This was a two-story cottage with a tiled roof, built haphazardly from stacked stone and wood. The walls were exposed earth, the wooden-framed windows were narrow, and the damp floor was covered with loose pine planks. The house wasn't large; a quick glance from the creaking wooden staircase revealed the entirety of the ground floor.
Maria, the mother of the original Anne, sat by the hearth. The woman was gaunt, her light-colored curls pulled back and secured with a strip of ramie cloth, highlighting her slightly hunched back.
A sharp jolt of hunger brought Anne fully awake. She stared at the desolate "home" for a moment, then tightened the ramie jacket around herself and continued her descent.
Hearing the movement, Maria turned and smiled faintly. "You're awake, Anne."
Maria held a spindle, skillfully spinning wool yarn. Her fingers moved nimbly back and forth, showing no sign of any physical disability. "Anne, George and Isabella went to town with the blacksmith early this morning to find your aunt."
"I know, Mama."
Anne did her best to appear composed. She nodded at Maria, gave a discreet cough to cover her awkwardness, and opened the door, walking out toward the well beside the small house.
In this era, clean water wasn't scarce, but obtaining it was still a task.
Anne was a transplant from the modern world. This place seemed to be the Dark Ages, but before crossing over, Anne had lived through the start of a zombie apocalypse. She had been the owner of a family farm. After the outbreak, she converted the farm into a safe haven and eventually merged with a rescue organization. Through intense training, Anne became a volunteer, but she suffered an accident during a rescue mission.
When she woke up, she had become the small, fourteen-year-old daughter of a medieval shepherd. She lived in a cramped, primitive house, had a mother with a crippled leg, and a younger brother and sister.
The original Anne Miller was the daughter of a shepherd. Her shepherd grandfather had once been a knight and owned serfs. By her father's generation, however, all that was left was a patch of hillside land, some forest, and this small, two-story house. The slope was too steep for crops, but it was ideal for grazing. Old Miller, lacking the funds to buy livestock, made a living by tending the flocks of landless freemen in the village and processing wool products. The family barely scraped by on this meager income.
Just before Anne crossed over, Old Miller died in an accident while grazing the sheep.
With the sudden loss of the family's patriarch, the original Anne fainted from grief. When the modern Anne woke up, she found herself in the body of the tiny, frail girl.
In her previous life, Anne's family had all died in the zombie outbreak, and she had experienced countless ups and downs. When she woke up as Anne Miller, she felt no despair—only a sense of relief and luck that she could finally sleep soundly without keeping watch.
The wooden house sat at the edge of the village, nestled against the mountainside. Looking out, one could see green mountains, meadows, and coniferous forests.
Outside the door was a large, moss-covered well. The current Anne, whose body was under four and a half feet tall and starved of meat, had little strength. She only dared to draw a small bucket of water, managing her limited physical ability.
The day she first woke up, Anne had seen her younger brother, George, leading a priest wearing a beak-like raven mask to check on her. The priest claimed a plague of rats was sweeping the town, suspected she might be infected, and suggested bloodletting. Fortunately, Anne vehemently resisted, insisting her illness was merely grief over her father's death, thus narrowly escaping the priest's harmful "treatment."
Old Miller had lost one of the blacksmith's sheep. Even though he died while searching for it, the blacksmith still demanded the copper coins for the loss from Maria. This single compensation wiped out most of the family's remaining savings. They instantly had no flour to cook, and Maria had almost asked George to pawn her shoes in town.
Though Anne hadn't fully recovered, she could see that her cheap "Mama," Maria, was not equipped to handle their survival. Her brother George was too young, and her sister Isabella was even younger. The burden of plotting the family's livelihood fell squarely on Anne's shoulders. That's why she had arranged for her siblings to hitch a ride with the blacksmith yesterday to find their aunt, a nun at the church in town, hoping to borrow some provisions to get them through.
The Miller home was considered relatively well-off in the village. Their ancestors had been knights; though now fallen, they were freemen, owned their own land, lived in a tiled-roof house (not a thatched one), and even had a well.
...
Anne stood by the well and washed her face, including behind her ears and neck. If her body could tolerate it, she would have loved a long, cool bath. Maria woke early every day, and even though the sun had just risen and the morning mist still covered the meadow, she was already working.
Back inside, Anne began starting a fire in the hearth.
"I feel much better today, no discomfort at all."
"That's wonderful, Anne," Maria smiled, then lowered her head and continued weaving the wool.
Since her husband's death, Maria had been perpetually low-spirited, focusing only on her weaving, leaving the home shrouded in gloom. Anne wasn't good at consolation. She used the iron tongs to scoop out the ashes and light the dry grass and firewood Old Miller had left. The fire gradually flared up.
This was Anne's first proper exploration of the house; she had been mostly bedridden with a fever for the first two days. The Millers' ancestors had once been wealthy, but much of their property was sold off by her grandfather's generation. There was little proper furniture, and only two iron pots and a knife hung by the hearth—that was the extent of their cooking utensils.
Anne took the larger iron pot and placed it on the iron rack inside the hearth.
"Anne, what are you doing? Are you hungry? There's bread on the table." Maria stopped working, thinking Anne was about to cook something.
"No, I just want to heat some water to drink." Anne finished speaking and left the house again.
She followed the grassy path outside the house to the nearby sheep pen, where the sheep and calves belonging to a few village families were still kept. Anne retrieved an earthenware jug used for collecting milk from a corner. The vessel was worthless; it cost only three copper coins in town. She then searched the grass and snapped off a stalk of wild herb.
She washed everything by the well before bringing them inside. The water in the iron pot had boiled. She added the wild herb, let it steam, poured out half the water, and sterilized the jug. She then refilled the jug and placed it on the wooden table by the window.
"Mama, I heard the priest say that water boiled with herbs can prevent the plague." The Miller family typically drank water directly from the well.
Maria was surprised. "Really? That's wonderful. God be praised." The village priest often dabbled in strange remedies, and Maria, a devout believer with a disability, didn't question it.
Anne smiled but didn't answer. She picked up the two pieces of black bread left for her on the wooden plate and sat by the fire to eat. People here didn't have the custom of drinking boiled water. Since the village had cases of plague, it was unlikely that trying to preach the merits of hygiene would work.
After eating, Anne prepared to go out again. "Mama, I'm going to take the sheep out to graze."
Maria hesitated. She really didn't want Anne to shepherd, but there were hardly any copper coins left in the family purse. "All right. Be careful."
...
Anne changed into her oldest long robe. Everyone in this era wore long robes, cinched at the waist with a long apron and leather shoes. She found Old Miller's leather whip downstairs and went to the sheep pen. There were five large sheep, three lambs, and one calf. The Miller family was responsible for grazing, milking, and shearing these animals, in return for one-third of the total income.
Though the village had a hundred residents, few were freemen who could actually own property. The social structure was tiered:
At the foot of the mountain lay the manor of an old knight under the lord. The old knight's land occupied half the village's arable fields, and he owned more than thirty serfs. Serfs had no right to trade freely or acquire property; they were bound to the knight's farmstead and transferred with the land.
Those directly under the lord were called freehold farmers, numbering several dozen. Freehold farmers were allocated a plot in the village to cultivate and paid an annual land tax. They could acquire property and houses, but transferring land required the local knight's permission, and they couldn't easily cultivate private plots. Many freehold farmers had secondary trades, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, or butchery.
The Miller family, as members of the fallen knight class without a manor, held ancestral land and a house. Politically, they ranked above serfs and freehold farmers but below the knights who held manors. Only three or four families in the entire village held this status. Unfortunately, the original Anne's father and grandfather were either too honest or too spendthrift to maintain the knightly lifestyle, simply living off their dwindling inheritance.
The eight sheep and one calf crowded in the wooden enclosure used to yield about 600 copper coins worth of wool and dairy annually. The Miller family's one-third share, about 200 copper coins, was worth two silver coins. Most of the time, the Millers would take their share in wool, which Maria would weave into yarn, spin into cloth, or make into felted vests. This handiwork could fetch an extra few dozen copper coins whether they used it themselves or sold it in Dingo town. This meant the entire family of five had an income of only two or three hundred copper coins a year, out of which they had to pay twenty to thirty in head tax. This was barely enough to buy coarse flour for half a year. To make it last the whole year, they had to mix it with chaff.
Anne drove the sheep to their family's hillside in the afternoon. The land was about ten acres, mostly steep slope with more rocks than soil. Moss and thickets grew on the shady sides. The harvest would likely be poor if they tried to cultivate crops here. While Anne considered livelihoods outside of farming and herding, she walked on the soft moss toward the top of the hill. She noticed that this rugged area was full of shrubs, wild flowers, and herbs, with many bees flitting about looking for nectar. Anne pondered this for a moment and suddenly felt a plan forming in her mind.
"Anne! Anne!"
A girl in a white long dress and a long braid climbed up the hill, breathing heavily, and waved at Anne.
"Mary?"
Anne recognized her. This was Mary James, the original Anne's contemporary friend in the village and the carpenter's eldest daughter. Mary carried a basket and offered it to Anne, her face apologetic: "Anne, my father took our sheep back, didn't he?" Everyone in the village knew the Millers relied entirely on Old Miller's shepherding for their income. Mary, who was close to Anne, felt uneasy knowing Anne had just lost her father and her livelihood. She had brought the wild fruit she picked that morning to find her on the hill. "If I had known sooner, I would have told him not to listen to that mill owner."
Anne accepted the wild fruit in a basket woven from straw, filled with assorted, colorful berries. "It's alright, Mary. No one in our family is particularly good at shepherding anyway. If you want to help me, why don't you tell me where you picked these berries?"
Mary, relieved that Anne wasn't too sad, said, "It's near the western woods, the place we used to go. Did you forget? How about we go there now?"
"Sure." Anne nodded.
The east side of the village was a river, the south was the Millers' hill, and the west was a patch of forest. People usually walked along the riverbank path and seldom ventured into the woods, fearing wild animals, except for hunters. The edge of the forest was the favorite spot for the village children to look for treasures.
It was almost noon, and the sun was directly overhead. Anne planned to find some ingredients for lunch, not just wild fruit, but also wild greens and perhaps bird eggs. When the zombie virus first broke out in her past life, she survived on foraged vegetables to improve her diet while trapped on the farm.
Mary had intended to cheer Anne up, but once they arrived at the woods, Anne was immediately drawn to the dense vegetation. She busied herself picking berries, and then crouched on the ground digging up wild greens that no one ate, showing no inclination to vent her feelings.
Anne was concentrating on digging up wild garlic and shepherd's purse. "Why are you gathering that? I've eaten it. My mother uses it for soup, and it tastes awful," Mary said. Wild garlic tasted like chives, and indeed, made for a bland soup. Anne sighed internally at the poor culinary skills of the Middle Ages and shook her head. "I'll give it a try."
After finishing the wild greens, Anne even rolled up her sleeves and quickly scrambled up a tree branch. She was after bird eggs. Mary watched from below, stunned. Usually, only boys climbed trees for eggs, yet Anne's movements were remarkably fluid and practiced.
Having collected a handful of unknown bird eggs, Anne gathered everything into her apron, said goodbye to Mary, and headed back up the hill towards home.