Day 26

Ilaeryol the farmer's story.

Everyone in Teeluw is trained to survive in the forest on their own. It's not because that is ever really a threat - the people of Teeluw plan to live where they do for a very long time to come - rather it is so everyone has some skill at all of the important tasks. Should it be necessary, a fletcher could help search for plants with medicinal properties, or a healer could help craft arrows. Everyone can do everything.

Of course, the fletcher would make better arrows than the healer, because she has spent her life honing the skill. But, in Teeluw's history, it was Ilaeryol who advanced the furthest past her peers, and even her successors, at her craft. No one in Teeluw has ever been able to farm in quite the same way.

First I should explain how farming works in Teeluw, as I understand that forest farming is not the norm.

It is the farmer's task to collect the ingredients required to make food for the town. This is not just restricted to ingredients grown by the farmer, but it is also up to them to collect from the trees and bushes and plants that grow naturally in the woods. An expanse of forest is cleared of the wild plant life that grows there and the earth between the trees is sown with the seeds for cereals and other similar crops.

Ilaeryol brought back bounties of food unlike anyone else ever managed to harvest. They were never spoiled by the animals in the forest; they were always perfect.The only time she was unable to grow what she had planted was when a travelling merchant passing through the forest on his way to the East had traded her some tropical tree seeds.

When the High Priestess Namifra was blessed it was a day of rejoicing. It is the tradition of the Teeluw to celebrate a new High Priestess to show the Gods that she has the support of the people in the hope that they will accept her in her new position.

Disaster struck. When the priestesses were preparing for the feast, they found that all the food stored had gone bad! Maggots crawled over the fruits of the forest and were having a feast of their own.

Ilaeryol had been picking hazelignum nuts and had overheard the commotion in the food stores. Immediately she dropped the nuts and began skipping from branch to branch through the trees to the farm patch.

She got there to find the field full. Not of the crops she had planted there, but of the tropical fruit trees from far away lands that had never grown before.

The exotic fruits were taken back to the town and served in place of the expected feast. Enaerixer was delighted with how much Namifra was respected by the people and granted the longest life of any High Priestess to her. Ilaeryol's loyalty to the Goddesses and their heralds was rewarded too. From that day, whatever Ilaeryol planted in her farm would be fully grown one day later and would always be in perfect condition, as well as immune to rotting when it had been picked.