On the terraced eastern slopes of the Orchard Ward, ninety meters above the river valley, the first full harvest of autumn wheat was being cut beneath an unshadowed October sun.
Elsi Marr stood on the packed clay bank of the main irrigation ditch, her broad-brimmed straw hat shading her weathered eyes from the midday glare. In her right hand she carried an iron-toothed weeding fork. Around her waist hung a linen apron filled with spare rawhide twine for the sheaf-binders.
Below her, stepping in a staggered, slanted line across three dropping stone terraces, fifty men and women were swinging curved steel sickles.
The wheat was not the tall, waving lowland grain that grew along the capital rivers. It was a hardy, cold-basin mountain strain called Red Spelt. Short, dense, and reaching only to a man’s knee, its stiff straw bred to withstand alpine squalls and early snows. But the heads were thick, heavy. Then he bearded with long, dark awns that rustled in the mountain breeze like dry parchment. After two full months of uncurtained, twelve-hour daylight, the grain had ripened into a deep, burnished bronze that glowed like hammered copper across the slopes.
Behind the reapers walked twelve children from the lower ward schools. Their small hands gathered the fallen stalks into armfuls. They tied them into tight, upright pulley wheels with twisted lengths of green rye straw.
