Thomas, their tedious and toneless superior: “The. Grey. Mold. Strikes. Plants. With… Soft…Fleshy… Fruits… In… Humid… Climatesszzzzz…” He faded into a false snore.
The laughing pair trotted along after the scarecrow figure in the distance (who on most mornings went about his work with a smile of rich pride.) Annika had found a friend.
Another day found her hauling half her weight in laundry past the Headwoman while the venerable lady tended to her day’s business. Anni had paused for a breather, leaning against the wall while Thomas droned obnoxiously about his need for more properly sorted compost. It was time to sew the winter’s crops, she noted to herself, and closed her eyes while she listened to what that meant to the older farmer. (Ignore her he might, but the man knew his compounds backward forward and upside down, and a strain of corn he had been working with was proving robust and easier to harvest.)
She might have been fifteen then, shooting ever upward but still straight as a stick through the hips and chest: a fair-faced, gangly boy. A girl just beyond her in age, and touched—slathered, really—with all the curve and sensuousness Anni lacked, tapped her on the shoulder and motioned for her to step into a little alcove nearby (later they would be friends and occasionally more, today she was a whisper and a spark).
“Just wait here,” the girl murmured, and spun back out into the hallway. Surprise—both at the strangeness of her situation and at a creeping heat in her face—kept the farmer rooted there. Some minutes later, slim fingers took her wrist and she was guided into a room she’d long taken to skulking outside. The Headwoman nodded to a small stack of hides before her. “If you don’t give yourself a rest sometime, child, you are going to collapse.” Annika met the woman’s eyes, and found them kind and open. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate that somehow extra work finds its way to completion whenever I have certain visitors, but I wonder when the last time was that you went for a swim down by the lake or spent an evening with the others in the Hall.” The hides slid across the table toward her. “Copies. I want two of each of them. Once a week. You’ll save me time and I get to drive some of the shiftlessness out of those girls you’ve been picking up slack for. Half of these are my ledgers, the rest requests from that charming bald fellow who dislikes you so much.” Annika beamed her thanks, unable to speak: her eyes already greedily soaking in the rows of numbers.
The Headwoman reached out and laid a hand on hers when she went to pick them up. “It is pretty extraordinary for someone so young to have realized your craft is also about what people need and want, not just what grows best or longest and how. You’ll keep doing well. But you promise me. Promise me right now that once a week you’ll let yourself be young for an afternoon or an evening.” Her face said she was very serious, and Anni felt a deep thrum of duty. She realized it had been some time since an adult had so openly cared for her; she wished she could spend a day with her granddad again. For the first time since her garden had been ruined, she felt the chest-wrenching struggle of tears making their way from her soul to her eyes. Her ears rang.
“Thank you,” she said softly, gathering up the pages in her arms. She retreated, and found that the girl had hauled off her abandoned load for her. It was three weeks before she realized that she had not actually promised, which was good: She would have hated to have broken her word so quickly.
Work had become enough for her already, and her relationships thereafter, though perhaps deep in other ways, were never her grounding-points. It made her mysterious and interesting, but young love does not yet understand that it need not be all-consuming, and so her flings were as casual as her friendships were powerful.
Time dragged on or flew, and she was twenty one: despicably young, still. A purple-faced pair of her former instructors looked on while she recited the answer to yet another question. Their surprise at her ability to lay out answers not only to technical problems but solutions to the complex matters of shifting populations and seasonal needs of the Weyr would have been delicious to any observer who knew what she had undergone. For her it was as though she had been forbidden to speak for ages but now had found her voice. Erik nodded and went on, driving her to the very roots of each issue. There were gaps in her knowledge still, he knew, and her own research was yet shallow, but that was what journeymanship was for. And by the Craft’s own strictures she was already fully capable of taking that next step. None of the observers could argue against her promotion.
But they could make her miserable.
If they had forgotten somewhat in the intervening years that they loathed her, the majority of the Weyr’s farmers remembered it now. She had been raised before a number of her peers, and one need not have been brilliant to see that she was. Maybe it was this that let her forgive and try again over and over, that she felt that she really could come to be what they feared. That she could pass them by.
More likely, she was too busy being busy. Her new rank came with a score of new responsibilities. It is one thing to accept tasks daily, even when you have to do some sleuthing to figure out what those tasks are. It is another entirely to act as part of the head of a large infrastructure, when you are denied up to date information at every turn.
She tried everything she could think of. She gave extra assistance to the other journeymen, she confronted them directly about their issues with her, she tried to work alone, she tried sussing out their work patterns and needs without them, and she even went over their heads. Nothing worked.
One might have said Erik took her side: again and again failing to promote those who tormented her, but he always gave several legitimate reasons for doing so. Yet, as he had known it would from the start, their relationship could lead the others to only one conclusion: he was looking out for his own to the detriment of the Weyr (and themselves).
Unfortunately for any designs they might have formed, Erik’s lifetime of obsessive overwork left him beyond reproach. His methods remained studious, the Weyr well-fed, and his pet vineyard on the cooler north side of the Weyr had begun to produce grapes with a hint of the pleasing brightness one would have sworn was possible only at Benden.
Quiet Annika had no such protections. She was floundering, and she knew it. She spent one year and then another just hanging on. The apprentices who did not want her to instruct them skipped her lessons. Those who came learned quickly that doing so put them at odds with the other senior farmers, and apologetically explained as much to her.
Edwin lingered, though it had been made increasingly clear to him that he might never rise past his apprenticeship. And so she turned her attention to him, and to her own projects.
It should be noted that she had not begun her apprenticeship or even her test for journeyman with any grand plans in mind. She had no great ambition, no desire to control. She found joy in her work and comfort in the rest after a long hard day in the sun. She had no wish for children—and indeed only rare interest in men—and least of all any desire to couple herself to someone as people sometimes did even in the Weyr. In truth she might have at one time named a simple life in the fields as her greatest dream.
But the more she was pressed, the more she found herself incensed to go beyond. Each hurdle in her path made her want to sprint once she had passed it, and one day she woke up with the sure knowledge that (as others had long claimed) she wanted nothing less than to someday be the one to take her grandfather’s place.
Dramatic though it would have been, that was not the same day she woke up with the beginnings of a new idea.
She went to see her grandfather first. He looked surprised when she approached, and started to say something, but she headed him off. “I only want to ask one question about work, and I want to sit with you a while,” she said. He nodded, and slung himself onto a bare patch beneath an apple tree from which he’d been gathering bits of limb to graft. She sat beside him, and for the first time in a long while leaned back into his shoulder. “Why do you work so separately from everyone else?” She said after a while. The question had sounded serious in her head, but saying it, it was almost nonsense. Nevertheless, she let it hang there: heavy as the fruit overhead.
It was a while before he spoke. “You know I wanted to say that I don’t. But then,” he paused, gathering his thoughts, and she remembered how alike they were and smiled. “I suppose it is the way I was taught to be,” his voice was pleasingly rumbling, “There is that sense that every little secret is precious. So we teach, but not too much, not too fast, not to everyone. Especially here where we are so isolated, you would think we would want to tell everyone everything all the time, wouldn’t you?” He paused again, with a distant—angry?--look, “But then they would get into it and muck it up, eh?” His eyes caught hers in understanding. “What did you find?”
“Kenneth’s been fiddling with the pumps from the Black Lake again. He has a lady in the laundry who says that he smelled of pond scum last night. The water’s been running lower and lower, but no one’s noted it,” the last was almost hurried, for her. She took a deep breath, “Grandad. You can’t watch everything all the time; you can’t keep everything in your head all at once, or in your notes alone. I know you feel like everything has to all work together, and that’s easiest under one set of hands, but the more everyone else thinks that way, the more things are going to get missed. They are already getting missed.” She touched his arm. “This isn’t just me saying that I’m tired of being left out. It isn’t just me. The kids can’t learn because they don’t have you to remind them every day since they’re six that planting is like painting as much as it’s like mathematics, and because they’re scared to listen to anything I have to say at all. Your keeping your hands in everything isn’t letting the anyone grow, its making them shrivel up into themselves. You’ve been overwatering,” she added with a smile.
Erik rubbed his chin, then stood and offered her a hand up. “I have to go speak to a few people.” He clutched her shoulder fondly, and paced off up the mountainside.
Her next meet-up was with the Headwoman, who had seemingly not aged a day since the last time she had snuck by to drop off her weekly homework. “Still boring, I see,” she teased when Annika explained her needs, “Very well.”
For days, Anni did little but write—poring over years’ worth of records for, well, everything that had ever touched a farmer’s hands in Ponaa Weyr.
While her grandfather began to appear spontaneously at lessons and in places where the journeymen farmers were doing their more experimental planting, she downed mugs of klah far removed from her beloved sunlight and her equally beloved bed.
They met again once or twice, and people began to grow suspicious. Then the whole of the craft was gathered in the Hall early one morning. Backs stiffened when Annika began to speak, and eyes rolled. Here she went again: seeking recognition for whatever little she knew. And then she began to walk them through things they already knew, and they motioned as though they would have left had Erik not stood off to the side watching. Thus trapped, however, they listened, and listening, they began to hear what she was saying.
“…Six hundred pounds barley, stored for three weeks outside because it had been brought to a storeroom mistakenly filled with the late-harvest wheat last October, spoiled by several rainfalls, brought to be composted to deal with the loss, but then mistakenly packed again and in part delivered as feed to the herders, who, thinking someone was having them on, waited a day before requesting removal and redelivery, by which time the feed that should have gone to them was rerouted for replanting,” she paused, then continued her long litany of examples, “Thirty apple seedlings, grafted with cuttings from a citron tree because the two persons in charge of the exchange would not let the other check their stock. Two hundred pounds of freshly reaped tomatoes gone bad because the kitchens were already overstocked, which was noted in one report but not in another.” She stopped again and looked up. The group was not happy. She had known they wouldn’t be. Who likes to hear they’ve fouled up?
She picked up another page, “In ten years of records, not one case of food poisoning. Only four cases in which a scheduled reaping could not take place, all due to extreme weather. Consistent or improving food quality, as noted by the head of the kitchens and the Headwoman. Ten recorded successful attempts to improve specific strains for yield, hardiness, and resilience to local molds.” The frowns were melting into confusion.
Another sheet: “Yields consistent across ten years. Meaning,” she paused, “no overall increase in yield, despite over fifty different varieties of twenty plants being tested during that time. At the same time, a population decline in the Weyr of approximately 5%.”
“So what, Numbers?” someone said, not bothering to whisper. Laughter followed, but not among the more senior attendees. They knew what was coming, had probably noticed it long before this.
Annika looked patiently at the heckler, holding up her final page of notes, “An overall drop in the water level of the Black Lake of three inches, averaged across the last ten years. This takes into account heavy rainfall periods and droughts, so we’re talking pure drainage. Pair that with gradually decreasing yields and I think you’ll get your answer.”
Kenneth said, “You think we’re overworking the area?” It was almost a sneer, and almost a question, but not quite either: because as history will often prove, vindictiveness does not necessarily equate to stupidity.
“I think we’re not paying attention,” she said simply, and stepped aside, letting Erik take center stage.
“Nobody here has been anything but a credit to his or her craft,” Erik began, “But in treating with each other, we’ve denigrated into a pack of scrabbling wherries. I know that I have been a part of this, and for that, I apologize.” He looked at each of them in turn. It was, after all, no massive gathering. “I will not apologize for insisting that each of us be capable of taking on any task alone, because that is exactly what has always been required of any trainee by every master in long memory. What I am sorry for is continuing a pattern where it has seemed like every person must at all times be responsible for everything: that giving up control means giving up in general, unless the task is totally trivial,” He smiled, and the tense quiet lifted somewhat. “This doesn’t mean that you youngsters will not be out mixing fertilizer tomorrow morning,” the youngest of the apprentices, two boys who favored one another strongly, grimaced. “It means that you will be included in what have been becoming all too private projects, that you won’t be discouraged from working together, and that we will be having some serious discussions about how much responsibility any one person here will have. Myself included.”
The pause was longer this time, more pregnant, and there were some nods. “It also means that I’ll be spending less time out meandering like the old fart that I am and more making sure you all are playing nice. The infighting, the petty rivalry, the hoarding notes and tracking mistakes, the intimidation, they stop now.” He smacked the hides Annika had left behind down onto the table in front of him sharply. Eyes swung to his granddaughter and back almost in unison. There were mumbles, but also more nods.
Annika was expressionless, but inside she was glowing. This hadn’t been part of her plan, but she loved the man all the more for it. The timing was right: his authority would impress on them the truth of her assessment, but the thrust of the point would still belong to her.
A change in the land can happen suddenly, violently. The same can be said of people, but the trigger must be equally violent. Most change is slow, and the change in attitudes was just so.
But the Farmcrafters of Ponaa learned to respect her.
Gradually things realigned, and the ideas were hers as often as not: Small things, to be sure, but meaningful ones. The system eased out of a long compression. Those involved were happier. Annika could breathe without the steady tightness in her chest, sleep without tossing and turning, and take the Headwoman’s long ignored advice.
She found herself more and more in the company of others in the Weyr-- even the riders as they came to recognize in her an interested companion, willing to hear increasing worries and to press for war stories. It had never occurred to her to want to be a rider, and did not really now, except in that she realized how little of the world she had seen. She dreamed of travelling to the north, of meeting with her fellow-crafters and learning from them, of finding new places, new people. The crafters of Ponaa were missing the true experience of the journeyman, she realized, and that made her a bit sad. But what was there to be done? And yet, the idea sits within her still.
As cutting back branches will spark new growth, Annika’s attempts to seek some small life outside her work charged her creativity and her focus. She remained unusual and flexible in her thoughts and her efforts, and the results of her odd methods—plants in pots fed by fishpond water, treated cloth shades, tinkering with the water systems—were nothing short of impressive. More, she was able to rediscover the closeness that had faded between her and her grandfather. She would never become truly close to those who had held her back for so long, but they did come to tolerate and work with one another.
When Erik’s shaking hands took hers on the day she was made a master in her own right, the other faces in the room were smiling. He passed just days thereafter, peacefully, leaving her heavy-hearted and stricken, but un-shattered. And so it is that she has entered the highest echelon of her Craft on unpredictable ground: prepared but bereft of backup, grieving but still steady. It is now up to the Weyrleaders whether it will be her who officially takes charge of the feeding of Ponaa.
I’ve upped her age only slightly (and her height as well, but that’s for jollies). Hopefully this will still be acceptable. I tried to leave it open enough so that you all could assume or not that another person had been made master before her, because I’m not quite sure how she’ll swing into the structure. She is prepped to be in charge of her Craft for the Weyr, but doesn’t have to be. I’ll be happy to play her either way.
Recruitment: Summoned out of retirement <3
Email: Pvt.
~Character~
Name: Annika
Rank: Master-Craftswoman
Gender: Female
Age: 32
Origin: Ponaa
Family:
Grandfather--Erik, Master Farmer (deceased, old age)
Mother--Honesty, kitchen drudge, Ponaa (deceased, childbirth)
Father-- Uncertain
Siblings-- similarly uncertain
Sexual Orientation: Vertical?
Personality: The sharp smell of broken earth, the easy tilt of stems, the subtle buds, shifting colors, and all growth's slow revelations are Annika's foundations. She does not need clever words nor practiced timing; she has no drive to impress or to pull others to her. But, her solidity is like a warm embrace, and those who know her hold her precious. She is content to work and to learn, filling long hours with simple philosophy and observation.
Physical Description:
Sharp featured, fair but heavily freckled, with strong legs and short blonde hair. Annika is tall (just over six feet) and almost skinny, with a well-earned well-rounded behind and rough hands. Her eyes are grey, and just beginning to show age and hours in the sun in crow's feet at their corners.
Hobbies/Skills: Food, comfort, and, of course, growing things.
Pets: None
History:
There was a comfortable predictability to Annika's younger days. Mornings she would work beside her grandfather in the gardens and the waterways of the Weyr. Their work was the suture holding fast the threatening split between the riders' needs and the missing tithes, but he showed her to take pride more in the results alone than in their necessity. By the time she joined other children for their chores or lessons, she had already been awake for hours.
She daydreamed her way through forced theoreticals and repetitions, or concocted her own more rooted examples to pass the time. In the evenings she escaped to tend her own modest jungle: a narrow strip of green along the southeast edge of the weyr bowl, where rampant vines and pungent roots filled lines of baskets fitted with clever reed-tubes.
"Tinkerer," her grandfather called her, and tossed her over his shoulder to carry her back to their shared quarters, "Little plant-smith." His grey smile would wrinkle his face like a newborn's outcry, the eyes disappearing, and he would show her how to tally the yields and add them to the Weyr's ledgers.
These were good times. To Erik-- married to his work, despairing of the passionless efforts of his stodgy journeymen, and slightly broken by his daughter’s death-- the wiry energy and love of living things that poured from Annika was a balm and daily wonder.
Then he moved her from his quarters, trying to avoid the appearance and pitfalls of favoritism when she began her formal apprenticeship. It remained difficult: she was passionate, and had at least a four year head start on the other children. That she was also darling, understanding, and thorough did not save her from the jealousies of parents and her fellows. That she was Erik’s blood kin meant little to them: this upstart beanpole girl, quiet and self-assured, drew their ire like thread draws dragonflame.
There were no threats, no school-bully beatings. Nothing so traceable or open to reprimand from the at times irascible Master Farmer of Ponaa (With one exception: within weeks of her first lessons with the others, someone ran salt water through the tubes of her garden.).
She was ignored. After all, was it not certain that they, her supposed teachers (her grandfather’s journeymen), would be next in line to lead the craft forward (in the weyr if not the world)? It was beneath them to especially instruct witless females.
When it came time to move beyond any basic group lessons or sessions lead by Erik himself, there was no time for her. Always, some chore needed doing, or someone would forget to tell her where to be and when. Her correct answers were brushed aside as simple and her questions dryly ridiculed.
Believing his interference would do more harm than good, Erik kept a painful distance. That was the worst of it. “No special treatment,” he said, his eyes tellingly tight. “I am sorry,” he did not say.
She had to make her own peace if it was going to stick.
She grew more serious, and more reserved. This started her habit of speaking only when she had something important to say, and lit the slow fire in her that would so come to fascinate people later in her life.
Annika’s base was strong and her mind and interest stronger still. Learning became an adventure game for her. She picked at scraps of information, unraveling and reweaving them into understanding. She followed the journeymen to their meetings with the Headwoman—finding extra chores as an excuse—and simply eavesdropped.
And when her grandfather would go out alone to walk the low-slung green skirts of the volcano’s slopes, she would walk behind him at a distance, watching.
All this won her allies, in the end.
Edwin—the herdie they called him, Eddie the heardbeast, plodding and dull-eyed—usually cursed her when she would rise to leave in the predawn hours. But one day he followed her. They walked the caverns in silence, and Annika wondered if he meant to have at her.
“Why do you do this?” he said, scrambling down behind her past rows of tall corn. His voice was almost angry. Frustrated confusion, the dangerous kind.
Anni smiled and took his large hand. She hurried them along the trails, until they could see Master Erik kneeling down by a little patch in the distance. They paused and Eddie grunted irritation. When the old Farmer moved along they went to where he had been and she crouched beside a row of staked tomatoes. Her fingers skimmed fruit and leaves as she explained. “He does his own checks, still, every morning, and when he tests something new or finds a problem, that’s what we all get sent to take care of later on,” she said. “Obsessive, really,” she added fondly.
“So you know what we’re going to do before they tell us?” Eddie half-asked, not so dull after all.
“Not always, but when you don’t it helps you to figure out what you should’ve been looking for, you see? And it’s more fun than lectures” Her eyes grew distant. “Here now,” she pointed to small wet splotches on the underside, just visible in the gathering light.
“Shaffit,” he groaned, “we’ll be grinding brownstone for hours if this has spread even a little way.”
“And washing and picking away leaves in the evening,” she added, with a nod of approval and a twist of the hand that illustrated the task. She pocketed the leaf. “I don’t think it will be that bad, though,” she said, “we should have sprayed them a few days ago. There was that week of rain we had… You know how that is for fungus.”
Eddie nodded, then smiled spontaneously and broke into a brilliant impersonation of Thomas, their tedious and toneless superior: “The. Grey. Mold. Strikes. Plants. With… Soft…Fleshy… Fruits… In… Humid… Climatesszzzzz…” He faded into a false snore.
The laughing pair trotted along after the scarecrow figure in the distance (who on most mornings went about his work with a smile of rich pride.) Annika had found a friend.
Another day found her hauling half her weight in laundry past the Headwoman while the venerable lady tended to her day’s business. Anni had paused for a breather, leaning against the wall while Thomas droned obnoxiously about his need for more properly sorted compost. It was time to sew the winter’s crops, she noted to herself, and closed her eyes while she listened to what that meant to the older farmer. (Ignore her he might, but the man knew his compounds backward forward and upside down, and a strain of corn he had been working with was proving robust and easier to harvest.)
She might have been fifteen then, shooting ever upward but still straight as a stick through the hips and chest: a fair-faced, gangly boy. A girl just beyond her in age, and touched—slathered, really—with all the curve and sensuousness Anni lacked, tapped her on the shoulder and motioned for her to step into a little alcove nearby (later they would be friends and occasionally more, today she was a whisper and a spark).
“Just wait here,” the girl murmured, and spun back out into the hallway. Surprise—both at the strangeness of her situation and at a creeping heat in her face—kept the farmer rooted there. Some minutes later, slim fingers took her wrist and she was guided into a room she’d long taken to skulking outside. The Headwoman nodded to a small stack of hides before her. “If you don’t give yourself a rest sometime, child, you are going to collapse.” Annika met the woman’s eyes, and found them kind and open. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate that somehow extra work finds its way to completion whenever I have certain visitors, but I wonder when the last time was that you went for a swim down by the lake or spent an evening with the others in the Hall.” The hides slid across the table toward her. “Copies. I want two of each of them. Once a week. You’ll save me time and I get to drive some of the shiftlessness out of those girls you’ve been picking up slack for. Half of these are my ledgers, the rest requests from that charming bald fellow who dislikes you so much.” Annika beamed her thanks, unable to speak: her eyes already greedily soaking in the rows of numbers.
The Headwoman reached out and laid a hand on hers when she went to pick them up. “It is pretty extraordinary for someone so young to have realized your craft is also about what people need and want, not just what grows best or longest and how. You’ll keep doing well. But you promise me. Promise me right now that once a week you’ll let yourself be young for an afternoon or an evening.” Her face said she was very serious, and Anni felt a deep thrum of duty. She realized it had been some time since an adult had so openly cared for her; she wished she could spend a day with her granddad again. For the first time since her garden had been ruined, she felt the chest-wrenching struggle of tears making their way from her soul to her eyes. Her ears rang.
“Thank you,” she said softly, gathering up the pages in her arms. She retreated, and found that the girl had hauled off her abandoned load for her. It was three weeks before she realized that she had not actually promised, which was good: She would have hated to have broken her word so quickly.
Work had become enough for her already, and her relationships thereafter, though perhaps deep in other ways, were never her grounding-points. It made her mysterious and interesting, but young love does not yet understand that it need not be all-consuming, and so her flings were as casual as her friendships were powerful.
Time dragged on or flew, and she was twenty one: despicably young, still. A purple-faced pair of her former instructors looked on while she recited the answer to yet another question. Their surprise at her ability to lay out answers not only to technical problems but solutions to the complex matters of shifting populations and seasonal needs of the Weyr would have been delicious to any observer who knew what she had undergone. For her it was as though she had been forbidden to speak for ages but now had found her voice. Erik nodded and went on, driving her to the very roots of each issue. There were gaps in her knowledge still, he knew, and her own research was yet shallow, but that was what journeymanship was for. And by the Craft’s own strictures she was already fully capable of taking that next step. None of the observers could argue against her promotion.
But they could make her miserable.
If they had forgotten somewhat in the intervening years that they loathed her, the majority of the Weyr’s farmers remembered it now. She had been raised before a number of her peers, and one need not have been brilliant to see that she was. Maybe it was this that let her forgive and try again over and over, that she felt that she really could come to be what they feared. That she could pass them by.
More likely, she was too busy being busy. Her new rank came with a score of new responsibilities. It is one thing to accept tasks daily, even when you have to do some sleuthing to figure out what those tasks are. It is another entirely to act as part of the head of a large infrastructure, when you are denied up to date information at every turn.
She tried everything she could think of. She gave extra assistance to the other journeymen, she confronted them directly about their issues with her, she tried to work alone, she tried sussing out their work patterns and needs without them, and she even went over their heads. Nothing worked.
One might have said Erik took her side: again and again failing to promote those who tormented her, but he always gave several legitimate reasons for doing so. Yet, as he had known it would from the start, their relationship could lead the others to only one conclusion: he was looking out for his own to the detriment of the Weyr (and themselves).
Unfortunately for any designs they might have formed, Erik’s lifetime of obsessive overwork left him beyond reproach. His methods remained studious, the Weyr well-fed, and his pet vineyard on the cooler north side of the Weyr had begun to produce grapes with a hint of the pleasing brightness one would have sworn was possible only at Benden.
Quiet Annika had no such protections. She was floundering, and she knew it. She spent one year and then another just hanging on. The apprentices who did not want her to instruct them skipped her lessons. Those who came learned quickly that doing so put them at odds with the other senior farmers, and apologetically explained as much to her.
Edwin lingered, though it had been made increasingly clear to him that he might never rise past his apprenticeship. And so she turned her attention to him, and to her own projects.
It should be noted that she had not begun her apprenticeship or even her test for journeyman with any grand plans in mind. She had no great ambition, no desire to control. She found joy in her work and comfort in the rest after a long hard day in the sun. She had no wish for children—and indeed only rare interest in men—and least of all any desire to couple herself to someone as people sometimes did even in the Weyr. In truth she might have at one time named a simple life in the fields as her greatest dream.
But the more she was pressed, the more she found herself incensed to go beyond. Each hurdle in her path made her want to sprint once she had passed it, and one day she woke up with the sure knowledge that (as others had long claimed) she wanted nothing less than to someday be the one to take her grandfather’s place.
Dramatic though it would have been, that was not the same day she woke up with the beginnings of a new idea.
She went to see her grandfather first. He looked surprised when she approached, and started to say something, but she headed him off. “I only want to ask one question about work, and I want to sit with you a while,” she said. He nodded, and slung himself onto a bare patch beneath an apple tree from which he’d been gathering bits of limb to graft. She sat beside him, and for the first time in a long while leaned back into his shoulder. “Why do you work so separately from everyone else?” She said after a while. The question had sounded serious in her head, but saying it, it was almost nonsense. Nevertheless, she let it hang there: heavy as the fruit overhead.
It was a while before he spoke. “You know I wanted to say that I don’t. But then,” he paused, gathering his thoughts, and she remembered how alike they were and smiled. “I suppose it is the way I was taught to be,” his voice was pleasingly rumbling, “There is that sense that every little secret is precious. So we teach, but not too much, not too fast, not to everyone. Especially here where we are so isolated, you would think we would want to tell everyone everything all the time, wouldn’t you?” He paused again, with a distant—angry?--look, “But then they would get into it and muck it up, eh?” His eyes caught hers in understanding. “What did you find?”
“Kenneth’s been fiddling with the pumps from the Black Lake again. He has a lady in the laundry who says that he smelled of pond scum last night. The water’s been running lower and lower, but no one’s noted it,” the last was almost hurried, for her. She took a deep breath, “Grandad. You can’t watch everything all the time; you can’t keep everything in your head all at once, or in your notes alone. I know you feel like everything has to all work together, and that’s easiest under one set of hands, but the more everyone else thinks that way, the more things are going to get missed. They are already getting missed.” She touched his arm. “This isn’t just me saying that I’m tired of being left out. It isn’t just me. The kids can’t learn because they don’t have you to remind them every day since they’re six that planting is like painting as much as it’s like mathematics, and because they’re scared to listen to anything I have to say at all. Your keeping your hands in everything isn’t letting the anyone grow, its making them shrivel up into themselves. You’ve been overwatering,” she added with a smile.
Erik rubbed his chin, then stood and offered her a hand up. “I have to go speak to a few people.” He clutched her shoulder fondly, and paced off up the mountainside.
Her next meet-up was with the Headwoman, who had seemingly not aged a day since the last time she had snuck by to drop off her weekly homework. “Still boring, I see,” she teased when Annika explained her needs, “Very well.”
For days, Anni did little but write—poring over years’ worth of records for, well, everything that had ever touched a farmer’s hands in Ponaa Weyr.
While her grandfather began to appear spontaneously at lessons and in places where the journeymen farmers were doing their more experimental planting, she downed mugs of klah far removed from her beloved sunlight and her equally beloved bed.
They met again once or twice, and people began to grow suspicious. Then the whole of the craft was gathered in the Hall early one morning. Backs stiffened when Annika began to speak, and eyes rolled. Here she went again: seeking recognition for whatever little she knew. And then she began to walk them through things they already knew, and they motioned as though they would have left had Erik not stood off to the side watching. Thus trapped, however, they listened, and listening, they began to hear what she was saying.
“…Six hundred pounds barley, stored for three weeks outside because it had been brought to a storeroom mistakenly filled with the late-harvest wheat last October, spoiled by several rainfalls, brought to be composted to deal with the loss, but then mistakenly packed again and in part delivered as feed to the herders, who, thinking someone was having them on, waited a day before requesting removal and redelivery, by which time the feed that should have gone to them was rerouted for replanting,” she paused, then continued her long litany of examples, “Thirty apple seedlings, grafted with cuttings from a citron tree because the two persons in charge of the exchange would not let the other check their stock. Two hundred pounds of freshly reaped tomatoes gone bad because the kitchens were already overstocked, which was noted in one report but not in another.” She stopped again and looked up. The group was not happy. She had known they wouldn’t be. Who likes to hear they’ve fouled up?
She picked up another page, “In ten years of records, not one case of food poisoning. Only four cases in which a scheduled reaping could not take place, all due to extreme weather. Consistent or improving food quality, as noted by the head of the kitchens and the Headwoman. Ten recorded successful attempts to improve specific strains for yield, hardiness, and resilience to local molds.” The frowns were melting into confusion.
Another sheet: “Yields consistent across ten years. Meaning,” she paused, “no overall increase in yield, despite over fifty different varieties of twenty plants being tested during that time. At the same time, a population decline in the Weyr of approximately 5%.”
“So what, Numbers?” someone said, not bothering to whisper. Laughter followed, but not among the more senior attendees. They knew what was coming, had probably noticed it long before this.
Annika looked patiently at the heckler, holding up her final page of notes, “An overall drop in the water level of the Black Lake of three inches, averaged across the last ten years. This takes into account heavy rainfall periods and droughts, so we’re talking pure drainage. Pair that with gradually decreasing yields and I think you’ll get your answer.”
Kenneth said, “You think we’re overworking the area?” It was almost a sneer, and almost a question, but not quite either: because as history will often prove, vindictiveness does not necessarily equate to stupidity.
“I think we’re not paying attention,” she said simply, and stepped aside, letting Erik take center stage.
“Nobody here has been anything but a credit to his or her craft,” Erik began, “But in treating with each other, we’ve denigrated into a pack of scrabbling wherries. I know that I have been a part of this, and for that, I apologize.” He looked at each of them in turn. It was, after all, no massive gathering. “I will not apologize for insisting that each of us be capable of taking on any task alone, because that is exactly what has always been required of any trainee by every master in long memory. What I am sorry for is continuing a pattern where it has seemed like every person must at all times be responsible for everything: that giving up control means giving up in general, unless the task is totally trivial,” He smiled, and the tense quiet lifted somewhat. “This doesn’t mean that you youngsters will not be out mixing fertilizer tomorrow morning,” the youngest of the apprentices, two boys who favored one another strongly, grimaced. “It means that you will be included in what have been becoming all too private projects, that you won’t be discouraged from working together, and that we will be having some serious discussions about how much responsibility any one person here will have. Myself included.”
The pause was longer this time, more pregnant, and there were some nods. “It also means that I’ll be spending less time out meandering like the old fart that I am and more making sure you all are playing nice. The infighting, the petty rivalry, the hoarding notes and tracking mistakes, the intimidation, they stop now.” He smacked the hides Annika had left behind down onto the table in front of him sharply. Eyes swung to his granddaughter and back almost in unison. There were mumbles, but also more nods.
Annika was expressionless, but inside she was glowing. This hadn’t been part of her plan, but she loved the man all the more for it. The timing was right: his authority would impress on them the truth of her assessment, but the thrust of the point would still belong to her.
A change in the land can happen suddenly, violently. The same can be said of people, but the trigger must be equally violent. Most change is slow, and the change in attitudes was just so.
But the Farmcrafters of Ponaa learned to respect her.
Gradually things realigned, and the ideas were hers as often as not: Small things, to be sure, but meaningful ones. The system eased out of a long compression. Those involved were happier. Annika could breathe without the steady tightness in her chest, sleep without tossing and turning, and take the Headwoman’s long ignored advice.
She found herself more and more in the company of others in the Weyr-- even the riders as they came to recognize in her an interested companion, willing to hear increasing worries and to press for war stories. It had never occurred to her to want to be a rider, and did not really now, except in that she realized how little of the world she had seen. She dreamed of travelling to the north, of meeting with her fellow-crafters and learning from them, of finding new places, new people. The crafters of Ponaa were missing the true experience of the journeyman, she realized, and that made her a bit sad. But what was there to be done? And yet, the idea sits within her still.
As cutting back branches will spark new growth, Annika’s attempts to seek some small life outside her work charged her creativity and her focus. She remained unusual and flexible in her thoughts and her efforts, and the results of her odd methods—plants in pots fed by fishpond water, treated cloth shades, tinkering with the water systems—were nothing short of impressive. More, she was able to rediscover the closeness that had faded between her and her grandfather. She would never become truly close to those who had held her back for so long, but they did come to tolerate and work with one another.
When Erik’s shaking hands took hers on the day she was made a master in her own right, the other faces in the room were smiling. He passed just days thereafter, peacefully, leaving her heavy-hearted and stricken, but un-shattered. And so it is that she has entered the highest echelon of her Craft on unpredictable ground: prepared but bereft of backup, grieving but still steady. It is now up to the Weyrleaders whether it will be her who officially takes charge of the feeding of Ponaa.
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