Chapter Text
When they drew up jobs and the fair division of labor, the Dag ended up supervising the War Tower farm, the biggest and oldest farm of the Citadel, and currently the least productive, despite feeding the majority of the War Boys and the War Pups. That was fine with her; though rusty and out of use, she had never forgotten the early skills she had learned in life. Raised by Botanists, the Dag had never forgotten the vocabulary of grafting and seed dispersal and hand-pollination, though sometimes she had trouble remember specific genus names and species. But as she went along, she found herself remembering pieces of it here and there, bits of knowledge submerged in the depths of memory that she thought had been lost so many years ago.
“Artemisia.” She sang under her breath as she walked along the steep terraces, minding her step and minding the War Boys. “Brassica and Sinapis.” Her voice was still strange to her, but not her muddy boots and her clay-whitened skin; a time long time ago she once played War Boy for a tense hour, and somehow the charm of it had never quite worn off, despite what they had represented. But here on the farm it was reasonable to wear the white like any other War Boy; it kept off the glaring sun and it was easy to wash up afterwards. Besides that, it seemed to give her more respect among the War Boys. Some were even growing their hair out now, in imitation.
She had a crew of War Boys to supervise, the kind known as Organics. Most were boys too young to have been in the fight (and how many hundreds of days had it been since that awful run?), but there was one who had been sent up from the workshops below, a cripple. He had been a strong man once and was still powerfully muscled, but he moved slowly, his step halting and awkward from a bad fall.
He had skills beyond the crowd of boys that helped up at the farms; he could fix the windmills when they broke, carried baskets of produce too heavy for the boys to lift on their own, and shifted large barrels of water, though he could only go as fast as his bad leg would allow. Once he helped design and build a drip irrigation system when the Dag explained to him what she wanted; she had the War Boys expanding the terraces higher, opening up more arable land.
The Dag liked working with him; he never needed to be told twice how to do anything, and kept the boys hard-working and disciplined, even though she had never asked it of him.
Today she found him weeding; he was digging out stubborn-clinging roots with a broken pair of needle-nosed pliers.
“Hey, you're pretty good at that.”
He looked up at her, and she wondered what he was thinking behind those dark goggles that hid his eyes. She paused, wondering if she should stay; they had never really spoken before, but then his skew-set jaw shifted, and he nodded his thanks.
“Used to be that I weeded War Pups too. Sorted out the good ones from the bad.” The man went back to work, bent over the greenery that was struggling for life, every plant in its own silent war against its neighbor.
After that day, they began to talk more. She found out he lived alone in a sod house on the farm, a dry, dark cavern where roots sunk their long tendrils down through the ceiling and there was not much more than a stone-carved bed with a few thin blankets and an old kerosene lamp for light. The other War Boys took the twisting, stone-carved stairs down into the warren to sleep and eat, but he couldn't make the long walk every day with his bad leg. Even the terraces themselves were hard on him, and she could count his breaths against hers, double or triple when they walked together up and down the paths.
“How come you're up here?”
He patted his leg gingerly. “Crippled on a run. That's what life hands you. Years riding at the left hand of an Imperator, high above the rest... One bad fall means it's all over. Got lucky though; used to be a War Boy as crippled as me might end down in the Waste, sent down to join the Wretched. Suppose it depended on how the Organic Mechanic felt that day.” He smiled wryly to himself. “Bad mood, and he'll stamp you defective, get you turned off.”
“Being hurt doesn't make you defective,” The Dag offered reasonably, but the War Boy shrugged.
“Don't work, don't eat. That's the law.”
“Can't is different from not wanting to though.”
“Not the way we was taught.”
They sat together, watching the fading sun and the rising ghost moon; it would be light out for another hour or more, but work had long since stopped for the day and they were alone up on the farms. The War Boy looked at his hands, hard-calloused and black with soil.
“Ain't you got supper to go to? Someone's gonna be missin you.”
“I told them I'd be late. How about you?”
“Ain't got no one waitin for me. The pups bring me up some fresh dried food bars every few days, and there's plenty of Ah-...plenty of water to drink.”
“When then oranges come in, you can have one. In fact, you could have two. Or three.”
“Maybe, but that'd be stealin,” the War Boy said simply.
“As Admiral of the War Farm, I'm personally giving you permission.”
“Admiral?” The War Boy gave her a skeptical look.
“I'm not really the admiral of anything. It just sounded fun. But I'm serious, you can have some oranges if you want. Just don't forget to save the seeds and bury the peels.”
The War Boy shrugged.
The Dag sighed, smelling the sun-baked scents of the earth, of the herbs and the fresh-clipped greens, and the sweet scent of flowering orange trees. “I suppose you're right. It would have been sensible and sensical to join everyone for supper, but truly, I wanted to see what it was like for that ferocious orb of fire and light to return to darkness from here.”
“Yeah?”
“And what it was like to talk to an old War Boy, one who remembers the old days.”
“What's that like?”
“Reliable,” the Dag smiled. “I like it.”
She ventured a peek at him; he was smiling, faintly to himself, a wistful, dreamy expression, and then he pushed off his goggles and she could see his pale gray eyes.
“I like it too.”