Chapter 9: The Question of Salt

Tom did not sleep. He lay on the straw pallet in the tithe barn’s loft, listening to the rats scratch among the sacks of wool that Fulke had stored there against the winter. The rain had stopped, but the air still held the smell of it—wet earth, rotting leaves, the sharp tang of the midden. He turned the reeve’s words over in his mind like stones in a stream, polishing them for meaning. *He was asking about you. About the stranger who appeared from nowhere.*

By dawn, he had a plan, or the skeleton of one. He dressed in the rough tunic and hose that Joan had sewn for him from undyed wool, the cloth still stiff with lanolin, and made his way to the village well. The women were already there, drawing water for the day’s brewing, and they fell silent when he approached. That silence was a new thing, heavier than the fear they had shown him in the first weeks. Fear, he had learned, could be softened with kindness. But suspicion was a harder metal.

“Mistress Joan,” he said, nodding to her as she set her bucket down. “I need salt. A great deal of it.”

Joan’s eyes narrowed. She was a small woman, barely past twenty, with the kind of face that seemed to have been carved by wind and worry into something older. But her gaze was sharp, and it missed nothing. “Salt is dear. And the lord’s steward takes his share of the salt-pans before any of us see a grain.”

“I know. But I can trade for it. I have—” He hesitated. The warehouse had yielded its secrets slowly: rolls of coarse linen, coils of rope, iron nails, a small fortune in beeswax candles. But the salt he had found in the stores was refined, pure, almost too white for this world. He had hidden it in a sack beneath the turnip seed, but now he needed to move it into circulation. “I have goods the steward will want. Steel, perhaps. Or spice.”

Joan studied him for a long moment. Then she nodded, once. “Come to my cottage at dusk. We will talk of what you have and what it is worth.”

She turned and walked away, and the other women resumed their chatter, but Tom noticed they did not meet his eyes.

The day passed in a blur of work. The fields were being ploughed for the winter wheat, and Tom had insisted on a new method: deeper furrows, turned with the steel ploughshares he had bartered to Baldric for a share of the harvest. The oxen strained against the unfamiliar weight, and the villagers muttered, but the soil turned black and rich beneath the blade, and even the most doubtful could see that it was good earth. By late afternoon, Tom’s back ached and his hands were raw, but he felt a small, stubborn pride. He was doing what he knew. He was making order out of chaos.

At dusk, he went to Joan’s cottage. It stood at the edge of the village, a low hovel of wattle and daub, with a roof of heavy thatch that sagged in the middle like an old man’s back. Inside, the fire had been banked low, and the air smelled of dried herbs and woodsmoke. Joan was at the table, grinding something in a stone mortar. She did not look up when he entered.

“Sit,” she said.

He sat on a three-legged stool by the hearth. The heat was welcome; the autumn nights were turning cold, and the chill had crept into his bones. He had not yet grown used to a world without central heating.

“You asked about salt,” Joan said, still grinding. “But salt is not what you truly need.”

Tom frowned. “What do I need?”

“Protection.” She set down the pestle and looked at him. The firelight caught her face, deepening the shadows beneath her eyes. “Fulke told you about the steward. His name is Ralph of Crowthorne. He is a hard man, but he is not stupid. He has heard the stories that travel from village to village—the stranger in the barn, the crops that grow too fast, the sick who do not die. He will come here, and he will ask questions, and he will not be satisfied with the answers you give him.”

“I can handle a steward.”

“Can you handle a bishop?” Joan’s voice was flat. “Because that is what will come if you are not careful. The Church has ears everywhere, and they hear everything. A man who appears from nowhere, who speaks of things no one has seen, who cures fevers and makes corn grow in winter—that man is either a saint or a warlock. And the Church knows how to deal with both.”

Tom was silent. He had known this, of course, in the abstract, the way a man knows a cliff is dangerous before he walks to its edge. But hearing it spoken aloud, in Joan’s dry, unsparing voice, made it real. He thought of the warehouse, hidden behind the oaken door of the barn, its fluorescent lights humming in the darkness. He thought of the books on his shelf—on crop rotation, on animal husbandry, on the rudiments of germ theory. They were a treasure beyond price, and a death sentence if found.

“I have a plan,” he said slowly. “But I need allies. Baldric trusts me, but he fears the Church more than he trusts anyone. You—” He hesitated, unsure how to phrase it.

“I am a widow,” Joan said. “I have no husband, no father, no brother to speak for me. I survive because I know things the priests do not, and I sell them cheap. I have no power, Tom. But I have eyes, and I have ears, and I have a memory that does not forget a debt.”

She reached into her apron and pulled out a small leather pouch. She loosened the drawstring and tipped a pinch of white powder into her palm. “This is salt. Good salt, better than any I have seen from the pans. If you have more of this, you can trade it for almost anything. But you must be careful. If Ralph of Crowthorne learns you have a source of wealth that does not flow through him, he will not just ask questions. He will take.”

Tom stared at the salt in her hand. It sparkled in the firelight, impossibly clean, impossibly white. He had pulled it from a crate that had been meant for a supermarket in Leicester, and now it sat in a widow’s palm in the middle of the fourteenth century.

“I have enough,” he said. “Enough to trade. Enough to buy time.”

Joan nodded. “Then we will use it wisely. But there is one thing you must understand, Tom Ashwick.” She closed her fist around the salt. “In this world, a secret is a kind of coin. You can spend it, or you can hoard it, but you cannot do both. If you spend yours, I will spend mine. But if you hoard it, I will not be able to protect you.”

She held his gaze for a long moment, and Tom felt the weight of her words settle over him like a cloak. He had come to this world with a warehouse full of miracles, but he was beginning to understand that the greatest miracle he could offer was not steel or seed or medicine. It was trust.

“I will spend it,” he said. “But not all at once.”

Joan’s lips curved into a thin, knowing smile. “Then we have a bargain.”

Outside, the wind had risen, and Tom could hear the creak of the old oak tree that stood at the village crossroads. He rose to leave, but Joan stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“One more thing,” she said. “The steward asked questions, but he also left something behind. A message for Sir Hugh. The lord is returning from France. He will be here before the first frost.”

Tom felt the cold seep back into his bones. “How do you know?”

“Because I am a widow,” she said, “and widows know how to listen.”

She released his arm, and Tom stepped out into the darkness. The stars were out, sharp and cold, and somewhere in the distance a dog barked. He walked back toward the barn, but his mind was not on the path. It was on the horizon, where a lord was riding home with debts and hunger in his heart, and where the first frost would soon turn the world to iron.