Most of the folk of Grimmond-on-the-Wold were peasants, who tilled the little garden tofts around their three-room-and-a-loft cottages that gave off the tree-shaded streets. They had their strips in the big open fields of wheat and barley, canola and sunflowers and clover westward, their stock in the common flocks and herds. From that they paid a share to the lord, and worked two or three days a week on his demesne land; that included a long south-facing slope of goblet-trained vineyards green and bushy with summer and the orchards around the irrigation furrow beneath. Some of the little houses were neatly kept, with flowers planted around their doorways. Others had patches flaking from their whitewash and chickens walking in the door.

None of them looked truly miserable; the people in them certainly weren’t underfed, or very ragged, or too smelly. The toft gardens all had abundant vegetables and a few fruit trees; there were chicken coops and the odd pigsty or shed for a milch cow down at their far fence. There were Refugees in Richland who lived worse. The upper part of the town held larger houses as well, from the reeve’s and the bailiff’s up to those of the household knights.

“Heimat,” Maugis repeated, rolling the word around his mouth to taste it. “I like that. It . . . fits.”

Since this was a baron’s seat, it also had two or three of the things the ordinary manorial village had one of, bakeries and blacksmith’s shops and some full-time weavers. The blacksmiths had the usual piles of bundled scrap metal around their doors, and they were working too hard to notice their overlord walking by; metal hissed viciously with a vinegary smell and a spearhead was quenched, with a grinding chorus of metal shoved against spinning honing wheels beneath. Most of the other craftsfolk looked about as busy.

“War wears things out,” Maugis said, nodding at them. “Things and people.”

“God knows it’s worn holes in me,” Ingolf said ruefully, touching the dent where his nose had been broken.

Down at the end of the single street were a set of huge barns, long work sheds, a tall windmill and a tangle of corrals. Those were swarmingly busy too.

“I could turn these mountains into a running sore when the enemy come . . . as they will. Or I could put up a single fight on the plains for honor’s sake, and then just defend the heights, giving a bloody nose to anyone who pokes it in and hoping to deal as best I can with whoever has the victory in the end.”

“You could do that, my lord,” Ingolf said carefully, as he might to a horse he wasn’t sure might bolt. “But you’d be making it that much less likely we win the war.”