The Farmer Bandits
Unlike Earth, where most of the land was asphalt and the places people lived, this world was mountains, forest, and field, with human settlements only wedged in among them. Even when the road a wagon traveled was not forest, it ran between trees large and small, and now and then a bleak stretch opened out—wasteland, or empty field.
In a country like that, happening upon a village stirred a little gladness even in Juhwan. Whenever a village came into sight, Lizzie's eyes and Dorothy's sparkled. People were social animals. That much, it seemed, was true.
They did not enter every village. Under Red Sword's guidance they stopped briefly at one or two and paid their respects to the village chief—an introduction to places that would be all right to visit later, when they came alone. Inns that did not gouge you, or gouged you only a little, or where the beds and the meals were decent.
As the day began to fail, another village appeared. That would be where they stayed the night.
It looked much like any other. A fence that might as well not have been there circled the place, and most of the land around it was fields. This village, too, seemed to leave the front gate open through the daylight hours. It stood half open now.
A few men had come out to shut it when they caught sight of Juhwan and the Red Sword party. They swung the gate wide again so the wagon could pass.
Juhwan had the driving turn. He muttered as he steered that way.
"Are we really sure about this? If there are bedbugs again, we're finished."
"You can't help there being lots of bedbugs. Most places are like that."
Lizzie giggled.
Was she truly all right? The memory of last night rose in him, and before he knew it he was scratching himself raw. He could endure the rest of it. Bedbugs, he did not think he could. And yet if they slept in the wagon again, they would only be throwing the money away.
That thought had made him ask Red Sword, during a rest, whether camping in the open might not be better. The women had answered that anyone who meant to live as an adventurer had to keep passing through villages. Otherwise, they said, you got cheated later. They had pointed him toward lodgings that did not cheat people much—but even those, it seemed, were not above gouging anyone who looked inexperienced, or simply green.
"However you dress it up, a lack of experience shows."
That was Marie.
And this village, they told him, was all right. Red Sword stayed here from time to time. The people changed the straw more often than in other villages and kept the place clean, so there ought not to be bedbugs. Even hearing it, he found it a little hard to believe.
Once they were inside, almost the same scene as last time played itself out. The village chief and the men of the village came out to meet Juhwan and Red Sword. Only the faces were different.
His eyes met Lizzie's. She seemed to have been thinking the same thing. Neither of them had said a word, but the moment their gazes caught, he felt it. Lizzie ducked her neck, smiled a small smile, and a smile rose on Juhwan's face as well. So this was a husband and wife understanding each other without speaking. He was faintly moved.
The lodging came to one small coin each for an empty house and for the barn. A little steep—but they also gave hay for the horses, and in the end the price was very cheap. Horse feed at a city inn had cost more than he expected: one rina, and a small coin on top of that. Set beside that, this was a bargain. A farm was a place that produced hay to begin with, and they likely used feed a notch poorer than an inn's. He had thought a farm, hay being common, would simply give the feed away. Nothing in this world was free.
When Karin asked for hot-water bottles, the village chief answered that he would bring them later in the night, around the time they went to sleep. Karin looked at Juhwan and Lizzie.
"Then from here, we unpack."
"I'm sorry, but tonight we'll sleep in the barn."
"Oh—will that be all right?"
"It's fine. This is all experience, too."
At Juhwan's words, Karin, Jessie, and Marie looked at one another. Then they laughed.
"You must have hated those bedbugs an awful lot. I think this time will be all right. But, well—just as you say, it's all experience."
Karin laughed and agreed. Red Sword pulled old blankets from the cart and headed for the house. A house had less straw than a barn, they said, and so it was colder.
A thoughtful look came over Lizzie's face. She glanced up at Juhwan, then frowned a little.
"What is it, Lizzie?"
"Mm…. It's nothing."
Her reaction nagged at him, but it did not seem to be anything serious. She did not look hurt anywhere. It was only the feeling of someone who had started to speak and then stopped.
Guided by the village chief, Juhwan and Lizzie made for the barn. The chief looked at Dorothy, and at Oz perched on her hat, and laughed low—heh, heh.
"That's a horned rabbit, isn't it. I saw one once, when I was very small. Rare thing, a child as young as you going about with a magical beast on your head."
"It's Oz! Daddy picked Oz up when Oz got hurt."
"Oh ho. Is that so. You seem to get along."
"Yeah! Oz and Dorothy are the best friends. Oz is my little sibling."
The village chief laughed, heh heh, with a fond face. Since coming to this world, Juhwan thought this might be the first person he had seen who found a child cute. His mood lifted a little.
The barn was on the clean side. One end was a space heaped high with hay; at the other, a goat and a few chickens wandered.
"Use it as you like. If you make a mess, we'll tidy it, so don't trouble yourselves."
With that, the village chief set a lamp that reeked of oil into a shelf on one of the posts. The wooden wall had a niche just large enough to hold it.
"Is it all right to have a fire in a place like this?"
With hay everywhere, he worried it might catch, but the village chief smiled and nodded.
"It's fine. The lamp bowl is fixed so it won't fall easily. This spot is clear of the hay, too. No need to worry so much."
He said that and went out.
Dorothy had already plunged into the haystack.
The barn was colder than he had expected. The house had been cold enough, but here the wind came pouring through. There were walls, and he could not tell where the wind was getting in. Stand still beside one, and cold air passed straight through it. A sigh escaped him on its own.
Did I choose wrong?
But Lizzie and Dorothy looked delighted. Both of them were buried in the hay.
They had brought food from the wagon and were in the middle of eating when the village chief came again.
"It's nothing much, but there's a child. This'll warm you a little."
What he held out was broth boiled with vegetables. When they thanked him, he glanced at Dorothy with a softened face.
"My granddaughter died not long ago. Get them past three or four and a good many live, but our girl had bad luck."
Perhaps Dorothy looked a little like her.
"The child's face is very bright. You don't often see one who laughs so well."
He said that and left the barn. A little later, the bottles of warm water were set outside the door.
The meal was finished, and so was the warm broth. Time to sleep.
When Juhwan climbed onto the haystack, his feet sank deep. He flailed, a little thrown, and Lizzie and Dorothy burst out laughing. The three of them lay down in a row, the bottles half buried in the hay at their feet, and closed their eyes.
But he could not sleep.
Deep in the night, something crawled about at his feet. Skitter, skitter—and terribly fast. Even under the hay they lay on, something seemed to be wriggling. The hay was soft enough that nothing touched him outright, but the straw shifted, little by little. Wriggle. Wriggle. It raised the hair on his arms.
He sat up in alarm, and Lizzie hesitated, then spoke.
"It's rats. Barns have rats. I did wonder if maybe you didn't know. You really didn't?"
Did people in this world not know that rats were the root of every sickness? How many germs did the things carry, and here they were, sleeping among them?
In the end Juhwan gathered up the sleeping Dorothy and left the barn with Lizzie. They passed that night in the wagon, the same as the night before.
At dawn the women of Red Sword saw him climb out of the wagon and laughed until they clutched their stomachs. He had nothing to say.
Next time he would simply camp. Or if they entered a village, he would sleep in the wagon and spare his nerves. In a village, he would just buy feed for the horses.
Before he became a bandit, he had been an ordinary farmer. Last year he had failed to pay the poll tax, and he had fled the village.
The six beside him now were the ones who had left with him. All but one had gone because of the poll tax. One man had had his wife taken by the village chief. He had gone at the man, been beaten half to death, and been all but driven out. Had he stayed, the chief would have pinned some crime on him at the village council and made a criminal of him anyway.
At first they joined another band. Farmers did not fit that company. Those men attacked people and killed them, raped the women, and killed even the children. In the end the seven fled in the middle of the night, half dead with the running, and everywhere they went it was the same. Unable to adapt to any other band, they founded one of their own. They called it the Farmer Bandits. He became the leader.
They still had not managed a proper robbery. Whenever they steeled themselves to it, one party of travelers was nothing but women, and another had too many children. Think of the little ones, the parents, and the wives they had left in the village, and they could not bring themselves to strike. Other travelers looked too strong, or were adventurers with swords in their hands.
But now their bellies were truly stuck to their backs. He was hungry enough that child or woman, he no longer cared. He was the one about to starve. Who was he to worry over anyone else?
"If we don't plunder this time either, let's just all die together."
"We don't even have to try. We'll starve anyway."
"I mean it. This time we really have to kill people, or whatever it takes. If we don't, we're dead for sure."
"Don't stop me this time."
"You don't stop me."
The Farmer Bandits each said their piece, then fixed their eyes on the road.
It was not forest, but the trees were many. Cart or wagon, whoever came had no choice but to pass this way. The trunks were large and thick, and from the road they overlapped, good cover for a body. They would not be spotted easily.
This time it works. It has to.
Tension dried his throat to paper.
Then the sound he had been waiting for came. He narrowed his eyes. Far off, a cart and a wagon were coming on.
Someone muttered.
"That one's a bit dangerous."
"Yeah. Two of them. Mess this up and we get hurt bad, don't we?"
"…What do we do?"
"Then how about we just block the front?"
"Should we?"
They meant the trap. So a wagon or a cart would have to stop, they had dug a shallow cut across the road. Too late, he thought it would have been easier to fell a few trees and leave them lying there. The digging was already done. Do it that way, he had figured, and a wagon would lurch and halt as it crossed. But if two came at once, the one behind would ram the cart in front. Even without a collision, a clumsy hand on the horses and the wagon would tip onto its side.
The cart seemed to hold only women. In the wagon behind, a child sat in the middle.
He did not want the child hurt. It felt like watching the child he had left in the village come to harm before his eyes, and his heart was truly not in it. Living together in the village, he had not been so tender a father. Far away, he missed them now, and pitied them.
He was the leader. The decision had to be his.
"All right. We go."
"Let's, Boss."
"Hurry. They're already here."
The seven who had been hiding behind a great tree dashed out. Thrusting forward the swords and pickaxes they had stolen on their way out of that other band, they shouted all at once.
"Stop!"
"We're bandits."
"Don't resist, and we won't kill you."
"Mwahaha! We won't kill you, so hand the goods over nice and quiet!"
The horse of the cart in front cried out and stopped hard. Almost in the same instant, the wagon behind stopped too. Both rocked badly, but luck was with them: no one fell, and no one was hurt.
Today, though, they might be the ones to do the hurting. They would not kill, and they would not maim, but they were the ones holding weapons. Someone, he was sure, was going to get hurt. The leader saw that his own hand was trembling. He was wound so tight he felt as if something were about to spill out of his mouth. He tightened his grip on the weapon. Today he could not retreat. He would take something, no matter what. His stomach growled.
Then the woman driving the cart shouted.
"You sons of bitches!"
The women in the cart twisted up their faces and swore. Then they drew their weapons and leaped down.
They did not look afraid at all. Something, he thought, was wrong.