Below Red Oak Gap, the kingdom changed character. The stark, barren chalk downs gave way to the great agricultural tiered arena of the Upper Reach. There, the hillsides dropped toward the river plain in hundreds of stepped limestone terraces.
Ten years ago, under the trade ring’s management, this hillside had been a total monument to risky greed. The syndicates had clear-cut the ancient beech groves on the upper crests to sell timber to the capital shipyards, destabilizing the thin mountain loam. The winter rains came. Then, total mudslides had repeatedly swept through the terraces, burying cottages, washing away vineyards, and choking the irrigation ditches with yellow marl. Instead of repairing the retaining walls, the absentee landlords had simply demanded higher rents from the surviving tenants to cover their “insurance losses.”
Now, as Tomas and Nessa walked down the broad, winding road, the terraces stood in spotless order.
The dry limestone retaining walls had been fully rebuilt under the regional public works program started during the Green River resettlement. They rose eight to twelve feet high. They were built with heavy, squared blocks of fossiliferous stone laid without mortar, their faces battered back at an angle of one inch in six to resist the sideways push of the soaked soil behind them. Every ten feet along the base of each wall, clean cry-holes had been left, discharging clear drainage water into stone-lined gutters that guided the flow safely down to the valley canals.
