Ah, what a sour business, he thought, to awaken from a dream of destruction and calamity, only to find yourself in the most dismal place in the world!
4
Six hundred miles east of the brilliant crystalline city of Dulorn, in the marshy valley known as Prestimion Vale, where a few hundred families of Ghayrogs raised lusavender and rice on widely scattered plantations, it was getting to be the midyear harvest season. The glossy, swollen, black lusavender pods, nearly ripe, hung in thick clusters at the ends of curving stems that rose from the half-submerged fields.
For Aximaan Threysz, the oldest and shrewdest of the lusavender farmers of Prestimion Vale, there was an excitement about this harvest like nothing she had felt in decades. The experiment in protoplast augmentation that she had begun three seasons back under the guidance of the government agricultural agent was reaching its culmination now. This season she had given her entire plantation over to the new kind of lusavender: and there were the pods, twice normal size, ready to be stripped! No one else in the Vale had dared to take the risk, not until Aximaan Threysz had checked things out. And now she had; and soon her success would be confirmed; and they would all weep, oh, yes! when she came to market a week ahead of everyone else with double her usual volume of seed!
As she stood deep in mud by the edge of her fields, pressing her finger-ridges into the closest pods and trying to determine how soon to start the picking, one of her eldest son's boys came running up with a message: "Father says to tell you he's just heard in town that the agricultural agent's on his way from Mazadone! He's reached Helkaplod already. Tomorrow he'll ride to Sijaneel."
"Then he'll be in the Vale by Twoday," she said. "Good. Perfect!" Her forked tongue began to flicker.
"Go, child, run back to your father. Tell him we'll hold the feast for the agent on Seaday and we'll begin the harvest on Fourday. And I want the whole family to gather in the plantation house in half an hour. Go, now!
Run."