After putting on his boots, Rini looked down at Mati, still under her blankets, dead to the world. He went outside to pull some fresh grass for Tera.
Kibi had secretly saved half a fruitcake for their last morning at the shack, and when the rest learned of her surprise, she received more than her usual number of hugs and kisses. Half an hour later, when everyone else was making noise packing saddlebags and rolling up bedding, Mati finally came to life.
“I’ve never been so tired and sore in my whole life. I’ve had gentler beatings when I was a slave than what I went through learning to ride my donkey!”
“Your breakfast is at the fire circle,” Rini said while chuckling. “I fed and brushed your cruel master . . . I mean your donkey.”
Mati
smiled.
“The weather is nice,” Ilika commented, “and everyone else is anxious to leave. Today we have to put on your saddlebags before the saddle, and strap on your bedroll.”
In spite of her soreness, Mati soon had her bags packed. She quickly ate breakfast, then hobbled out to the corral, Rini at her side.
Kibi and Neti conferred, and decided to take the two wooden bowls, but leave the heavy ceramic items.
After Mati mounted, Rini used a short length of rope to secure her bedroll
behind the saddle, then put the crutch with his own gear.
When everyone was ready to go, they all fell silent and looked around with sad eyes. The clearing and its shack had been their home for four days, giving them everything they needed to go from the wet and cold of the old tunnels in the city walls, to the sunshine and freedom of the wild countryside in springtime.
Ilika sensed the mood. “Perhaps we’ll be back someday.”
After taking up their saddlebags, bedrolls, and other burdens, they crossed the stream for the last time and slowly climbed the hill beyond.
As they worked their way along the line of hills westward, Mati proudly rode at the front of the group. Kibi was at the back with Ilika.
“Do you have places in your country that are special to you?” she asked as they came to the top of a hill.
“Oh, yes. The most special are places like we just left, places that gave me shelter when I needed to rest, or ponder my life, or spend time with a friend.”
Below them spread a small green valley, and they could see a farm about a mile away.
“How about you?” he asked.
Kibi was silent for a moment. “Just Doko’s inn and the shack. I’ve never been anywhere else I could just . . . relax and think. Somehow, this kingdom doesn’t feel like home. If I don’t get onto your crew, I think I’ll take that road I saw on the map that leads to the desert and see where my feet take me.”
Ilika tried very hard not to smile.
As they came down off the hill and began to cross the grassy lowlands, they soon found themselves on a track that skirted the edge of the trees on the northern side of the valley. Mati would ride ahead a stone’s throw, then come back to share what she had seen over the next rise or around the next bend.
Boro kept a sharp eye on her, while Sata took turns with Rini carrying the crutch. Miko and Neti happily held hands in the middle of the group. Toli and Buna continued to keep their distance from each other, and still hadn’t exchanged any unnecessary words since the pool under the city walls.
The track became a trail, with neatly stacked firewood here and there. The
trail became a road, winding its way through an orchard. Neti squeezed a plum hanging low, but shook her head. The walkers rounded a bend to find Mati talking to a large man holding a pitch fork.
“Ilika, come meet Farmer Keni!”
He strode forward, trying not to let his nervousness show.
“Are you the leader of this troop?” the burley farmer asked as he looked them over carefully and saw no weapons of any kind. The little shovel and the crutch only made him smile.
“These are all traveling students, and I am their teacher. We hope to buy food and a few supplies. If that is not possible, we wish only to pass through peacefully . . .”
“If I have the wife kill a chicken and bake a pie, what color is your money?”
“There are ten of us, and we usually pay a silver for a good meal, perhaps a silver and three coppers if there’s dessert.”
The farmer’s face lit up. “It shall be done!” Then his brow wrinkled slightly. “Il . . . ika? What kind of name is that?”
“One from a far-away land.”
“No doubt. Come, Ilika, walk with me and tell me what supplies you might be needing.”
“Kibi?”
She joined the two men. “Salt and whatever spices you have. A cooking pot that isn’t too heavy. Wooden bowls or cups. A spoon.”
“If it’s no trouble,” Ilika said, “we would take meals with you for a couple of days, and also buy bread and cheese, or whatever you have, for our journey onward.”
“If your money is the color you say it is, you can stay as long as you like! I think the wife has a pot and a few other things she will part with. But alas, I only have one extra bed.”
“All we need is a bit of barn or shed . . .”
“And I’d like to buy hay and grain for my donkey,” Mati said. “Is a copper piece enough?”
“It certainly is, young maiden. For a copper, I’ll even put molasses on it!”
“She’d like that! Her name is . . . Ter.”
The farmer’s cottage and table could hold his family and a guest or two, but not ten, so they ate lunch in a grassy yard beside the kitchen garden, with an old stump for a table and overturned buckets or wooden boxes for chairs.
Farmer Keni’s brown-haired daughter, about twelve, helped her mother constantly. His three younger sons, between four and ten, came and went on errands or play.
His wife, a large and serious woman, was quick to point out to her husband that they couldn’t be feeding just any strangers who wandered by.
He reassured her, and Ilika was happy to hand her a silver piece when he saw the bread, butter, cheese, greens, and fruits she supplied on short notice. She was completely content, and verified that there would indeed be chicken and pie at dinner.
The farmer showed them to the woodshed, just a roof supported by poles, nearly empty this time of year. They got comfortable on their bedrolls and Ilika brought out paper and pencils.
Farmer Keni and his wife strode uphill toward the goat pasture.
“They’re the ones those priests are looking for, aren’t they?” she asked with a worried tone.
“I think so. The priest hinted they were criminals of some sort, but I see nothing in their eyes but innocence and kindness. Maybe too much of both for their own good. But the priest had fear in his eyes. You saw it.”
“I
did.”
They came to the goat pasture and Keni counted his goats while his wife lifted their tails to look for problems. The farmer hoisted a young billy to his shoulders, rapidly getting too old to be safe around the nannies, and they headed back downhill.
“Do we welcome them,” Keni asked, “or send them on their way?”
The woman was thoughtful for a moment. “We welcome them, as long as they pay for what they eat and use.”
Deep Learning Notes
A small map shows the area around the shack and Farmer Keni’s farm.
Ilika is the captain and teacher, and is also entering into a close personal relationship with Kibi. A dual relationship like that can be challenging when one relationship calls for one response, the other relationship a different response. As the captain, Ilika must avoid making decisions about his crew before he gets to know them well. As Kibi’s companion and friend, he wants to comfort her about the future. What do you think he would tell her if he could?
Farmer Keni and his wife used their intuition to decide if their guests were innocent travelers, or criminals. They remembered seeing fear in the priests’
eyes. How did that help them to make their judgment about the travelers?
Chapter 7: Farmer Keni’s Daughter
As Farmer Keni was tying up the goat near the house, he could hear the students and their teacher talking about addition and subtraction and other things about numbers that were pretty much a mystery to him, save what he could work out on his fingers.
His daughter came out of the cow shed with a heavy pail of milk. “Father, when I get my chores done, can I listen to the lessons?”
The farmer wrinkled his brow for a moment. “After all your chores, and only if your mother says it’s okay.”
“Thank you, father,” she said with a happy smile and continued waddling toward the house with her pail.
Keni entered the cow shed, checked on all the cows, and slipped a lead rope on one. As he was passing the woodshed with the cow, all the students sat in a circle and one was opening a thick book. Just then his daughter dashed out of the house and approached the teacher timidly. “Can I listen?”
Keni continued on toward the lower pasture with the cow. He slipped the rope off as he opened the gate, and she trotted in, ready to work on the new grass that was sprouting everywhere.
An explosion of cackling came from the chicken house as Keni walked to the barn. He saw his wife emerge, dinner bird in hand. As he passed the woodshed, he could hear the students reading some fancy story about things that never really happened, and he could see his daughter intently looking over their shoulders. One of the boys, a tall one several years older, was
stealing glances at her.
After the farmer spent half an hour carving the new axle for the cart, it looked about right. A thoughtful expression came to him, and he wandered out to the woodshed.
“Sorry to interrupt, but could I get a bit of help with something? My oldest son is way out in the orchard. Just one, perhaps this tall lad here . . .”
“Me?” Toli questioned.
“It won’t take long.”
Toli looked uncomfortable, but went with the farmer into the barn.
“I’ll tap the axel through the hole on this side, and you line it up with the other side when it gets in far enough.”
“Okay,” Toli said.
Keni started tapping on the new axle. “My daughter Kora is a very pretty girl, and she’s growing up quickly, but any boy who wants to court her has to, you know, stick around. We don’t want her to rush into anything, or run off.”
Toli turned red with embarrassment. “The axle is . . . um . . . getting close.”
“I’ll go slow,” Keni said. “There’s no harm in looking, of course. I did lots of looking before I found my wife.”
“It’s . . . um . . . lined up just right,” Toli said nervously, “and looks like it’ll fit.”
Keni continued tapping, and the axle was soon in the right place. As he came around to the other hub to check it, he looked into the young man’s eyes, and saw only youthful shyness and clumsiness. He tapped the axle back the other direction a bit, then declared it good.
“Thank you lad, all done.”
“You’re welcome,” Toli said, “and . . . thank you.”
Keni
nodded.
When Keni and Toli came out of the barn, the reading lesson was over, and the girl had gone into the house to help her mother make pies.
“Would someone review with Toli the new words we read while he was gone?” Ilika asked.
“I will!” Buna said excitedly. Then she swallowed her words and her face
NEBADOR BookTwo: Journey 37
fell. “Oh . . . but . . . I guess he’d rather have . . . someone else . . .”
Toli looked at her, his expression changing several times during a long moment of silence. “Buna . . . I’d like it . . . if you’d teach me the new words.”
She
brightened.
Toli discovered that Buna was pretty when she smiled, and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before.
After a break for stretching and discussing the paragraphs they had just read, Ilika got out a sheet of paper and wrote.
“Sunshine implies Ultra-violet. Ultra-violet implies Burn. Therefore, Sunshine implies Burn. See how the end of the first conditional is the beginning of the second one?”
“Yeah,” Sata said, “so the two conditionals get linked together . . .”
“And the thing that links them disappears . . .” Rini added.
“And you just have the first cause . . .” Toli said.
“And the last effect, a royal sunburn!” Kibi said with a cheesy grin.
Ilika smiled. “Pretty easy, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but I want to see how we can get the hats into the logic,” Buna asserted.
“Okay . . . we could just put them in with the sunshine, in the negative,”
Ilika said as he wrote.
They looked at it and asked questions until they all understood, and
agreed, with the logic.
“But what if we do have hats?” Mati asked.
“Okay, so we agree that the conclusion is valid. Now we apply it. If we do have hats, H is true, so ‘not H’ is false, right?”
“Um . . . yeah.”
“So ‘S and not H’ is false, because both parts of the ‘and’ must be true for it to be true. Okay so far?”
“Yeah. Okay, so the result is false,” Mati said. “So no burn!”
“Be careful! No burn from the sun, but don’t sit too close to the fire! A false cause does not guarantee a false effect.”
“Oh, yeah,” Neti said with a shy grin. “We already made that mistake once before.”
Farmer Keni sat on a log at the back of the shed pretending to sharpen his hatchet. A slight smile of understanding appeared on his face for a moment, but it quickly changed to embarrassment and he focused all his attention on finishing the task.
It wasn’t too long after the logic lesson that Keni’s wife served dinner. The stew was rich with chicken, small pot herbs, dumplings, fresh spices, and, Kibi noticed, just the right amount of salt. Ilika was happy to place a silver and three coppers in the woman’s hand. Even as they sat around the stump enjoying their meal, they could smell pies baking in the kitchen.
Keni built a fire in the pit near the garden and brought over extra logs for sitting. The group stayed up for hours reviewing astronomy concepts and practicing simple multiplication problems in their heads. Kora listened part of the time, but ran to do evening chores when her mother called from the cottage door.
Two more days passed joyfully at Keni’s farm, with delicious food provided at every meal, a roof over their heads, and plenty of feed for Tera. Kibi purchased a small bronze pot from the farmer’s wife, and the woman made them a cloth sack so the soot wouldn’t get on everything. Sata arranged for pouches of salt, dried sage, and dried onions. Neti completed their cooking gear with three more bowls and a large wooden spoon.
NEBADOR BookTwo: Journey 39
Ilika introduced them to the fractional decimal places of tenths and hundredths, which the students found easier to understand than to say. They studied a hand-drawn chart of all the chemical elements, and had fun finding the elements they already knew, including the copper, silver, and gold in their pouches. Many others remained just mysterious names to them.
Kora sat in on two or three lessons each day. She loved the reading and was interested in the chemistry, but seemed quite lost with the logic and math. Kibi, Neti, and Buna had great fun explaining things to her, as if they were masters of the subjects.
Toli still glanced at Kora occasionally, but also started taking longer looks in another direction.
Deep Learning Notes
Keni is one of those wise parents who accepts that he can’t stop boys from becoming interested in his daughter, but wants to make sure it happens in an honorable way for his culture and class. In farm life, stability and understanding gained by growing up on the land is essential. Right now, Toli
does not have that. The boy down the road, mentioned later, does.
Why did Toli, who had been disgusted with Buna for several days, suddenly accept her help?
The logic form they studied is called the Hypothetical Syllogism, and is one of the nine or ten rules of inference that are generally accepted as valid. The second form reads “Sunshine and no Hat implies Ultraviolet, Ultraviolet implies Burn, therefore Sunshine and no Hat implies Burn.”
The fallacy Ilika refers to is called Denying the Antecedent. The students first encountered it in Book One, chapter 35.
The Periodic Table of Elements Ilika drew was very simple, listing only the element number, which is the number of protons and electrons in a stable, non-ionized atom.
