Oats

Overview

Oats are the second grain of the hills. In the valleys of the Headwater Marches a household works narrow terraced fields of barley and oats, and the two between them carry the high valleys through a winter. Oats like the wet and the cold even better than barley does. They feed people as porridge and oatcake, and they feed the animals that work the passes, which on the Headwater roads matters nearly as much.

Appearance

An oat field stands waist high and looks softer than any other grain. Each stalk ends not in a tight ear but in a loose, open spray of small hanging spikelets on thread-thin stems, like a branching tassel, that shiver and rattle in the wind. Green in summer, the field ripens to a pale straw-cream with a silver sheen when the light lies along it. The grains are long, thin, and wrapped in papery husks, and the straw is softer and leafier than barley's.

Habitat and Range

Oats grow on the Headwater terraces, often on the higher and wetter fields where barley does worse, and on the colossal terraces of villages such as Notchfield, whose retaining walls no living people could raise. They are a hill crop: the deep basin fields below grow wheat instead, and the Dwarven terraces of the Ironspine grow barley and roots.

Behaviour and Temperament

Oats tolerate rain, cool summers, and poor, sour soil, and they ripen in a short season. Wind and heavy rain can lay a field flat, and birds strip the loose heads if no one watches them. Oats shed their grain readily once ripe, so the high valleys cut them a little green and let them finish in the stook.

Life Cycle

Oats are sown in spring as soon as the terraces can be worked and reaped in late summer or early autumn, after the barley. Seed is kept back from the best field each year.

Uses and Dangers

Hulled and rolled or ground, oats make porridge and the flat, dry oatcakes that carters and escorts carry up the passes because they keep for weeks. Oats are the best grain for horses and mules, and the waystations of the Headwater roads, which keep fresh animals for the caravans, buy them by the cartload. Oat straw is soft enough for fodder in a hard winter.

Oats stored damp go mouldy fast.

Lore and Belief

Headwater people say oats were the first grain sown on the colossal terraces, because only oats would forgive ground nobody living had broken. Basin farmers say oats are the grain of people too poor or too high up for bread, and Headwater people answer that basin bread would not get a mule up the high roads before they close.

Where It Appears

• The Headwater Marches
• Humans