End-Ero: Omen's First Meet

Omen’s head throbbed mercilessly in time with the beating of his heart, a rather familiar sensation for the Meet’s youngest Overseer. Last night’s festivities had left him passed out upright in his chair, too drunk even to shamble his way home and into bed. Dawn’s call to wake had come only an hour or so into his uncomfortable sleep, and his new position was no less strict in its requirements on his time than the old one. As a foreman under Big Red, he was expected to turn out and do his duty, with no excuses offered. That his job now was to sit at a broad table with three other men and one woman, deciding the fate of an entire tribe, somehow robbed the luster of “At least it’s quiet.”

Only when compared to the incessant clamor of a working mine, of course. Just at the moment, the sandstone chamber was echoing from the force of men roaring to be heard over one another. Each voice might be speaking a cogent argument, but the greater result was an unholy cacophony from which no reason could be extracted. Tor Flame-Touched was hammering an iron ball against an iron plate in an attempt to restore order, but it was not until the two red-cloaked, steel-helmed Firewatch soldiers raised their shields and banged them against the floor did quiet fall. Those shields were heavy wood planks fronted with leather and rimmed in iron, nearly as tall and slightly more broad relative to the Watchmen themselves.

“Col Wide-Green,” Overseer Tor began, “it is far too early in the morning for you to be stirring such a ruckus. I would advise you to hold your temper in check until at least the hour after lunch, when our assembly will be far more restful and open to radical ideas.” As Overseer of Foundries, Tor Flame-Touched was regarded by most as the voice of moderation on the Meet. He had no overriding agenda, since his output to the Smiths faction was contingent upon that of the Miners.

The blond-haired, sun-tanned youth upon the broad speaking floor had no true faction, only that which was recognized as the Farmers union; recognized in name alone, with no elected Overseer and thus no ability to influence Ironborn politics. Instead, they constantly issued vague, veiled threats about food shortages or outright famines, depending on the intensity of their ire at the moment. Col Wide-Green was only the latest representative of those slave-bastard descended sodbusters and cowpunchers, as Omen well knew having often attended the Meet on his days off; it was an entertaining show, but he had never ventured within the assembly hall with a hangover before. It was not making for a pleasant experience, but the Overseer of Miners had more reason to dislike Col than either his lineage or obnoxious politics.

“Men and women toil away in the fields and paddocks, the sheds and shops, working for their honest wage, and our good Overseer Tor asks me to wait until he has stuffed himself with the fruits of their labor before seeing to their needs!” One had to admit, Col had a fine strong voice, and an orator’s sense for theater. He swept his hands, beat his breast, and held his brow at all the right moments. “We Farmers are the ones who put food on the tables of every man here, on the plates of your families! And yet we are reviled by our own society, which we serve faithfully, denied our proper place as Ironborn. We put the food on the table, but are we allowed to sit at it?”

“No!” came the call from a few rows of benches high and in the back of the gallery. With men as with stone, factions and cliques would aggregate together so that one could fairly read the veins and seams in the audience. Miners to his far right, a great many of them turned out to see their new Overseer in action, dusty and dirty in their sleeveless tunics; must be night shift, as Omen was startled to see several faces he did not know on sight. Left of them, the Smelters, cleaner and better dressed, their clothes tighter to the body and consisting of more layers; that didn’t do much to increase their perceived muscularity. Sandwiched as they were between Miners and Smiths, the Smelters looked wiry and slight. The Smiths though, they put even the Miners to shame for obvious strength, their arms and chests bulging enormously; Omen was one of the few men outside that faction who could expect to beat an experience Smith at arm-wrestling, but they were weaker in the legs than a Miner.

You had to be smart to be a good smith, Omen understood, it being harder to strike red-hot steel just so than to chip away at unyielding stone. Less dangerous, shorter hours, but it took years and years to work through an apprenticeship.He didn’t begrudge them their position of reverence, for he had never known a smith who truly looked down on a miner, and a fair few who had great respect for their courage in general. Which brought him back to the matter at hand as his eyes moved down to the front rows nearest the floor, where the women had their place of honor on cushioned seats, with little tables for dainties and wine, and thence to the floor itself and Col. Farmers wanted respect, but they had respect for no one. When town children played in the pastures, rancher kids threw shit at them, if it wasn’t rocks aimed for true harm. Venture out into the fields for a walk on your day off, or maybe a picnic in privacy with the wife, and lo there’d be a farmer along to call you a thief and demand to go through your things in search of stolen veg.

“No!” Col was saying, feeding on his supporters’ energy, raising his voice above the growing rumble of discontent from the true factions. “We are given no say, and no choice! Work the fields and turn over all but our meager share to the town, or hope to find a place hauling rocks under Big Red. And even then, the job will go to a miner’s son before a farmer’s, no matter that the miner’s son’s head is harder than stone itself and the farmer is quick and bright! You spit on us in the street when we bring our goods to market, you piss and moan about the quality of food for which you hardly give recompense!”

“Oh, what is it you want?!” In the silence that fell after the bellowed words ceased rebounding from the walls, Omen took a moment to wonder who it was that shouted. He would have thought everyone would turn to look at the speaker, allowing him to follow their eyes, but instead everyone was looking… at… Oh shit.

Col was flabbergasted for a moment, cut off midstream by Omen’s thunderous outburst. Rallying himself, he turned his body to address the miner directly. “What we want,” he stressed the plural, “is recognition! We want--”

“Yeah, yeah, a seat at the bloody table,” Omen interrupted again, this time purposefully. “Let me tell you something about this bloody table, Col. I’m sitting at it right now, been here about an hour, since bloody dawn, listening to you rant and ramble and just about raise hell. And y’know what? With all respect to my fellow Overseers and the ladies in the gallery, my bloody ass hurts.” Shocked gasps and rough chuckles answered him, and he rolled on. “This chair is too bloody small. I think I’ll skip lunch and go down to get one from my house, one as fits my big bloody ass. Know why I’m gonna do that?”

“Because your ass hurts?” Col was looking a little pinched, a little amused, and a lot confused.

“Because my ass hurts,” Omen agreed amiably, smiling with a good cheer he did not feel toward the man he was looking at. “And because I don’t want to be here. I want to be down the mines, or better yet, at home in bed with my wife. They want me to be here,” he said, raising his hand towards the miners, who whooped and whistled curtly in response. “And as long as they want me to be here, I might as well get comfortable.”

“I don’t see--”

“The point is, I don’t want to be here, I have to be here. It’s my job. Your job is bloody farming, or ranching, or picking berries, whatever you do out there, not coming in here and raising hell because you got your feelings hurt. I hope it’s your bloody day off, by the way.” Col was looking uncomfortable, kept opening his mouth to speak only to be overridden by the big miner. “And I get to be vulgar because the miners already have their seat at this table. We don’t want another one, we don’t want shorter hours or whatever, not badly enough that we have to suck up and kiss asses. Our grandfathers did that for us, thanks be to them, and before that their grandfathers went to their work and kept their bloody mouths shut about how hard they had it, just like yours did.”

Red-faced, Col drew himself up to his full height; Omen failed to be impressed by it. “So that’s it, then? Go back to the fields like a good boy and work the land til my back stoops and my bones creak, with never any hope for my children that they will do the same?”

“Let’s say you get a seat at this table. We plonk it down right here by me this very morning. Who’s Overseer of Farms, you?” Omen watched Col gobble air for a moment before rolling on. “Okay, so whoever’s Overseer sits down in the chair and we get about some real business. He says the town’s taking too much food, not enough left for the people growing and harvesting and processing it. What’s your percentage?”

“I… I-I-I don’t…”

“You don’t know, because you’re a talented idiot with a pretty face. But let’s say we’ve got someone up here who actually knows the difference between ‘reasonable proposal’ and ‘rambling stupidity’. He says we’re leaving thirty per cent of the total harvest -- that’s grains, fruits, and meats -- for the Farmers and it’s not enough. Thirty per cent goes to the public stores, canned and salted against winter and famine. The remainder feeds the town. He says we’ve got food for ten years packed away, even if every married woman in town has a child this year, so how about we give the Farmers forty-five per cent, store fifteen percent, and the rest to the town? Or hell, we could do forty, ten, and have a big festival on the rest! How’s that sound?”

“Well, I mean, it sounds like it might be--”

Overseer Malk broke in this time, his cool voice cutting across Col’s words like a knife across flesh. Not a big man, for the Ironborn, but a viper didn’t have to be very big for its bite to be deadly. “Both of those proposals have been heard by the Meet in the last five years, and we granted. Remember, two years ago, the Big Barrel Bash?” His voice went hard and cold as cast iron, but not nearly as brittle. “Do you remember?”

Scared now, the farmer took a step back, looking around as people shifted in their seats, brows lowering, lips pursing thoughtfully. “I… yes, I remember the festival. I was there.”

“Did you eat there? Did you drink?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the last time a Vaqui war party burned a farmhouse? A barn? Stole cattle?”

“My father told me--”

“Your father told you about the last time our greatest rivals successfully raided the Ironlands, and you begrudge the Firewatch their ration? Get away.” Malk sat back in his chair hard, chewing savagely on his thumbnail.

“I think,” said Overseer Tor, speaking slowly and deliberately with a glance at his armored colleague, “that will suffice for discussion on this issue today. Overseers shall deliberate.” Discussion sprang up in the gallery as those sitting at the table turned in towards each other, the general noise covering whatever might be said. However hard Col strained to hear.

“Interesting strategy, Omen,” Malk said, approval squeezing through the cracks in his iron-mask face. “You laid it on pretty thick.”

“I still don’t understand what he wants,” Omen opined, spreading his hands on the table, palms up. “It can’t be the seat, he knows he won’t get it. Just trying to stir up trouble?”

“He wants to keep seventy per cent of the spring harvest,” Overseer of Smiths Hando rumbled, scratching at a splinter in the table’s surface idly. “Let the town eat into our reserves for a season, the salt meat and canned veg. They’ll waste a third of it trying to store it in pits in the ground, or else feast themselves stupid just in time to whine about how much of the fall harvest we’re taking.”

“Not to take back what I said before,” Omen said carefully, “but are we being too hard on them? I mean, they do feed the town. Without the Farmers, all of Irontown would starve.”

“That’s the problem, the real problem,” Tor said, shaking his head with a glance to Col. “Him and his type, they don’t want to feed Irontown. They want us to go away and leave them alone, let them work for themselves. His actual petition on the rolls today is the withholding of all barley from this years spring harvest, that’s the seventy percent Hando mentioned.”

Barley. Bread, tea, beer, whiskey, feed for livestock, soup and stew. Fields of red and gold stretching as far as the eye could see to north and east of town, out to where the Farmers made their homes and ran their herds. It was a staple, along with the less popular rye and lower-yielding wheat. “Has he gone bloody mad? Where does he think he’ll get tools? Who does he think will protect him?”

“That,” said Tor gravely, “is what worries me.”



“Col Wide-Green, your informal petition for the creation of an Overseer of Farmers is denied, pending further evidence of necessity. In the future, please restrain your talking points to the issue you have formally entered to the rolls. Your petition for decreased quotas is denied, pending any evidence of necessity whatsoever. Please leave the floor.”

Col and his crew left in a silent file, unharassed by even a harsh word so far as Omen could hear. Looking down the table, he got a shallow nod from Malk and a raised eyebrow from Tor. Overseer of Smiths Hando appeared to be resting his eyes, and Overseer of Women Kora was ignoring him studiously; what to make of either response to the situation, he did not know.