Tak

The Borderlands - Part 5

     They slept under the wagons again that night. There were boarding houses available, but they cost money that Tak's father was reluctant to part with. Also, he was unwilling to leave their valuable cargo. "We'd come back in the morning to find them picked clean as a troll's skull," he said, and indeed most of the other farmers were doing the same thing. "The ground's good enough for honest folks like us."

     Some of the townspeople laughed at the country bumpkins as they spread their blankets, but Tak ignored them. His father was his one and only role model for proper behaviour.

     The next morning, Tak's father threw the canvas covering off the wagons and open one or two of the hessian sacks to let their contents spill out onto the wooden boards of the wagon's floor. Those sacks had originally held seed grain for young homesteaders starting out in the borderlands and had passed from one owner to another with contents varying from sugar beet to potatoes to tobacco leaf. The Gods alone knew how old they were now, with holes and tears carefully mended and those that finally became too worn for further use being cut up to make patches for others.

     He had barely finished arranging it for best visual effect when someone was there looking at it; a professional trader dressed in rich clothes who wrinkled his nose in distaste as if he were looking at the mouldy leavings from the back of the shed. Tak felt himself growing angry at his contemptuous attitude but, as his father explained to him later, it was only the posturing of an experienced haggler. An attempt to push the price down. He was experienced with dealing with such people, his father said, and he wasn't fooled. He recognised the subtle body language that told him the trader liked what he saw and wisely kept his mouth shut, letting his goods sell themselves. Eventually the trader wandered off, but Tak's father told him that there was a good chance he'd be back. He wasn't worried by his departure. It was far too early to expect him to make a purchase yet. He'd want to have a look at everything that was available first. People wouldn't start any serious buying until probably around midday.

     Some local merchants were also beginning to circulate, seeing what was on offer. Hoping to supplement the produce of the local farmers gathered around the town. Jalla was almost self sufficient in food, but not quite. Too many of the town's permanent population were uninvolved in food production, being guardsmen, builders, smiths, weavers, potters, thatchers or any of a dozen other professions essential for the smooth running and maintenance of any community, and so they were dependent on the outlying homesteaders if they didn't want to go hungry before the end of the winter. Tak's father was guaranteed a buyer for his goods, therefore, even if none of the city traders were interested, and he could even play them off against each other to drive his price up, but only to a point. If he drove too hard a bargain the townsfolk would simply put their own prices up and he would lose everything he gained. Prices tended to settle at a steady level, therefore, and those who tried to upset the balance were actively discouraged from doing so.

     Tak's mother left her husband to handle the selling while she took the children with her to browse around the other stalls and wagons. They couldn't actually buy anything until Tak's father had made a sale and gotten his hands on some money, but if they waited until then all the best stuff from the other vendors would have gone. Her job, therefore, was to 'finger' what they needed. Tell the other homesteaders that they wished to buy some of their stock and would do so as soon as they had the money. She and the vendor would then haggle over the price just as if she were buying it there and then, and the vendor would set it aside, to be paid for and collected later.

     He had no fear that she might not come back, leaving him with unsold stock at the end of the day. Breaking a finger, as it was called, was a serious crime and was punished by the removal of one of the offender's fingers. The offender could choose which one. This was civilisation, after all. The proceedings were opened by both parties opening their hands to each other, therefore, showing that they still had all their fingers, that they hadn't been caught offending in the past. The big danger, of course, was that she might overfinger, that she might finger more than they were able to pay for, so she had to keep careful track of how much she'd committed herself so far and balance it against the price they eventually hoped to get from the sale of their own stock.