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After a long day of harvesting hard wheat, the people of Safehold were returning to their homes to rest. Tomorrow would be hard as well, but it would see the end of the current harvest season. It would be another fifteen days until the next crops were to be gathered from the field. In the meantime, the wheat would need to be threshed; brewers would begin the process of malting the grain. There was never a time on Barbarus in which there wasn’t something that needed to be done.
Few in Safehold embodied this principle like the Reaper of Men. Mortarion rarely rested, and not just because he tired less easily than his fellow harvesters. He made it a point to always be busy, to always be doing something that helped other people, whether it was baking, laundry, or tanning. No chore was beneath him. Having something to do almost made him feel like he belonged , like he was part of something. Merely being the peoples’ defender wasn’t enough. He always needed something more.
But even the Reaper of Men needed time to himself sometimes. In those moments when he couldn’t talk properly or think straight, he went to his garden.
Behind his house, surrounded by a tall stone wall, Mortarion had an extra-large allotment of land that only he could enter. It was an indulgence to have such a large piece of land to himself, but no one seemed to mind. After all that he had done for them, they seemed to think that Mortarion had earned the right to have a private place. It had become his inner sanctum, his place to think. Here, Mortarion kept his herb and vegetable garden.
It was unique. Nowhere else on Barbarus was there such a collection of plants as these. Some of them he gathered himself; whenever he left Safehold to go on campaign, Mortarion made it a point to collect whatever herbs he found along the way and at his destination. Once home, he would study and cultivate them in his garden. Others were purchases from nomadic tribes, or gifts from people who had heard about his collection. Most of them were medicinal or culinary herbs, but fruits and vegetables grew here too.
Keeping such a diversity of plants from such a wide variety of biomes alive was a challenge. He had resources to draw on—if a plant had ever been cultivated by human hands, chances were, someone in Safehold knew how to grow it. After all, Safehold’s population boasted members from nearly every community on Barbarus. If no one here knew how to grow it, Mortarion could still rely on his intellect and persistence to figure out how to keep a plant happy. Every plant needed the right conditions to grow, and finding the right spot in his garden to mimic the conditions of places as diverse as Temptation Creek, Cauldron Canyon, or Coffin Ridge was a matter of trial and error. He kept a meticulous record of both successes and failures in a journal—how much water each plant needed, how much sunlight, when to harvest, how it could be used. He was a believer in keeping notes. Not because he was at any risk of forgetting anything he had learned, but because of the nature of his role in Barbaran society. Mortarion was the leader of the Death Guard, and if he should fall in battle, he did not want to see his garden, and the knowledge he had gained from tending it, die with him.
When Mortarion got home from harvesting that day, he picked up the sickle and the basket by the door and headed into the garden to pick herbs. In contrast to the orderly rings in which crops were grown in the fields outside of the walls, Mortarion’s garden was cultivated into a wild look. His garden grew in clumps and bushes in the shade of an old shudder oak in the corner. A winding, twisting path leading through the garden guaranteed that every plant was in reach of Mortarion’s long arms without his needing to crush other plants to get to it. This time of year, the garden was mostly green and brown. The thawing season was over, and with it, most of the flowers. Some still remained, however. That was another advantage of cultivating plants from all over Barbarus—when flowers from some valleys had stopped blooming, plants from others were only just starting. As Mortarion followed the path, he took cuttings with his sickle and laid them down in his basket in neat, discrete piles. Such care now would make it easier to sort the clippings out when he went back inside.
The wall on the northern side of the garden sheltered plants in its lea from storms that came down from the mountains. The southern side of the garden, by contrast, was damper, and the corner by the house was warmer as well. It was the perfect environment for plants such as salomile, catumrush, dogspaw, and crab’s wand. Salomile, combined with flintbar mint, treated digestive ailments; catumrush was good for menstrual cramps. Dogspaw’s leaves contained an antidote to the poison in its own berries. Crab’s wand, well…it wasn’t nearly as effective at keeping revenants at bay as the old legends said. But the large succulent’s pointed red leaves served another, equally vital importance: it made an excellent salve for chemical burns, such as those experienced in alpine storms. Mortarion’s recipe for just such a salve had proven crucial for the Death Guard’s campaigns into the foothills, so he was sure to collect its leaves as he passed by.
In the side of the garden furthest from his house, Mortarion kept the plants that needed cooler conditions to grow, such as arrow-leaf thyme, needlebush, snowdagger, and callow moss. Snowdagger counteracted the venom of a death’s head adder, and callow moss added a pleasantly tart flavor to fish dishes. Tea made from needlebush roots would soothe a colicky infant. Elox’s daughter had been having trouble lately, so Mortarion dug up some extra with the tip of a trowel he kept at his belt. He had plenty of it to spare—needlebush was a forgiving plant to cultivate. It could have grown nearly anywhere in his garden, but Mortarion preferred to keep the needlebush here where its pungent blossoms kept boarflies away from the arrow-leaf thyme. Without its protection, the aromatic herb would have been completely overwhelmed by the bristly bugs. While he was here, Mortarion checked the stems of the arrow-leaf thyme. Satisfied that the boarflies had been deterred, he moved on.
Mints Mortarion had in his garden a-plenty. They tended to be aggressive, choking out their neighbors, so he kept them in clay pots. He had nearly twenty different kinds of mint, kept as much for their unique scents as for their medicinal properties. Flintbar mint, cauldron mint, roadmint, slagmint, marrowleaf, marrowbloom, ghostbreath. Nausea and inflammation were soothed by at least half of them; others treated headaches or calmed troubled minds with their pleasant aromas. He picked a few handfuls of the fragrant leaves, holding them up to his nose to enjoy their scent before placing them gently in his basket.
In the center of the garden, on trellises made of branches and twine, Mortarion grew vines. Bog bramble produced large, dark berries in clusters; they would be ready for picking and preserving in another month, but for now, they were covered in small white flowers and large pink thorns. Toadpickle grew alongside it, its crunchy, savory, finger-sized fruits destined for preserving in vinegar. Mortarion tried not to let his mouth water in anticipation of how good they would taste. Just as crops in the field were shared between everyone in Safehold, so too were the fruits of the harvest of Mortarion’s garden. Even if he had been able to consume it all himself, he would have shared it. That was how people had survived for grueling millennia on Barbarus. Those who would not share with their neighbors were no better than Overlords. Mortarion brushed the toadpickle’s yellow flowers with his fingers, admiring the downy fur that covered the outside of the petals. Then he plucked green, spiny caterpillars from the nearby ash beans. The season for the plump beans was already past, but he knew from bitter experience that these caterpillars would cause havoc even after the bean harvest, killing not only the bean plant but any nearby plants as well.
Not all of Mortarion’s climbing plants liked the trellises. Crag creeper preferred a rockier support, so Mortarion grew it on the stone walls of the garden alongside midnight ivy and petrous glory. Unlike the other plants in his garden, they produced neither food nor medicine. His rockvines had been chosen for an altogether different purpose, one to which he dare not admit. He would have been ashamed if anyone in Safehold knew that he kept them purely for the color of their flowers and the fragrance of their blooms. Crag creeper’s flowers were a brilliant gold that gleamed no matter how meager the sunlight; petrous glory’s flowers produced a sweet perfume that cured nightmares, even after being dried. Midnight ivy’s tiny white flowers looked uninteresting until sundown—then they would begin to glow light blue and purple. Insects attracted to the light of the flowers would flitter around the glowing blooms. Inevitably, some of the insects would fall—right into the open gapes of carnivorous moondews at the feet of the ivy. Midnight ivy and moondew grew on opposite sides of the world, but to Mortarion’s delight, both plants lived in perfect harmony together. In rare moments of romanticism, Mortarion thought of them as being very much like Barbaran humans in that way. Then he scolded himself for being so fanciful and forced himself to think of more practical matters.
By the time he completed a circuit of his garden, Mortarion’s herb basket was full with trimmings both medicinal and culinary. The sun had nearly set, and the mist was starting to rise from the ground. Here in Safehold, the mist was never as thick as it was beyond the walls. That was one of the benefits to living in a town—the walls kept out the worst of the nighttime weather. All the fog could do here was give his garden an ethereal quality as the midnight ivy began to glow. Mortarion looked over the profusion of greenery— his greenery, his garden, his private place. And from this private place that he nourished, grew plants that would save people’s lives. Mortarion might not have belonged—how could he belong, someone as strange and alien as he was? But he could make the lives of his people better. Not just by killing monsters. But by nurturing and providing for people as well. On that comforting thought, Mortarion turned back inside with the bounty of his garden, grown by his own hand.