The Village Cleanup

The people were still in the same worn, shabby clothes, still thin as sticks, but they looked a good deal livelier and brighter than they had yesterday. All it had taken to make them this glad was a handful of grain and a few pieces of cream bread, and the thought brought relief and pity welling up in her at once.

“Butler.”
“Yes, my lady.”

Scrooge, evidently glad to see his lord welcomed by the villagers, put a great deal of force into his voice and drew himself up ramrod straight.

“How many people are there in this village, all told?”

He took a pair of spectacles from his front pocket, perched them on the end of his nose, and studied his scroll with a careful eye.

“There are some two hundred households, so if every one of them were gathered it should come to seven or eight hundred, I believe.”
“You don’t know the exact number?”
“A great many have starved to death of late. Had we not handed out food yesterday, the count would have fallen further still inside a single day.”

Before he knew it, his gaze had drifted to the people standing outside the carriage. Worry sank deep into the creases at the corners of his eyes.

“And the other villages on the estate?”
“The largest runs to about a thousand households, and the remaining three are much like this one.”

Chloe had never once asked a question about the estate before now, and even while he answered something this elementary, the butler could not keep the swell of pride out of his face.

Hearing his answer, Dong-hui sank into thought.

So there are five villages on the estate.

Going by the size of Grace Castle, she had assumed there would be a great many more than that. The butler might have been reading her mind, the way he rattled off an answer to a question she had not asked.

“All told, thirty-one villages have passed into Viscount Patrasche’s holding, so five remaining is correct.”
“Thirty-one?”

So the estate had been a fair-sized one originally, exactly as Dong-hui had guessed. She had no idea what sort of man Viscount Patrasche was, but a curious wariness and hostility had seeped into Scrooge’s voice as he spoke of him.

“Yes. One at a time, one at a time, the Viscount bought the land away from us. For a song. He will very likely come again around next week, asking us to sell him another of the ones we have left.”

Scrooge leaned unusually hard on the words ‘for a song’, and his voice came out heavier than it had a moment before.

“And the estate’s residents who lived on it?”
“Most of the estate’s residents are coloni, bound to the land¹, so when the land was sold they passed over with it and became Viscount Patrasche’s residents.”
“I see…”

They were people she did not even know, and yet hearing that they had been sold for money brought on a guilt she had no business feeling. Honestly, this Chloe Grace had an unerring instinct for whatever would rub a person the wrong way, and had gone and done every last bit of it. A foolish girl who never spared a thought for anyone else’s welfare, who knew nothing but her own self, who bought up dresses of idiotic design with lace fluttering off them as though she had lost her mind.

A good many of the gaudy dresses packing that dressing room had probably been bought with the price fetched for the estate’s residents sold off to Viscount Patrasche.

Dong-hui held her silence a moment, then spoke as though she had made up her mind.

“Have the people gathered in the village square.”
“All of them?”
“Leave the small children out. Everyone else, the women included.”
“Yes. It shall be done.”

She had blurted the thing into motion, and now her head began to throb. Even a quick glance around turned up a mountain of work waiting to be done.

The moment Chloe’s order was given, Scrooge stepped down from the carriage, went to the household staff who had come along, and passed on the instruction to gather the people in the square. The staff, close to ten of them, scattered in every direction almost before he had finished speaking.

It’s all right.
One thing at a time, slowly, and it’ll get done.
I can do this.

Dong-hui had no small streak of the workaholic in her, and strangely, the more there was to be done, the more her fighting spirit would blaze up. She would taste that thrill again, a list of tasks packed into a planner down to the margins and knocked off one item at a time. And spending a staggering amount of money while she was at it. Catharsis surged up out of nowhere, and goosebumps raced across her whole body.

The village square felt as bare and parched as the half-clothed people standing in it. The fountain that must once have bubbled with water had dried to a brittle husk, and cracked and broken as it was, it had long since stopped working.

Dong-hui narrowed her eyes at the oddly shaped statue standing in the middle of the fountain. One antler had been snapped off, but the figure was unmistakable, a person crowned with a deer’s antlers. Everything but the antlers on its head and its lower body was human, which gave it the look of some mysterious being out of a myth.

“What is that?”
“The Korus.”
“The Korus?”
“Yes. A race that is half human, half deer.”
“Where do the Korus live?”
“I have heard a rumor that some were found decades ago in the snowfield beyond the Black Forest. But it was all so very long ago. There will be hardly anyone alive who has actually seen one.”
“Is that so?”

The thought of people shaped like that living out there in a snowbound place, white to the horizon, set her heart thudding, strangely enough.

“There is a legend that they bring good fortune to a village, so every village hereabouts will have one of them standing in it somewhere.”
“Ah. So it’s like a Great General Under Heaven².”
“I beg your pardon?”
“There is. Such a thing.”

Dong-hui waved a hand about. Scrooge stared at her, and she turned her head away, pretending not to notice.

While the two of them talked, the villagers came flocking into the square, group after group. They had greeted the carriage with delight; summoned out here, every last one of them wore a frightened face. Nobody had given them a reason for the summons, so it was hardly surprising.

The knights standing armed against any eventuality only wound the tension among them tighter. Gathered in twos and threes across the broad square, they kept curling their shoulders inward with worry and unease.

“She’s not going to make us pay for the bread we ate yesterday, is she?”
“Surely not.”

But there was not much conviction in the answering man’s voice either.

“But that bread looked far too precious. It wasn’t the sort of thing people like us should have been eating. We ought never to have just gone ahead and eaten it.”

It had come back to them, too late, what a selfish and pitiful creature the Grace lord was, and their voices were full of regret and worry.

“What if we’re sold off as slaves for not being able to pay for the bread?” one of the women called out.

The woman shook with dread, thinking of her children inside a broken-down hut with the wind whistling through it, waiting for nothing in the world but their mother to come home.

Dong-hui climbed up onto the platform Scrooge had had made ready in advance. Platform was a generous word for two old tables pushed together, but it was enough to draw every eye in the place.

Dong-hui had never once spoken in front of a crowd, and her fingertips prickled with nerves, but she gave no sign of it and cleared her throat. She was carrying more money than she had handled in her whole life, and the thought of it sent a confidence she did not actually possess surging up in her.

So confidence really does come out of money.

Dong-hui began to speak, as loudly as she possibly could. There was no loudspeaker anywhere in sight, and yet, strangely, her voice came out big and clear enough for every one of them to hear.

“From today we begin the village cleanup! Every one of the estate’s residents is to lend a hand in making this village clean!”

The village had been left to itself so long that filth lay in patches all through it. Sanitation was bad enough that leaving the place as it stood looked likely to breed diseases that did not yet exist, which was why she had picked the village cleanup as the first job of all.

No sooner had Dong-hui’s words landed than the faces in front of her began turning ugly. Days on empty stomachs, barely enough grain yesterday to stop the hunger, and now hard labor sprung on them out of nowhere. Complaints were only to be expected.

Their faces were going red and then livid, and Dong-hui hurried on. The way their eyes had turned aggressive in an instant cowed her a little, but she let none of it show.

“The daily wage will be a generous one. To those who take part in the cleanup and none other, one bron for each adult, three kupe for each child.”

Scrooge had given her the figure himself, as the appropriate daily wage. Left to herself she would have liked to hand out a gold a day, but that seemed likely to cause enormous confusion, so she had taken his advice and gone along with his number.

One bron seemed to work out at no more than about 10,000 won for a full day’s work. But Scrooge had stressed several times over that even that was a more than generous sum, so Dong-hui announced the wage in a loud voice, uneasy though she was.

The word that wages would be paid set the people murmuring. The sudden commotion left her anxious that they were angry at how little she was offering, but a careful look over their faces told her they were not angry at all, and she was relieved.

For the estate’s residents, turning out for labor at their lord’s command was one of their plain and obvious duties. And now they were to be paid a wage for it as well? After yesterday, it was one unbelievable thing after another, and confusion filled every face in the square.

Without a word, Dong-hui watched them murmur, then raised one hand. It worked like a signal, and the murmuring stopped, every startled eye fixed on Chloe. Distrust still filled their eyes, but here and there she caught a flicker of expectation as well, so she put still more force into her voice.

Don’t chicken out, don’t chicken out!

Perhaps it was the incantation she had chanted inwardly; her voice came out with more force behind it than before.

“Butler Scrooge, who has overall charge of this work, will select the numbers required for each area of it. Once you have heard him out, you may begin work in whichever area you wish. The work starts tomorrow. Before that, food for this evening will be distributed.”

No sooner had Dong-hui finished speaking than a cart piled high with grain came rolling into the village.

It had very nearly cleaned out the estate’s storehouse, but she did not begrudge a grain of it. She could buy grain in any quantity she liked now.

The murmuring of the crowd grew louder.