Chapter 5: Walls And Watchtowers
The south-side labor rotation was working well.
Three weeks in, the Wei, Liu, and Chen families were cycling through each other's plots on a shared schedule I'd drawn up using a stick and a flat piece of bark that I kept tucked under my sleeping mat. The Wei family's eldest son worked the Chen plot while Chen's widow worked the Liu fields. Then every other day it reversed, and on off days Hao moved between all three and handled whatever heavy labor had piled up during the week.
The yields wouldn't show for another two months, but the signs were already there. Seedlings were going in on time and the irrigation was holding. The Chen widow's eastern field, which had been half-fallow for two seasons, was fully planted for the first time since her husband died.
I stood on the hillside above the village at dawn and looked down at the layout.
From up here, the whole settlement laid itself out like a diagram. The river fork was to the south. The hill I was standing on was to the west. Open farmland was to the east. And the northern road, cutting straight through flat ground toward the Prefect's seat at Meishan, was completely unobstructed for as far as I could see.
If I were a raiding party, I'd come from the north. There's nothing between the road and the first row of houses except a vegetable garden.
I crouched and studied the terrain. The hill behind me wasn't steep, but it had good elevation. Fifteen, maybe twenty meters above the village floor. Anyone standing up here could see movement on the northern road a full li before it reached the settlement. The river to the south was too wide and fast to ford easily, which meant it functioned as a natural barrier.
We had one exposed flank and every single house in the village was oriented toward the fields rather than the approach road because why would farmers build defensively? Nobody had ever taught them to think that way.
I pulled the bark sheet from my belt and scratched new marks into it with a sharpened stick. I'd been mapping the village layout for a week, adding details after each circuit. Now I added the terrain features such as hill elevation, river width, and the flat northern approach.