The Lady’s Silent Siege
The man I encountered after stepping out of the hut was, as his voice suggested, truly a kind and handsome fellow. The 'Capitán' who introduced himself as Juan Manuel was a man who felt strangely like both a commoner and a nobleman.
When I see him joking around with the tercios, he looks like any merchant in a marketplace, yet when I watch him command the people and direct the work, I feel the dignity of a born general.
He is not a man of empty words, either. He is actively involved in every task—digging water channels, piling up earth, tending to the injured, and distributing food and fuel.
Setting that aside, he has been consistently refusing any private conversation or being alone with me, Teresa.
"A fascinating man."
Watching this, I felt a spark of stubbornness. In the moments we were alone, I could clearly feel the gaze of a man lusting after my unnecessarily large breasts. When I subtly let my cloak slip, his visible agitation was plain to see. And watching that was a lewd and delightful amusement, quite out of place in this time of great catastrophe. To Teresa, a daughter of the noble Enrique family and sister to the head of the house, the 'pleasure of a woman' living in the midst of this disaster mattered more than any sense of propriety or status.
"Why won't he tell me his surname?"
One thing I can say for certain: despite his strangely refined demeanor, he is undoubtedly a nobleman. Managing the King's farm—he must be a poor hidalgo. The true commoners of Spain are cautious even about meeting a noble's eyes directly. Yet, the way he keeps hiding his surname is suspicious. Is he an illegitimate child? Whose? A royal's?
"What if he isn't a noble? It doesn't matter. I have already taken a liking to you. You will be mine one day."
Speaking those words aloud in a place where no one could hear was a vow. It was a declaration to Teresa of the Enrique family, and a binding spell of sorts.
A thrill I had never felt in my twenty-five years of life surged from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.
"How delightful. I feel as though a sense of emptiness will wash over me once this hunt ends. Now I finally understand why men are so obsessed with hunting."
Teresa smiled like a wolf chasing its prey, watching the man who kept trying to avoid her.
—Neigh!
Beside her, Aventador, the pure white Andalusian stallion, was playing and side-stepping with an expression that suggested he was having the time of his life.
"My dear. Your master will surely become mine. Do you feel that it is your fate to become mine as well?"
—Nod, nod.
The white horse nodded vigorously, though he immediately let out a threatening kick when a chestnut mare approached.
Teresa pulled on the stallion's reins and walked toward the women remaining on the plateau.
"Oh, hero of mine. You shall be held in my arms because of the very people you have protected."
After finishing her conversation with the women, she watched the men and the 'Capitán' who had gone down below, unable to suppress her laughter.
Three days after the flood forced us to flee to the plateau, I could feel the water receding to some extent. I descended the plateau with twenty hand-picked men and returned to the village, which was filled with thick, muddy silt.
"Capitán, this looks completely ruined..."
"No. I won't give up until I see it with my own eyes."
"Yes! Capitán!"
One of the tercios voiced his anxiety, but I shook my head firmly and did not stop my path toward the granary. And in the end, our hope was rewarded.
"Kyah! I knew I could trust you, damn it!!! Everyone, shout it out loud! Long live the Valladolid Stonemason Guild!"
"Long live the Valladolid Stonemason Guild!"
The foundation made of crushed stone and rock, one meter underground and one meter above, had become an artificial rock layer that supported the 50-ton stone granary to the very end. The wheat and beans remaining inside were securely protected by the thick, load-bearing stone walls without a single window. Sealing the vents and the main gate with earth before sealing the granary had been a stroke of genius. Although the humidity was a bit high, the catastrophe of the wheat grains sprouting did not occur.
And the 10-ton granary, located at the highest point in the village—our seed warehouse—was not only perfectly fine, but it had maintained a dry state where not even a drop of moisture had entered. In fact, some of the 'Don Quixote' wheat grains that we had moved to the temporary food storage on the plateau as a precaution had absorbed too much moisture and were already starting to sprout.
We hurriedly hitched the oxen to plow furrows for the seeds that had begun to sprout. While the women planted them one by one in the furrows with good drainage, we converted one side of the 50-ton granary into a temporary living space. With a roof over our heads, we finally had a place to evacuate when it rained, and we gathered all the children who had remained on the plateau to begin communal living.
"If I had known this, I would have gathered them all in the granary."
"But because the boss prepared for the worst, we're all alive and here, aren't we!"
"Hey, well said! Good! Quixote! You go up and bring the people down. Keep the children up there and bring all the able-bodied men!"
We opened the granary doors to let the moisture out and checked the collapsed houses one by one. Only after more able-bodied men came down did we light a fire in the square and begin the grueling labor.
We used ox-drawn plows to precisely scoop out the silt stuck in the rye field furrows and cleared the mud piled up in the ridges. In doing so, we allowed the rye sprouts, with their tenacious vitality, to see the sun. Watching the rye grow taller as time passed, we shouted cries of joy. If we had planted weak crops like wheat or barley, they surely would have all died.
We gave up on the fallow land where we had sown clover and radishes for now. Instead, we gathered the discarded mud and sandy soil to build high, makeshift ridges to improve drainage and planted potatoes. The potatoes of the 17th century are not as big and beautiful as the whole potatoes of the 21st century, but I still tried to save the eyes, coat them in ash, and attempt a 'potato copy cheat.' Even if it fails, it's just like an insurance policy.
"No, Capitán, what is this?"
"It's a potato. We ate them often in my hometown."
After all, Gangwon-do in 21st-century Korea uses potatoes as a base currency. Well, of course, my family grew organic Korean wheat instead of potatoes, which don't make much money.
"Isn't this... inedible? It has poison, and it's not even in the Bible."
A farmer who had been a sailor in the New World expressed his concern, so I gave him words to put them at ease.
"If you remove the poison like you do with lupins, people can eat them too, but for now, we're growing them for the oxen, so don't worry."
At my words, the people nodded and moved off to do their respective tasks.
If you don't have a house, you can bivouac. But if you don't have anything to drink or eat, you die. The next thing we did was refurbish the silt-filled well and build a facility to perform simple purification of the stream water.
"Capitán, can we really drink it if we do this?"
"It'll be better than drinking the water as is."
A transmigrator would basically say you must boil water at a disaster recovery site. But in this godforsaken land where there isn't even enough fuel to boil wheat porridge, boiling water to drink is a luxury of armchair theory. I made a pool where the water flowing down the cliffs and valleys could collect. That pool was designed to let the water trickle down through a filter layer made of charcoal, gravel, and sand. The filtered water flowing out at the bottom is collected in jars, and we only take the top layer of water after letting it settle, mixing in a bit of vinegar before drinking.
If a weak modern person from the 21st century had drunk it, they would have gone straight to the bathroom or the emergency room, but the hardy humanity of the 17th century can drink it and say, "Thank you! It's an honor!" Anyway, we protected our food and succeeded in rebooting and normalizing our farmland; the next step was to restore the houses we would live in, as we couldn't live in the granary forever.
"Alright! First, we fix the houses! We'll do it one house at a time, all together! Understand!"
"Yes! Capitán!"
With thunderous shouts, the men working as one body and the women helping even with the smallest tasks cleared away the mud-brick houses that had melted in the downpour and gathered clay to mold new bricks.
"If only we had enough fuel, we could use fired bricks..."
I am well aware of the situation in the Valladolid area, where the forests have been so devastated that the price of fuel is worth its weight in gold. I looked at the 200-meter-high plateau in the distance and said to Quixote:
"Starting this autumn, I really need to plant trees on that plateau."
"Boss, you said you were definitely leaving this year."
Quixote started picking a fight, so I gave him a flick on the forehead and said:
"Hey, kid, how many times do I have to tell you? Plant an apple tree even if you're going to die tomorrow? That is the true attitude of a farmer!"
"Geez, the guy who always says 'maximum harvest with minimum labor'..."
"Anyway, get some sleep and let's work tomorrow."
In one corner of the 50-ton granary, there was a little grain piled in bulk. In one corner, the men slept. In another, the women. In another, the animals. Thus, a day where we saw hope had passed. I watched them all fall asleep and then I, too, fell into a sleep like a faint.
—Rustle.
"He's asleep."
"Let's move."
The men who had been sleeping near the man who had just fallen asleep rose silently and headed somewhere.
"I am overjoyed that you all gathered at my request. Has everyone who was supposed to come arrived?"
The woman, who had wrapped a coarse blanket over her linen pajamas yet lost none of her dignity, spoke quietly, and the men and women who moved with suspicious agility gathered in an orderly fashion and answered.
"Yes, my Lady."
Regardless of gender, they were united with suspicious consistency, answering with one voice and creating a strange tension.
"Just as I conveyed through the women earlier. I wish to grant you what you desire."
"We uneducated folk only hope that you, my Lady, will make our boss take root in this land 'forever'."
It was Quixote of La Mancha who said that. Having assisted the Capitán from the closest proximity, he had become the ringleader of this conspiracy faster than anyone else.
The secretary, who had been watching this with displeasure, cleared his throat—ahem!—and spoke an uncomfortable truth.
"But I will say it again and again: his surname is Expósito. That means he is not even an illegitimate child, but a 'discarded child.' Even though I have clearly stated that, are you certain that your thoughts remain the same, my Lady?"
The answer to his words did not come from Teresa, but erupted from among the enraged tercios.
"Silence! You fool! Do you still not understand the will of our 'Lady'?"
"Losing one's 'faith' means death!"
"Hey, you! Is it because you're a secretary and you're well-off? Is it over if you're the only one who survives? Do you want to see if you're still alive even with a dagger in your gut?"
As the five tercios bristled with the intent to stab him to death, the secretary could not say a word and shriveled up.
"The troublemaker has been dealt with. Let's proceed just like this!"
Excluding the children who were fast asleep, the conspiracy, which had begun with everyone gathered, sought only one outcome.
Their discussion for the success of the conspiracy was more serious than that of great scholars and shone with an infinite intellect brighter than the moonlight in the night sky.
"Even if he abandons the world, the world cannot abandon him—that is what a hero is."
Teresa, who had already ascended to the position of their liege lady with her innate dignity, said as she drank wine that was closer to vinegar.
"Even if I have to eat cheap wine and coarse food for the rest of my life, I will live as a woman."
The crude wooden cup used in the farmhouse moved in her hands as if it were a top-grade crystal glass.
Having cast off even the last lingering attachment to the affluent life of the convent, she handed the cup to the farm girls lined up behind her.