2.4 Dirt Poor

Stop it stop it stop it! Thexi shouted into her head, rushing inside the house and snagging piles of notations and numbers she worked on all morning. This is your job now! I’m not a slut like Gowk thinks I am when he chopped my hair! I did what I had to so I could survive. I’m done with that, my legs are closed for business forever. Stupid Calepori genetics! Being a farmhand is good, honest, WHOLESOME work. Don’t screw this up, Thexi, because you can’t stop…can’t…ooooh, that tongue…

Thexi hauled off and slapped herself in the snout. Not a love tap, but not as hard as Gowk would have hit her before the divorce. Stupid Calepori genetics probably made her like getting slapped on top of everything else. It shook her out of the funk and put her right, descending the stairs and back outside in a jiff. “Did you know a bushel is determined by how much of a thing fits into a bushel basket? The whole farm system is cataloged that way because a bushel is the standard increment materials are shipped. At first I thought that would make it easy, but one bushel of oats weights less than a bushel of wheat. Absolutely maddening until I found his notes on average bushel weights for all the produce.”

“Fascinating,” Qastael said, entirely too close and her breath smelled of almonds. The wind stirred Qastael’s black and white fur, teasing out a myriad of colorful scales underneath, though her bra and skirt splashed crimson while dark green feathered wings haloed off her back. The massive woman’s long and serpent body coiled back around on itself, casually languid even with a long line of white stitches running down her middle.

She’s so big! Thexi thought, trying very hard to keep her mind away from sensuality, shuffling parchment and stepping towards an open patch of flat dirt, setting them on the ground to organize her presentation. “Yes, um, I went over everything on the farm and I think there is good news. I’m relying on Mr. Lewfich’s notes - though I already found a few discrepancies, then fixed things after I counted all the livestock - but the initial numbers are promising.” Thexi held up a bundle of pages triumphant, immensely pleased with herself over finishing these figures so quickly. “I have it here on these charts.”

Qastael nodded, peering around until she stepped over near the creek and picked up a long and straight piece of deadwood. Nodding, she walked over towards some dirt and motioned towards Thexi. “Alright, read them off.”

Thexi also nodded, desperately praying to the Pantheons that she didn’t screw up somewhere.

“Whale what?” Qastael asked, pausing and spinning her neck around to glare incredulously at Thexi, who blushed and waved her hands in the air.

“You heard me! I even found the barrels, it isn’t misspelled or nothing!” Thexi wanted to crawl into a hole and die, but what did she know? “Maybe it was some kind of delicacy and Plone had weird tastes. Maybe it is the secret ingredient for all the cheese. I don’t know!”

“Hmm…” Qastael muttered, going back to scratching out figures into the clay, careful not to step on any of her work. When Thexi finished, Qastael proved a great head for numbers, quickly and accurately adding up the totals without abacus or equations. “Going to leave off the Dairy for now. I’ve never had cheese, but this looks like an impressive amount for just one man to eat. All that cheese could be valuable, which might help us long term. How is cheese made? Does it use the eggs or milk?”

“I don’t know, but I found his booklets for cheese. Dozens of recipes, so some might use eggs, didn’t look closely. Milk is the main ingredient, though. There are other ingredients listed that I didn’t bother for now, like starters and rennets, which I don’t know what those are but they didn’t sound edible. I couldn’t find where he keeps all this dairy, though, only designating it in a cold room.” Thexi shuffled through the papers, nervous and sweating through her fur, plucking her corset and wishing it wasn’t so hot today. “This is all based on averages out of Mr. Lewfich’s observations and decades of work, I haven’t actually counted up everything as some of it is in the cellar, some in the barn silos, only fixing a few things I saw, like the barrels of almonds you ate today, also a few of the smoked meats are missing and I noticed some barrels were broken and I found bugs on the floor and maybe the other food is all bad…”

“It’s ok, this is good work, gives us a place to start.” Qastael flapped a calming wing towards the harried bunny then finished her equations, looking over the numbers. “I’ll add the eggs. Gonna hold off on Spices, Processed Goods, Magical Goods and Non-Edibles. Hope we don’t get desperate enough to eat feathers, but I’ve honestly eaten worse. All those could be goods we turn into coins that could garner more food or more stock. I don’t know enough, and that’s my biggest hangup.” Scratching out a final number, she sat back on her haunches and motioned Thexi over. “Does 479,634 pounds (217,557.2 kg) look right to you?”

“It’s what I came up with, more or less, though we might eat those feathers eventually.” Thexi held up the next page and ran down the lines absently, speaking with half a mind to Qastael as she rambled through everything. “Lot of this is guesswork and averages, and the next part is more the same. I counted the livestock, found their feed recipes in the booklets, added myself and you, then worked the numbers purely from weight. I don’t know if you understand how days and months work in Faluss, but today is Tenday, last day of the week, thirtieth of the month of Reiti, meaning Vette starts tomorrow. Thirty days left in spring, another two months after that for summer. I have no idea when all the food will be harvested, but I reckon we need to, minimum, store food lasting ninety days and the start of fall. I’ll look through the books and mark out when everything should be harvested later. For right now, I mathed feed quantities for the animals and the two of us will just have to make do with whatever is left.”

“These are just ideal diets according to Plone, and they include a fifteen percent waste overage because I guess animals are messy eaters,” Thexi quickly assured, hopping around and gathering all the papers when the breeze blustered a stronger gust. “Substitutions can be made, but all things being perfect this is what he recommended. Soybeans, for instance, were primarily for the sheep, but with them all dead that feed can go to both cows and chickens. And of course we aren’t eating feed, but it was so you could get an idea of how much need to last until harvest.” The bunny girl stomped on the last errant page, huffing as anxiety drained out of her. “I’ll work super hard and make sure these numbers are more accurate later, after I figure out what we need to do with the crops. I’ll also add in livestock output and see how much of things like cheese and meat we can produce by then.”

“Fantastic, absolutely lovely. 410,805 pounds (186,337.9 kg) of food in ninety days leaves us with plenty of buffer in case we have to hustle for our grub,” Qastael said, grinning a wide set of teeth and rubbing claws together before going back to adding up more numbers in the dirt. “Good thing, because I think we are going to lose about half the harvest this year, whatever we do. Something ate most of the potatoes, which I’ll deal with later. Also, while I can go as long as a week without food and water, ideally I should be drinking sixty gallons of water a day. Yeesh, milking cows drink…two hundred and thirty gallons a day? I need to head over to the barn and refill those water troughs.” Itching her chest, Qastael cocked her head and flipped her ears around towards the east.

Thexi’s ears weren’t just for show, she heard it too, clutching papers to her chest when panic bloomed. Wagons, lots of them, moving in the direction of the house at a fast clip.

“Crap, forgot all about her,” Qastael muttered while angling her neck over low trees, tossing her branch aside and standing. Stretching out her wings, she hobbling downstream towards the center of the valley.

“Her? Her who?” Thexi asked, hopping at nearly a sprint to keep up with gargantuan strides, though she hid behind Qastael in case of vagrants or vandals or…whatever.

Needn’t have worried, though. More than a dozen wagons filled with all manner of fabrics and materials, they were drawn by arachne rather than horses. And leading the way, waving her hands excitedly, was the matriarch herself, dressed in a tan dust cloak, both distance and the cloth obscuring her immediate identity. However, there was no hiding that magnificent afro.

“Howdy, y’all!” Ms. Zeshyrrith shouted, her caravan rounding the other side of the pond near a large and deep crevasse. Her smile could be seen from across the valley. Behind her, a brood of spidergirls followed along, each a different blend of clothing styles, hair styles and carapaces as could be imagined. Thexi figured she knew half of them, but she hadn’t worked at the bordello long enough to meet the entire family, all six of the madame’s daughters out in force.

“They’re here to make me clothing, completely dropped the carriage on that one. Said they’d take food for payment. Reckon your numbers are gonna need revising in a few days,” Qastael said, waving back, though it was clear a weight settled upon her shoulders.

Realizing the implications, Thexi’s panic returned tenfold as all her perfectly balanced numbers became outdated before her very eyes. “How much do arachne eat a day?” Thexi asked.

She was about to find out.