Chapter 46: The Peashooter and Princess Alisa
During the days of waiting for the next ten-day rest, the clansmen went about their business as usual. Everything proceeded just as it had been planned in the first ten days.
The amount of tilled land increased daily. From a distance, the turned earth looked like several black snakes slithering across the grassland. At first there was only one, then more appeared alongside it like brothers, until finally they formed a dense, dark patch.
At noon, the village drum would sound. The people digging in the fields would hear it and, talking amongst themselves, walk home carrying their various stone tools.
Everything about the tribe was perfectly ordinary, yet in the past few days, Chen Jian had done two things that seemed abnormal in the eyes of his people.
First, a small thing, and then a big one.
The trivial matter was that one evening before dinner, Chen Jian found two long bark vines and strung them between the support pillars of the two rows of houses.
At first, the tribespeople thought the vines were for hanging salted fish and cured meat, but they were too high and thin for that.
So they asked Chen Jian, who explained that he wanted to see if the swallows nesting under the eaves would perch on the two lines in the evening.
What Chen Jian said always seemed to come true. The very day the two vines were put up, the black swallows from the nests began to line up on them, chattering away.
The people of the tribe gradually grew accustomed to these black birds. Aside from the occasional droppings landing on someone's head, they caused no trouble and even added a bit more vitality to the village. The people grew to like these birds that were so pleasant to watch and warned the children not to poke the swallows' nests.
The seven little wolf cubs were especially fond of the swallows, as young birds attempting their first flight would often fall to the ground and become their snacks. Consequently, the cubs were always looking up at the swallows overhead.
At this moment, Chen Jian was just like those wolf cubs, staring blankly at the two ropes above his head, thinking that it would take thousands of years for those vines to become copper wires wrapped in insulation.
Many common things quietly change people's lives, yet people often fail to notice. For instance, swallows love to stand on wires, and the north wind in winter creates a whistling hum as it blows past them. That sound was a unique note in the symphony of the electrical age, a sound that existed only because of the wires.
The clansmen watched Chen Jian stare into space with curiosity, wondering why these swallows were so captivating to him, and why he was making a whistling sound that resembled the cold wind.
If this incident was considered strange, what happened the next day was even stranger.
The Peach Moon was very hot, and the seeds of many plants had matured. Most of the local plants could survive the winter without freezing to death, so there were mature seeds available even before the grass turned yellow or the autumn frost arrived.
Since Chen Jian had instructed them to start planting, the clansmen felt they should set aside a day to gather seeds.
Chen Jian refused, telling them to wait a while longer.
The clansmen argued that if they waited, the seeds would fall to the ground and be difficult to find.
Chen Jian nodded and said he was aware of that, but they still had to wait.
There were many primitive crops in the surrounding area, including wild wheat, sorghum, beans, and peas. The weather might have still been slightly too cold for plants like corn; even with a redistribution of species, they still had to abide by the laws of nature. These were all plants that could be cultivated in the future.
And it was precisely because they could be cultivated that he was not letting the people gather them now.
Plants produce seeds for only one reason: to reproduce. They never do it for the convenience of people who want to eat them. What is convenient for humans is the result of human selection.
Take wild wheat, for example. Normal wild wheat shatters its ears upon maturity, dropping its seeds to the ground so they can germinate and continue the species.
Wheat that doesn't drop its grains upon maturity is actually a "disability" caused by a genetic mutation.
If the wheat ears do not shatter, rain will cause the grains to germinate right on the stalk, unable to reach the soil. They would sprout and then eventually die in the sun.
The problem was, the normal, non-mutated wild wheat was completely unsuitable for cultivation. If the ears shattered as soon as they were ripe, would he have his tribespeople crawling all over the ground collecting individual wheat grains?
And peas were another example. The "peashooter" from games gets its name because "normal" pea pods burst open when ripe, shooting out their seeds like BBs.
This was the only way for the next generation to reproduce on the ground. Otherwise, trapped inside the pods, they would struggle to survive the winter, eventually becoming moldy and losing their viability.
The peas that people cultivate are, from a pea's perspective, abnormal. They don't pop when they're ripe, which makes them easy to harvest.
If the domestication of plants by humans were a fairy tale, then humans would probably be cast as angels.
Mother Pea had many children, and they would all leave their mother's embrace when they grew up. But there was always one younger sibling who was born with an illness, born without feet, who could not leave its mother's arms even when it was grown.
Mother Pea looked upon these children with regret, knowing that when she grew old, these children who could not fend for themselves would wither away with her. But she had no choice but to watch her children cry. Until one day, an angel's hand reached down and took away the children who couldn't leave their mother. Mother Pea could finally let go of her last worries and grow old in peace. Those children were stripped of their outer shackles by these hands, buried in the embrace of Mother Earth, and began a brand new journey.
A long, long time later, the children who were saved by the angels could look down on their brothers and sisters with contempt and say, "Look! You are not as round as I am, not as big as I am, and not as fruitful as I am."
The older brothers and sisters would feel aggrieved that their pods could burst, but their weakest siblings would retort, "But what's the use? If my pods didn't burst, would I have as many descendants as I do? And you? How much of your bloodline is left in this world?"
Chen Jian speculated that the story of plant domestication was roughly like this. From a human perspective, peas that didn't burst their pods were good peas, and wheat that didn't shatter was good wheat.
Since he wanted to plant crops, Chen Jian was naturally looking for these "defective products" from the plant world to use as seeds. The probability of such mutations was quite high, so he wasn't worried about the quantity. He had no intention of planting the seeds the rest of the tribe might collect; he planned to use those to make wine and accomplish another big project.
After another half a month or so, the normal seeds would fall off, and that would be the time to collect the mutant seeds that didn't burst or shatter. He couldn't have people tilling so much land only to end up bent over in a ditch picking up individual beans.
The tribespeople just thought Chen Jian didn't want to waste a day of labor and saw nothing strange in it for now. After all, they could always trade with other tribes for seeds.
It wasn't until Chen Jian announced another task that, combined with this one, it finally seemed extraordinarily strange.
Looking at the arrangements for the following day, Chen Jian said to everyone, "Let's spare a day tomorrow to mow some grass."
That night, Chen Jian took some tanned leather, traced the approximate shape of his hand, cut it out with a stone knife, and glued the upper and lower layers together with isinglass to make simple pairs of gloves. He made a pair for every man, explaining they were to prepare for mowing grass the next day.
"What kind of grass are we mowing?"
"Stinging grass."
Chen Jian gave the answer with a smile, and saw Wolf Skin subconsciously cover his rear. The last time they were in the wild, he had grabbed a handful of stinging weeds to clean himself. The clansmen a hundred steps away heard his wails, and he walked bow-legged for the rest of the afternoon.
Stinging weed was nettle, sometimes called scorpion weed, a very aggressive and hardy plant. After Wolf Skin's howling incident, the tribespeople had named it Stinging Grass, because he had described the sensation as being stung by a swarm of bees.
Nettles are widely distributed and can be found everywhere in temperate zones. They don't look special, but the tiny hairs on them are venomous, causing a truly sore and numb sensation. Some people called them stinging pockmarks.
But this grass tasted delicious after being scalded with boiling water, pigs and sheep loved to eat it, and it was a source of fiber, a type of hemp that could be spun.
In his memory from his past life, the most famous story about nettles was "The Wild Swans." In it, a stepmother turned Princess Elisa's eleven brothers into swans. The princess was told she could lift the curse by using nettles to make eleven shirts for her brothers. So, Alisa wove the nettles that caused men such pain and finally turned her brothers back into princes.
The next day, as the clansmen wore a glove on one hand and swung stone sickles with the other, or simply plucked the nettles, Yu Qian'er followed Chen Jian and heard this story.
Naturally, he left out the queen, the witch, and the bishop, and the swans became geese. Chen Jian also changed the transliterated name, Alisa. He explained that in Gubeizhi German, the name meant something like "a girl who loves to laugh."
The people in the tribe didn't name themselves after expressions. So, thinking of the phrase "a smile that doesn't show teeth," Chen Jian renamed Princess Alisa "Front Ya." He felt his translation was quite clever.
In truth, the tribe had never seen a door, so the concept of "front teeth" (literally "door teeth" in his language) was foreign. But incisors still had a name, so the story was understandable.
This was the first fairy tale Yu Qian'er had ever heard. For people who had only recently escaped the harshness of the wilderness, a simple story without sharp twists was particularly comforting.
However, Yu Qian'er didn't focus on the themes of unyielding will and resistance. Instead, she looked at the nettles with envy.
For a long time afterward, she would feel that she truly envied that girl named Front Ya.
*If my brother were also turned into a little goose one day,* she thought, *I would definitely do the same as that girl. I could endure weaving nettles, even thorns.*
As if to prove this to herself, she took off her glove and grabbed a flowering, hair-covered nettle with her bare hand, clenching her teeth and not making a sound, because in the story, speaking would get the princess struck by lightning.
A tingling, itchy sting spread through her palm, but Yu Qian'er didn't let go, her lips pursed in thought.
It wasn't because of the pain. It was because she thought her brother was so powerful, how could anyone ever turn him into a goose? Although she could endure so much suffering for her brother, just like Front Ya, her brother would probably never need her to.
For some reason, she was a little jealous of the girl named Front Ya. At least she had the opportunity to prove her devotion by making a painful choice for her brothers, who had been turned into geese.
So she angrily let go of the nettle, pouting, feeling a little aggrieved and unhappy.
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