“Five shek says she tips him on his arse,” said Albor, one of Will’s two farmhands. A strip of hairy gut was visible where he rested it upon the sty’s rickety old fence. It was, Will had noted, significantly hairier in fact than his chin, which he scratched at constantly. Albor’s wife had just departed the nearby village for a monthlong trip to help look after her sister’s new baby, and Albor was three days into growing the beard she hated.
“I say it’s face first, he lands,” said Dunstan, Will’s other farmhand. The two men were a study in contrasts. Where Albor’s stomach swayed heavily over his gut, Dunstan’s broad leather belt was wrapped twice around his waist and still flapped loose beyond the buckle. His narrow face was barely visible behind a thick cloud of facial hair, which his wife loved to excess. She had a tendency to braid sections of it and line it with bows.
“You’re on,” said Albor, spitting in his muddy palm and holding it out to Dunstan.
Will gave a damn about neither beards nor wives. All he cared about was his father’s thrice-cursed prize sow, Bessie. She had been his dancing partner in this sty for almost half an hour now. He was so coated in mud that if he lay upon the sty’s floor, he would have been virtually invisible. He briefly considered this as a possible angle of attack, but the pig was as likely to shit on him and call it a good day’s work as anything else. There was an uncanny intelligence in her eyes. Still, she was old and he was young. Brute force would win the day.
He closed the distance down by another inch.
Bessie narrowed her eyes.
Another inch.
Bessie squealed and charged. Will lunged, met the charge head-on. His hands slammed down hard against her sides.
Bessie flew through his mud-slick palms and crashed all of her considerable weight into his legs. The world performed a sprawling flip around Will’s head, then hit him in the face.
He came up spluttering mud, and was just in time to hear Dunstan say, “That’s five shek you owe me then.”
Bessie was standing nonchalantly behind him, with an air of almost studied calm.
Will found his resolve hardening. Bessie had to die. With a roar, he launched himself at the pig. She bucked wildly. And yet still one of his hands snagged a bony trotter. He heaved upon it with all his might.
Bessie, however, had lived upon the farm longer than Will. She had survived lean winters, breeched piglets, and several virulent diseases, and was determined to survive him. She did not allow her limb to collapse under Will’s weight, advanced years or no. Instead she simply pulled him skidding through the mud. After several laps, he appeared to be done. With her free hoof, she kicked him in the forehead to emphasize the lesson, then walked away.
“I think you almost got her that time,” Albor called in what might be generously described as an encouraging tone.
Will did not respond. Personal honor was at stake at this point in the proceedings. Still, there was only so much mud a man could swallow. He clambered to his feet and retreated to consider his options.
Dunstan patted him on the shoulder as he collapsed against the fence. Bessie regarded him balefully.
“She’s too strong for me,” Will said when he’d gotten his breath back.
“To be fair, you say that about most girls,” Albor told him.
“I have to outsmart her.”
“That too,” Dunstan chipped in.
“Don’t usually work, though.” Albor chewed a strand of straw sagely.
“This,” said Will, his temper fraying, “is not so much helpful advice as much as it is shit swilling in a blocked ditch. That pig has to become crispy rashers and if you have nothing helpful to add you can go back to picking apples in the orchard.”
For a short while the only sound was Bessie farting noisily in her corner of the sty.
Above the men, thin clouds swept across a pale blue sky. The distant mountains were a misty purple, almost translucent.
Will softened. None of this was Albor’s or Dunstan’s fault, even if they did not want to see old Bessie taken to the butcher’s block. Deep down—deeper perhaps now than at the start of his ordeal—neither did he. Bessie had been part of this farm as long as he could remember. His father had sat him upon her back and had him ride around the sty, whooping and hollering, while his mother stood clucking her tongue. Dunstan and Albor had been there, cheering him on. Even old Firkin had been there.
But now Will’s parents were gone to an early grave, and Firkin had lost his mind. Bessie was old and would not sow anymore. And Will was the unwilling owner of a farm on the brink of ruin.
“Look,” he said, voice calmer, “I want Bessie dead no more than you do, but I am out of options. The Consortium increased taxes again, and paying them has left my coffers bare. If I am to have a hope of surviving another year, I need to put her to the knife and sell her pieces for as much as I can get. Next winter she’ll be blind and hobbled and it will be a kindness.”
Another silence.
“You can’t wait a little, Will?” said Albor, straw drooping in the corner of his mouth. “Give her one last good year?”
Will sighed. “If I do, then there won’t be anyone to slaughter her. This whole place will be gone to the Consortium and I’ll be in a debtors’ jail, and you two will be in old Cornwall’s tavern without any sheks to pay for his ale.”
At that threat, the two farmhands looked at each other. Finally Dunstan shrugged. “I never liked that fucking pig anyway.”
Albor echoed his sad smile.
“That’s more like it,” said Will. “Now let’s see if together three grown men can’t outwit one decrepit pig.”
Slowly, painfully, Will, Albor, and Dunstan hobbled back toward the farmhouse. Albor rubbed at a badly bruised hip. Dunstan was wringing muddy water out of his sodden, matted beard.
“It’s all right,” said Will, “we’ll get her tomorrow.”
Later, the farm’s other animals locked away for the night, straw fresh on the barn’s floor, Will stood in the farmhouse, heating a heavy iron pot full of stew over the hearth. A few strips of chicken roiled fretfully among vegetable chunks.
He never bothered naming the chickens. It was easier that way.
He sighed as he watched the stew slowly simmer. He should be checking the cheese presses, or scooping butter out of the churn and into pots before it spoiled, or possibly even attempting to tally his books so he could work out exactly how much money he owed folk. Instead he stood and stared.
The nights were long out on the farm. It was five miles through the fields and woods down to The Village. The distance had never seemed far when he was a child. But that was when his parents were alive, and when Dunstan and Albor, and even Firkin, would all have stayed to share the supper, with laughter, and jokes, and fiddle music lilting late into the night. That was when performing the chores around the house had never seemed exactly like work, and when stoking the fire so it warmed the whole room had never felt like an extravagance.