Chapter 418: Chapter 402 – Village Hospitality

“Call it weird, but more often than not, the harsher a place is to live in, the more hospitable its natives tend to be. Probably those people just knew all too well how hard life is, and understood that a little kindness can at times go a long way.” - Saying by Theodore Ancona, philosopher-scholar from Elmaiya, circa 310 FP.

In the end, the three of them arrived at the village they planned to spend the night in just an hour or so before sunset.

 

It was a quaint little village, with only thirty or so longhouses, though given how in smaller towns and villages the locals often shared such houses, at times with multiple families living in one, that could mean anywhere up to a hundred households easy. Like most inland villages in the Jarldoms, the locals relied heavily on animal husbandry for their living, and had large sheds built for their animals, often right next to their homes.

 

The habit of sharing houses between multiple families also made more sense when one placed the animals into consideration. It was easier for multiple families to pool resources and build one large shed to house all their livestock together, rather than have them spread over several places. The gathered livestock also made survival easier in wintertime for those animals, with the larger amount of warm bodies to huddle with.

 

From what Aideen could see, the locals mostly kept local breeds of bovine and ovine animals, ones that had adapted to the extreme cold over many generations and grew thick coats of wool on their bodies. The cold weather of the Jarldoms meant that the great lizards that were commonly used as ranch animals or beasts of burden in the west would not survive there, necessitating the locals to use their own stock instead.

 

For the most part, the locals went with the natural cycle of seasons, where their livestock mostly gave birth in spring and were sheared in summer for their wool. By the time late autumn came, their wool would have regrown to an adequate length, and the best of the livestock – typically a prized male or two along with as many of the healthiest females that the family could afford to feed through the winter – were set aside to be kept, while the rest were butchered for their meat. 

 

That meat would then be eaten in festivals or sold to the cities to fund their living for the next year, with a portion of it preserved by the wealthier families who could afford it. For that purpose, some houses had small sheds built near the main building, where the meat would be allowed to hang so that the natural temperature and humidity would preserve it for the long term.

 

Other than preserved meats, villagers from small villages like these relied on grain purchased from cities in exchange for their meat, as well as certain breeds of vegetables suitable for growing in the cold, icy soil of the region. Even as the three of them walked through the village, they saw some villagers harvesting small potatoes – each barely longer than a thumb – that grew in bunches like grapes as well as narrow, long purple carrots out from the soil. They also saw a village woman dig into the piled up snow in her garden to harvest a head of plump cabbage that grew underneath the blanket of snow.

 

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The three of them headed to a house that seemed well-to-do – it would just be rude to bother those who were already in hard times, after all – and asked if they could stay the night. The welcome they received was a warm and enthusiastic one from the rather portly middle-aged matron of the house, who they soon learned was a mother of twelve, with children ranging from young toddlers to strapping young men and women in their early twenties.

 

She had apparently outlasted all three of her husbands – bearing four children for each – and now lived with her eldest children supporting the family instead, with her fourth husband being a rather young lad who was probably not too much older from her oldest son. Then again, with the local culture, it was common for widows to remarry, and fertility was seen as a very desired quality.

 

Where the man of the house was terse but polite, the warm and friendly matron was clearly the one in charge – not an unusual case when the men were the ones who married into the household as was the case here – of the place. She was all too happy to host the travelers and even gave them warm, enveloping hugs that made all three of them think of their mothers, despite how the matron was obviously younger than any of them.

 

As for the longhouse the family of fourteen lived in, it was a simple place, with a workbench on one end of the house – the husband as well as some of the older children made crafts out of bone and ivory that they sold to help support the family – and a cooking area on the other end. The central area of the house was where most everything else was done, serving as the living, dining, and sleeping area all at the same time.

 

Like most places in the region, the outhouse was built separate from the house, closer to the small field that the family grew vegetables on, so that the waste could be used to fertilize the soil. Similarly, there were no bathrooms in the house, as the villagers were used to bathing in the nearby river that ran past their village instead.

 

They bathed in the icy water even deep into winter, a habit that the locals believed would make their bodies stronger and more resistant to illness.

 

It was a way of living that Aideen and Calais was quite familiar with, both being natives of the southern continent and not on their first jaunt to the Jarldoms. Celia saw everything with curious eyes, however, never having seen a lifestyle quite like it back in the northern continent. After all, it simply never got anywhere as cold, there, much less for most of the year.

 

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