The sheep knew.
Tam was sure of it. He came up the lane to Fred's farm at dawn with his shears in his inventory, and every sheep in the pen lifted its head at once and looked at him. Then, as if somebody had blown a whistle, they all walked away to the far side of the pen and stood there in a tight grey lump with their backs to him.
Fred was leaning on the gate with a mug of something hot. He watched them go.
"They know," said Fred.
"I was just thinking that."
"They always know." Fred drank from his mug. "Go on, then. Twenty. Don't let any out."
Tam climbed over the gate, because opening it seemed like a bad idea. He walked across the pen toward the lump of sheep and took out his shears with his back to Fred. He had a plan. In the game, you clicked on a sheep with your shears and got some wool. The sheep stood there looking a bit cold. That was all.
The plan lasted until he reached the sheep.
They didn't run, exactly. They just weren't where he was. Whichever way he went, the lump of sheep flowed the other way, like water around a stone, and closed up again behind him. He went left. They went right. He went right. They went left, and one of them coughed at him in a way that sounded a lot like laughing.
"Corner one," said Fred, from the gate.
"I'm trying."
"Try harder."
He cornered one, eventually, against the fence. It was a big ewe with a face like a disappointed aunt. He grabbed a double handful of fleece and hung on. She dragged him across the pen on his knees. Fred laughed so hard he spilled his drink.
In the end he got her down by doing what he'd once seen a man do in a video, years ago. He sat her up on her bottom, with her back against his legs. She went still and resigned, like a very large, woolly baby.
"Huh," said Fred. "Who taught you that?"
"A man a long way from here."
He opened the shears and started to cut.
His hands were clumsy and slow. The shears snagged and pulled. He nicked the ewe twice, small cuts that made him wince more than her. The fleece came off in ragged lumps instead of one piece. It took him most of an hour. When it was done, the ewe got up and shook herself. She looked at him with deep disgust and walked off, thin and pale.
Tam knelt in the mud with a heap of greasy wool in front of him. It smelled of sheep and old rain.
One, he thought. Nineteen to go.
He gathered up the fleece, turned his back to the gate and let the inventory take it. It was Fred's wool, and it would be safe there.
He went back for the next one.
* * *
By the middle of the morning he had six fleeces, and he was faster. Not good. Faster. He had learned to get a sheep down in one try out of three. He had learned where to start cutting, and not to stand behind them.
The seventh sheep had horns.
He didn't think about it. It was standing a little apart from the others, a big, shaggy one with a heavy head. It didn't run. That should have been the clue. It just stood there and watched him come. It lowered its head a little.
He reached for its fleece.
Ram, he thought, about a second too late, with his hand already in its wool. In the game, you couldn't shear the rams. They looked just like sheep, with horns. You'd click on one by mistake, and...
The ram hit him in the middle.
It was like being kicked by a door. He went backward through the air and landed flat in the mud. He lay there looking up at the sky with all the breath gone out of him.
Hitpoints: 9/10.
...and end up in a fight, he finished.
Fred was bent double at the gate, with his hat over his face.
The ram looked down at Tam for a moment, as if making sure he had understood. Then it walked back to the other sheep. Tam lay in the mud until his breath came back, and the hitpoint with it.
"That's a ram," said Fred, when he could speak.
"I'd noticed."
"You can't shear a ram."
"I know that. I knew that. I knew that." Tam sat up. There was mud down his back and in his hair. "I just forgot."
"Some of the sheep don't like it much," said Fred, and wiped his eyes. "You've got to keep at it. Persistence is the key." He looked at the ram, which was eating grass and ignoring them both. "Not with him, though."
* * *
He had to stop with nine fleeces done and his arms shaking. The sun was well up and he still had a day's work waiting at Seth's. His inventory was full to the last square. Twelve shortbows, whittled in his clearing by lantern light the night before, took up a lot of room. He walked back across the river at a fast trot, smelling of sheep. Seth looked at him across the yard and said nothing at all. Tam mucked out the cow shed twice as hard as usual, without being asked.
Gillie watched him from the dairy door. When he came past with the barrow, she said, "You smell like Fred's sheep."
"I've been shearing Fred's sheep."
"Why?"
"He asked." He tipped the barrow. "And I need to get up to the castle."
She thought about that for a moment. "Those two things don't go together, Tam."
"They do, actually," said Tam. "It's complicated."
She gave him the long, careful look she had been giving him all week. Then she went back into the dairy without asking anything else.
* * *
In the evening, after the castle delivery, he went around to the general store before it shut. He took out a shortbow and laid it on the counter.
The shopkeeper picked it up and bent it a little. He sighted along it and bent it again. "Who made this?"
"Me."
He put down nine coins. "Shrimp boy makes bows now."
Tam laid down another. Eight coins. Another, seven. Every bow he laid down made the next one worth a little less. He kept going. Ten bows, and the tenth fetched two.
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He laid down the eleventh.
The shopkeeper pushed it back across the counter with one finger. "Got plenty of bows now, lad."
"I'll take less."
"You'll take it home. I've ten bows on the shelf and a village that shoots maybe one a month. Come back tomorrow, when I've shifted a few." He swept the ten under the counter. "Saradomin knows who to."
Ten, thought Tam, putting the eleventh away. In the game, a shop had gone on buying, for less and less, as long as you had things to sell. Fifty-six coins, though. Fifty-six coins for an hour's whittling, when Seth paid eight for a day.
He climbed the servants' stair. The guard on the landing sighed and nodded him past.
Cadmus was by the fire again, carving the same wooden spoon. He looked up as Tam came in, sniffed once, and raised his eyebrows.
"You've brought the sheep with you."
"Only their coats." Tam turned his back for a moment and took out one greasy fleece. The other eight could wait in the inventory, where they were safe. Cadmus watched the fleece come out from inside Tam's shirt.
"They want washing," said Cadmus. "And carding. Then you spin."
"Right."
"Have you ever used a wheel?"
"No," said Tam. Then he sat down at it.
His hands reached out on their own. They pulled a twist of wool from the fleece, teased it out and fed it to the wheel. His foot found the treadle and began to rock it, slow and steady. The wheel turned. The wool ran through his fingers and came out the other side as thread, fine and even, winding itself onto the spindle. He watched his own hands as if they belonged to somebody else.
The washing and the carding, he noticed, his hands skipped altogether. In the game you had never washed anything. You had put the wool on the wheel, and a ball came off.
A ball came off. He wound it up and held it: a fat round ball of grey yarn, the size of his fist, smooth and tight.
+2.5 Crafting.
There you are, he thought. Spinning gives Crafting XP. Shearing doesn't. Just like the game. The tests so far had gone the game's way, and he was starting to trust it.
Cadmus had stopped carving.
He got up, came over, took the ball from Tam's hand and turned it over. He pulled a little length loose, twisted it between his fingers, and held it up to the firelight. Then he set it down on the bench beside the wheel. Tam picked it up himself, before Cadmus could think of handing it back, and tucked it away.
"You didn't wash it," said Cadmus.
"No."
"You didn't card it."
"No."
"It should be lumps and grease and sheep muck." Cadmus's clever eyes had gone narrow. "Who taught you to spin, Tam Fallow?"
"Nobody."
"Then you're a liar," said Cadmus, "or you're something I haven't got a word for." He went back to his chair by the fire and picked up his spoon. "Carry on. I'd like to see the second one."
Tam carried on, one fleece at a time out of his inventory, and each ball back into it as it came off the wheel. The second ball came out the same as the first. So did the third.
* * *
The chest was against the wall opposite the wheel, half hidden behind the baskets of fleece.
He had seen it the first night, when the Cook brought him up. Now, spinning, he had time to look at it properly. It was a heavy wooden chest, bound with iron, with a brass lock. Somebody had cut a single letter into the plate of the lock: an S.
He knew that chest. In the game, in a quest about goblins under the castle, you had picked the pocket of the man it belonged to, taken his key, and opened it. Inside, folded neatly, there had been a set of clothes: a magenta robe, a shirt and a hood. H.A.M. robes. Sigmund's chest.
Tam kept spinning. His hands kept their rhythm. His heart did not.
He had spun his fifth ball when the door opened without a knock, and a man came in.
He was tall, thin and very neat. His head was bald on top, with a fringe of brown hair over his ears. He had a thin moustache and a small pointed beard, both trimmed so carefully they might have been drawn on. He wore the long blue robe, the white cape and the green stone from church.
Sigmund, Tam thought.
Sigmund glanced at Cadmus, then at the barefoot farm boy at the wheel, with mud in his hair and wool lint all over his shirt. His face didn't change.
"I wasn't aware," he said, to the room, "that the spinning room had become a sheep pen." His voice was quiet and smooth.
"The Cook's lad," said Cadmus, without looking up from his spoon. "Spinning for Fred the Farmer. The Cook vouches for him."
"Does he." Sigmund crossed the room, unhurried, and stood beside the chest. He didn't open it. He just rested one long white hand on the lid. "And who is the Cook's lad?"
"Tam Fallow, sir," said Tam. "From the Groats' farm."
"The Groats." Sigmund said it slowly, as if he were taking the name out of a drawer and looking at it. "Across the river. The dairy." His eyes rested on Tam's face. They were pale and patient. "Your farm has been losing hens to goblins, I hear."
Tam's skin crawled all the way up the back of his neck.
"A few," he said.
"A few." Sigmund nodded. "Terrible creatures. They take and take, and nobody stops them. One wonders how long good people are expected to bear it." He took his hand off the chest. "Good evening."
He went out. The door closed quietly behind him.
Tam sat at the wheel with his hands still on the wool. They had stopped spinning. He made them start again.
"The Duke's adviser," said Cadmus, to his spoon. "He keeps his winter things in that chest. Never lets me near it." He blew a curl of wood off the spoon. "Not a man who likes mud."
"No," said Tam. "I don't suppose he is."
He spun the rest of the nine fleeces without looking at the chest again. He didn't need to. He knew exactly where it was, against the wall.
He's real, he thought, walking home in the dark with nine balls of wool and two shortbows in his inventory. He's here. The man at the Sheared Ram buys drinks for farmers who've lost hens. He works up at the castle. And the castle has a chest with an S on the lock.
And Seth's lost three hens.
He went up to the woods anyway, for the last hour before sleep, because Sigmund would be just as real in the morning. Eight more shortbows, and the rest in shafts. He stopped with two squares to spare and Fletching 9.
* * *
The next morning he gave Fred the first nine balls at the gate, because his inventory had room for nine balls or eleven fleeces, not both. Fred squeezed each one and grunted. "Nine. I'll want the rest." Then Tam sheared the other eleven sheep, and gave the ram a wide berth. It watched him do it. On the castle round that evening he sold the general store ten shortbows, all he had. The shelf had been cleared overnight. The shopkeeper didn't ask who to.
It was the last day of the week, and at supper the Groats' long table was crowded. Seth sat at the end with his leather bag and his little book. He paid the hands one at a time. The brothers took theirs without a word. The old man bit every coin.
Then Seth opened the book at Tam's name.
Last week, forty-eight coins had slipped through Tam's fingers at this table. Then sixteen. Then he had argued Seth down to ten for a day and a half of bad work. Everybody at the table remembered it. The brothers stopped chewing. Gillie put down her spoon.
Seth counted out coins from the bag into a little stack. Six days at eight coins. Forty-eight.
"Wait," said Tam.
Seth stopped.
"I wasn't here two mornings," said Tam. "I buried Lozar. And I went to the mill. And I was late twice from Fred's. That's not a full week."
The whole table was looking at him. Seth glanced from the stack to Tam, and Tam could see him remembering the coins on the floor.
"Five days, then," said Seth slowly. "Near enough. And you stripped my herd for nothing."
"I paid you for that."
"You did," said Seth. "Daft beggar." He took eight coins off the stack and put them back in the bag, and pushed the rest across the table. "Forty. For five days of proper work. And the mucking out's still unpaid, so don't you go thinking it isn't."
Tam held out his hand, flat on the table, and Seth slid the stack into it.
He waited. He couldn't help it. Everybody at the table waited.
The coins stayed. Forty coins, heavy and warm from Seth's bag, sitting in his palm.
Somebody let out a breath. It might have been Gillie. The old man at the end of the table said, to his bowl, "There," and went back to his stew.
Tam closed his hand around the coins.
Forty, he thought. A real wage. For real work.
He looked up and found Gillie watching him, not the coins. Her face was still. Then she picked up her spoon again and went back to her supper, and so did everybody else.
* * *
He spun the last eleven balls that night, up in the castle, with the chest against the wall and Cadmus carving by the fire. Sigmund didn't come back. Then he walked out to Fred's farm by the light of the moon, with eleven balls of grey wool in his inventory, and a hundred and seventy-nine coins.
Fred came to the gate in his nightshirt with a lantern.
"It's the middle of the night," said Fred.
"You said the end of the month. I'm early."
He took the balls out of his inventory one at a time and put them in Fred's sack, with his back half turned. Fred counted them by lantern light, squeezing each one between his thick fingers.
"Eleven," said Fred. "And nine this morning. Twenty." He sounded almost disappointed. "And spun proper. Tighter than the last man ever spun them."
He went inside. He came back with a cloth bag. He set it on top of the gatepost, so it wouldn't slip, and stood back.
"Sixty," he said. "As agreed."
Tam picked it up. It was heavy.
Something rose at the edge of his sight, and this time he knew what it was before it opened.
You have completed Sheep Shearer!
You are awarded: 1 Quest Point. 150 Crafting experience. 60 coins. One ram, unshorn and unbeaten.
The warmth ran down his arms, once and then again.
Congratulations, you just advanced a Crafting level. Your Crafting level is now 3.
Fred was squinting at him over the lantern. "You've gone glassy-eyed again."
"It's been a long day."
Fred looked at him a moment longer. "You're a strange lad, Tam Fallow," he said. "But my sheep are shorn." He lifted the lantern, turned around, and went back into the house. At the door he stopped. "Shut the gate behind you."
Tam shut the gate behind him. He checked it twice.