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.

A palisade across the north side would be the obvious first move. Log posts driven into the ground with a packed earth base. It would be just enough to slow someone down and force them to bunch up at a chokepoint. The village has timber access from the hillside forest that I could use as well.

The problem wasn’t construction though, the real problem was justification.

Farmers didn’t build walls. Walls meant you expected trouble, and expecting trouble meant inviting it. If I walked into the village center tomorrow and proposed a palisade, half of them would think I was paranoid and the other half would worry that the Prefect would interpret the fortification as defiance.

They’re not wrong about the Prefect. A walled village is a village with ideas. A village with ideas is a threat to a man who needs compliant bodies for his conscription rolls.

I scratched out the palisade line and redrew it. I couldn’t build it across the northern approach, it could only be long enough to be connecting the two nearest houses on either side of the road, with a simple gate that could be closed at night. That way it could be framed as a livestock fence.

We’d been losing chickens to foxes — that was true, actually — and a connected fence line between the outer houses would keep animals in and predators out. The fact that it would also funnel any human approach through a single monitored point was just a practical bonus.

Start small. Give them a reason that makes sense in their world, not mine.

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I added a second mark on the hillside. A watchtower was too ambitious but a grain-drying rack that was positioned at the hill’s midpoint would give someone standing on it a clear view of the northern road. Build it sturdy enough to hold a man’s weight and tall enough to see over the treeline, and nobody would question a drying rack on a hillside. Every village had them.

A drying rack that happens to be a lookout post. A livestock fence that happens to be a defensive chokepoint. Infrastructure that serves two purposes.

This was going to be a recurring theme in this life, I could feel it.

“I want to build a fence,” I told Hao that evening.

We were sitting outside the house after dinner, watching the sky turn amber. Mother was sleeping. She’d had two good days in a row, which I was trying not to read too much into.

“A fence? Why?” Hao asked.

“The foxes got into the Zhao family’s coop again last week and took three hens. Before that, the Wei family lost a goat that wandered onto the north road. If we connected the outer houses on the north side with a continuous fence line, we’d keep the livestock contained and the predators out.”

Hao stretched his legs out and considered it. “That’s a lot of timber.”

“Not if we use the hillside stand. Those pines are thin enough to fell with hand tools and straight enough to plant as posts without much shaping. I’ve already mapped the trees that we need to take, the east side pines are overcrowded, if we cut those down, then it will improves the growth for the remaining trees.”

He glanced at me sideways. “You mapped the trees?”