Old Harrow, Turner of the Year

The farm-belt's god of the turned year — sowing, the green coming up, and the rot that feeds the next sowing. You worship him with a spade, not a prayer: tend his ground and he tends you back. He is losing the Lean Years, and the old folk say he knows it.

Old Harrow keeps the year turning: the seed under, the green up, the crop cut, and the stalk and muck turned back under to feed the next seed. Folk don't so much pray to him as work for him. The rite is the chore. The steaming dung-heap behind the byre is his altar, and turning it in the frost is the office; the first spadeful broken in a new field is his tithe; the last sheaf left standing is left for him. He has no temple and no priest — a leaning scarecrow with a cracked bowl at its foot is as much shrine as the belt keeps.

He is a two-faced god, and the farmers say so plainly: the green face that puts the shoot up, and the black face that rots the dead thing down. Neither is the good one. A field that never rotted would never feed you. This is why the reagent-women and the pot-brewers are his too — alchemy is Harrow's rot-face, the black work of letting a thing spoil right until it does you good instead of harm, and a good stillroom smells like his heap. The Reshi caravans that winter on the belt keep him alongside the road-god, and the farm-humans double up without a blush: the Wright over the doorframe for the making, Harrow out in the mud for the growing.

What the old folk will tell you at the fire, and the young ones won't hear, is that he is losing. Every field gone to thistle is a defeat he takes personally. So he spends what he has at the edges: a dead orchard that fruits one more autumn for the family that stayed; unlikely luck to whoever is fool enough to break new ground on land that others walked away from. Resettle an abandoned steading and the belt will tell you the first year came easy — that's Harrow, buying back an acre while he still can.