The scorching sun baked cracks into the yellow earth. More than two thousand laborers toiled under the watchful eyes of the overseers stationed by a flagpole behind them. A dozen or so crosses also stood beside the flagpole, with several dead men hanging from them, along with a few who were still alive.
The dead men were motionless, but the living ones were cursing at the top of their lungs. They had plenty of energy, and their curses were downright filthy.
Boswell the butcher set down his hoe, wiped the sweat from his forehead, then turned and looked up at the men on the wooden frames. He was a little surprised, and clicked his tongue in amazement.
Boswell recognized the dead men on the frames. They were the local thugs who had robbed several refugees carrying food back into the city outside the prince's army camp last night.
Food was so precious now that even Boswell, heir to the Butcher Family that had practiced its trade for generations, had been driven to desperation by hunger inside the city.
Ignoring his father's objections, he had swallowed his pride and come out to work. He awkwardly swung a hoe he had never used before, sticking his backside out as he worked the earth, all to earn one bag of flatbread a day.
The flatbread handed out by the prince's soldiers tasted awful. It had clearly been baked from unleavened dough mixed with all sorts of odds and ends. Not only was it as tough as wood, it was bitter and salty, too.
In peacetime, Boswell would not have spared such stuff a glance. But during a famine, it was a treasure. One flatbread the size of a human head could be boiled into a whole pot of gruel, enough to fill two