In the spring and autumn there was the plowing to be done—twice a year, for in the autumn they would seed the fields with winter wheat and other seasonal crops. They cultivated emmer wheat, spelt wheat, hulled six-row barley, kale, and beans. Wild garlic and parsnips could often be found, and in summer blackberries, elderberries, and crab apples. They kept a few chickens, sheep for their wool and milk, and pigs, useful creatures that could be turned out into the fields to root in the stubble, or driven into the forest for forage in the winter. Only old animals were butchered. Most of their meat came from hunted deer and occasionally boar, and they still used the simple traps for hares they had made from their very earliest days.

And then there were all the other essentials of life. It still startled Regina sometimes that you really couldn’t buy anything anymore. Anything you couldn’t barter for, from shoes to clothes to tools to new roofing for your house, you had to make.

Take clothing, for instance. As their few garments had quickly worn out, Regina had had to find out how to pluck wool off their sheep with combs of wood or bone, and to spin it into yarn, and even to weave it with simple looms. The clothes they made were simple—just tubes of cloth, made into tunics and undershirts and braecci, trousers for the men, and a peplum, a sleeveless dress for the women—but they did the job.

Shoes were more of a challenge. When their old town-bought shoes had worn out, their first attempts at making leather replacements had been disasters, ill-fitting lash-ups that had rubbed and burned and caused blisters. Even now they were only beginning to learn the knack of cobbling a good serviceable boot. It amazed her how much time she spent thinking about her feet.

They had even tried their hand at pottery, to replace their cups and bowls of carved wood. They experimented with pit clamps. You would line a shallow pit with hot embers overlaid with green wood. The pots would be carefully placed on top, and the whole thing covered with dry wood, damp straw, and soil to make an airtight mound. If you left it for a full day, making sure the covering of soil was intact, you might be lucky to have a quarter or a third of your pots come out whole—blackened, coarse, but intact.

Carausias and Marina seemed to find great satisfaction in making such things, while Brica and the children were used to nothing better. But Regina remembered her mother’s precious Samian ware, and she wondered how long it would be before the trade routes were restored and the markets opened again, and she would once again be able to buy such treasures as easily as breathing.