Chapter 88: The Green Blade and the Iron

The green blade came up through the black earth like a promise no one had dared to make.

Tom knelt at the edge of the furrow and touched it—two leaves, pale and tender, still furled at the tip. Around him, the long strip of the new field stretched toward the river, each row straight as a taut line, each seed planted at the depth his books had specified. The turnips. The first of them. In a world where a failed harvest meant a winter of boiled bark and dead children, these small green flags mattered more than any seal or commission.

“You are smiling,” Joan said.

She stood behind him with a basket on her hip, her sleeves rolled past the elbow, mud to the wrist. The frost had gone out of the ground three days past, and the whole village had turned out to break the winter fallow. Wat’s men had done the heavy work with the steel ploughshares—Tom had watched them handle the bright iron like something holy, turning it over and over in their hands—and the women had followed with the seed, and the boys had walked the rows with sticks to frighten the crows. It was the first sowing Wykeham had ever done in March, and half the village still crossed themselves when they passed the barn.

“I am smiling,” Tom said, “because I am not dead.”

“A low bar.”

“It is the only one that matters.”

She laughed, and the sound carried across the field, and a few of the sowers looked up and smiled too, because they had learned in the past weeks that Mistress Joan’s laughter was not a thing to be feared. That was its own kind of harvest.

Reeve Baldric came up the row toward them, his scarred face red with the wind, his stick marking time in the mud. He stopped and looked down at the green blade, and for a long moment he said nothing.

“I have farmed this land since I was six years old,” he said at last. “I have never seen a crop come up in Lent.”

“It is not a crop yet,” Tom said. “It is a promise.”

“Promises are what lords make when they want your sons for France.” Baldric spat to the side. “But this—this I can see. This I can touch.” He crouched and brushed the soil away from the base of the seedling with a calloused thumb. “What do you call it again?”

“A turnip.”

“And you eat the root.”

“And the greens. And you store the root through the winter, and it feeds cattle when the hay runs out, and it puts nitrogen back in the soil so the next year’s wheat grows taller.” Tom stopped himself. He had learned that too much explanation made men uneasy. “It is a crop that pays for itself three times over.”

Baldric grunted. “Three times over. The tithe-collector will like that.”

“The tithe-collector will like it very much,” Joan said, “which is why we have not told him.”

The reeve’s mouth twitched. It was as close as he came to a smile.

They walked the field together, Tom and Joan and Baldric, and Tom counted the rows and did the sums in his head. Forty acres sown. If the turnips came in as they should, the village would eat through the summer and have seed for the autumn planting and a surplus to sell at market. The surplus would pay the King’s new levy—Edward had confirmed the commission in writing, sealed and witnessed, and the levy was the price of his protection—and the seed would go to the next village, and the next, and by the time the King’s men came south again there would be fields like this all along the river.

That was the plan. Tom had learned, in the months since the warehouse fell out of the rain, that plans were only the first casualty of the world.

They were at the far end of the field when Wat came running up the bank from the river road, his boots throwing mud, his face white under the tan.

“Master Ashwick,” he said, and stopped, and bent double to catch his breath.

“What is it?”

“Riders.” Wat straightened. “On the London road. A company—thirty men at least, with banners. They passed the ford an hour ago and they are coming fast.”

Baldric’s hand went to the knife at his belt. “Whose banners?”

“I could not see the device. But the lead rider wore a black cloak, and there was a priest with them, and they did not stop at the tollgate.”

The world went very quiet. Tom heard the river, and the crows in the far elms, and the small green blades moving in the wind, and under it all the memory of the man in the black cloak at the inn, and the bishop’s men at the King’s gate, and the words the King had spoken: Do not think this makes you safe. It only makes you useful.

“The bishop,” Joan said.

“The bishop,” Tom agreed.

He turned and looked back across the field—the long rows, the sowers still bent to their work, the village beyond with its low roofs and its thin smoke. Somewhere in the barn behind the false wall, the warehouse lights were flickering their last. He had not opened the door since he returned. The battery was nearly gone; he could feel it the way a man feels a fever coming on. Whatever the bishop’s men wanted, they would find a village of turnip fields and a barn full of nothing they could see.

Unless someone told them otherwise.

“Baldric,” Tom said. “Get the men from the field. Not running—walking. Send them to their houses. Tell them to put away anything that came from the barn.”

“And you?”

“I will meet them at the ford.”

Joan caught his arm. “You will not meet thirty men alone.”

“I will not meet them alone,” Tom said. “You will come with me. And we will bring the King’s commission.”

He pulled the leather tube from his belt and held it up. The seal caught the pale spring light, red and bright, and Baldric looked at it the way he had looked at the steel ploughshare—like something that had come from another world.

“The King’s seal will not stop a bishop’s man who has come to burn a heretic,” Joan said quietly.

“No,” Tom said. “But it will make him hesitate. And hesitation is time. And time is what we need.”

He turned toward the river road. The green blades bent behind him in the wind, and the river ran on toward London, and somewhere beyond the ford the hoofbeats were coming closer, and Tom Ashwick walked out to meet them with a leather tube in his hand and a dying warehouse at his back and the first crop of a new England growing green in the mud behind him.