He could feel the sun almost directly overhead. He mopped his brow with an already damp red paisley handkerchief, stuffed the cloth into a back pocket and knelt. In front of him was a large mound of threshed wheat that he was winnowing before it could be ground into flour at the mill down by the stream.
With a big coffee can he put a couple scoops of wheat into the woven bamboo basket he was using. He stood up and with a quick upward motion tossed the wheat into the air. A light breeze that was always present on the knoll where he was working wafted dust, grit, and other detritus from the grain downwind. There was a thick carpet of chaff on the ground extending in that direction.
After several tosses he put his fingers into the wheat in the basket, ran some lightly between his thumb and fingers. He gave the wheat a few more tosses, repeated his test, then dumped the wheat onto a growing pile of grains ready for the mill.
He heard a small voice behind him. “Papo,” it said. It was Andalisha, his granddaughter. “Mumu says come in, it’s lunchtime.”
“Okay,” he said, “Let’s go.” He dropped the basket at his feet and reached out to find Andy’s left arm right where he expected it. Papo had been blinded 20 years ago fighting a fire at a neighbor’s farm. An almost empty kerosene can had exploded, spraying his face with shrapnel and fire.
She led him down the hill toward the stone cottage next to the mill. She was unusually quiet today, ordinarily she would talk his ear off. He reached over and touched her cheek and felt a wet track. “You’ve been crying,” he observed, “Why so sad?”
“Sendru is going to the harvest celebration with Idris,” she said bitterly. “He doesn’t even like Idris. She’s doing it just to get at me, I know it. She knows how I feel about him.”
“Ohh, I see,” the old man said.
“He’s already told me he doesn’t like her or her family,” she pouted, “and now he’s going to the grange with her. And he won’t even talk to me about it. I’ve asked him several times and all he says is, ‘later,’ and he walks away.”
The Conrads, Idris’s parents, were satraps for the local warlord and they owned the mill. In fact, they owned nearly everything in the valley. Andalisha’s father, Papo’s son, operated the mill for the Conrads. He wasn’t exactly tied to the land or the job, he could pick up and leave if he wanted but leaving in these troubled times wasn’t a very good idea. There was nowhere to go where it was different. His tacit serfdom, tantamount to the real thing, kept him and everyone else in the valley under the thumbs of the Conrads.
Over a century ago the Great Collapse, caused by a worm infecting the Internet that ruined the infrastructure of anything connected to it, knocked civilization back to the middle ages. With the cities in flames and most of their inhabitants dead fighting each other during the meltdown, the remnants of civilization, rural survivors mostly, degenerated into isolated pockets of Medieval feudalism. Warlords and their henchmen control large geographic areas and are always at each other’s throats—dark days indeed.
“Sendru may not have any choice, you know,” Papo said. “He must obey the Conrads. They can easily give his family’s farm to someone else to work and there would be nothing they could do about it.”
Andalisha had never thought about politics or power before, her naiveté nonplussed. She wrinkled her brow and said softly, “You mean they told Sendru he had to take Idris to the celebration or they would hurt him and his family?”
Papo could see the furrows between her eyebrows in spite of his handicap. Her voice didn’t sound so quite so childish as it did 5 minutes ago. “I’m afraid so, child,” he said.
Andalisha, deep in thought, led her grandfather across the yard to the cottage’s Dutch door in silence. Before she opened the door she turned to her grandfather and gravely said, “That’s not right.”
With a tight, humorless smile Papo shook his head. He said wearily, “and so it isn’t, child. But so it will remain until someone changes it.”
The young girl’s eyes became slits under her lowered brows as she digested her epiphany. “Ohh, I see,” she said.