Valentine suspected they'd sniff his chocolate out sooner or later. Better to give it up voluntarily than be put in his place in the pecking order by having it taken from him forcibly. Despite his lurking hunger, he offered it to Pappy.
"You looks hungries, grandfathers," Valentine said, offering.
"Naw, I couldn't," Pappy said. He shot a glance around, most of the workers were stripping and hanging up their clothes so they'd dry out by morning, or they were taking drinks from the plastic bucket by letting a siphoned jet of water spray into their mouths so as not to touch the plastic end. Pappy still eyed it, licking his lips.
"Give it here, Pappy," Fat Daddy said. Valentine wasn't sure they were even watching.
Pappy grabbed it and brought it over to Fat Daddy in his bunk. Beach Boy-though Valentine didn't know the name yet-took it, smelled it, and insouciantly popped a chunk in his mouth before handing it to Fat Daddy.
"Naughty boy," Fat Daddy said. He tasted it. "This is good stuff, new meat. Hey, Boy, new meat needs a name."
Beach Boy made a great show of licking his lips. "Scar."
Valentine liked the work. Maddeningly so.
He spent his days working with excrement, or drying it and then transporting it to the fields, rather.
It was filthy stuff for a man as fastidious about his own cleanliness as Valentine, filling a trailer with liquid "hot honey" and raking it out into a field to dry with other organic waste in the sun. The better job, in some ways, was taking the dried version of it, known as "brown sugar" out to the fields, though in spreading it some dust would get up and you'd have to spend the day with a rag tied around your face and the uncomfortable thought that you were blinking feces out of your eyes. There it was turned into quick-growing heartroot, or other more traditional Midwestern vegetables and grains-there were even paddies for rice. Most of the heartroot was broken up and added to scraps for pig feed or to granary leavings for the chickens the Gray Ones kept in little household coops or vast stacks in the pole barns.
The work was done by men because Grog warriors would not be stained by such duty, fit only for slaves. So the men of the forced-labor group, a collection of criminals, last-chancers, and sold-off Grog slaves of dubious origins such as himself, did work no warrior would take up, and the few Grog females in the Baron's stronghold were too valuable to sully with such labor.
Valentine followed orders, took his three hots and a cot, and waited in absurd, smelly happiness. They ate their meals outdoors, in the sun in good weather, under a tent or inside available transport in bad. He felt his body toughening under the dawn-to-dusk days, and there were no worries beyond his being recognized. There was a part of him that hated responsibility, the endless choices between bad outcomes that came with military life, the paperwork that no one ever read, useful only to the creators of file cabinets and document storage boxes.
His work wasn't limited to agriculture. Anything having to do with shit would cause an officer or a Grog chief to call in the forced-labor group. Valentine and Pappy were sometimes called into the Grog Quarter to deal with a stuffed-up toilet drain. He'd crouch to walk under lofted housing, or pass through alleys just wide enough to allow two Grogs to face each other and squeeze through. He smelled delicious steak and vegetable kabobs being cooked on tiny charcoal stoves and took cover when raucous games of throw-and-block or breakgrip burst out of multihome courtyards and into the streets, paths and alleys. He smelled tobacco and hot iron and apple-wood smokers. The Gray Ones loved pine and orange oils in their homes to cover the scent of a stopped drain.
"They also slosh around a lot of oil and burn it when the she-Grogs go fertile," Pappy said. "Grogs theyselves don't cause too much trouble about mating if there are no eligible females about, as long as they don't smell 'em. But if they get a whiff, it's Katie bar the door, 'cause you're about to get plugged in like a surge protector."
He also saw the Golden One quarters. Many still lived in tents, but more permanent housing formed of bricks reclaimed from the town and the output of a new Golden One-run sawmill was going up. Their quarters were laid out with more precision than the Gray One piles of housing, but each Golden One had less space. A whole family of six would be put into just a half basement.
Valentine felt for them. It was never fun to sleep in the same place you cooked.
Once, when their spreader flatbed broke down near headquarters, Valentine got a look at "the model."
It was on display in a peaceful garden, and as nobody seemed to mind him wandering within sight of the disabled truck, he went into a little Grecian temple, or maybe it was a small theater or music platform, and took a look at the wooden blocks carefully arranged on the three-dimensional plan.
The Baron had something grand in mind for his headquarters. There would be columns worthy of the Romans, a pair of arches that modernized the famous one he'd seen in pictures of Paris to include friezes of Grogs on one side, humans on the other-the Gray Gate and the Golden Gate, and, dwarfing all else, the Missouri Throne.
When his officer for the day called him back to the others, Valentine asked him about the pyramid.
"Going to take years to build, if it ever gets done at all. Even with all these Golden Ones going at it full-time. You wouldn't believe the hour cost in moving a city's worth of giant bricks into a single pile, Scar."
It would sit atop a staired Aztec-style pyramid, and the officer told him it would be visible, in some directions, from twenty miles away. The Baron could communicate with the Kurians from the top of it by reading the stars and planets. Or so the officer said.
Some days, Valentine saw Sergeant Stock out doing calisthenics on the athletic field near the forced-labor dugouts. A near mountain of dirt and gravel stood at the edge of the field, for emergency washout repair to the patched-together camp road network after a bad rain. Stock was one of a few who ran up and down the gravel hill, sometimes carrying a dummy gun, trying to keep his footing.
One morning, it was Ahn-Kha there, sitting atop the gravel mound, eating an orange from a bag of them.
Valentine got permission to try and cadge a couple of oranges from his old master, and trotted out to the hill.
Ahn-Kha made him go through the effort of climbing, sliding, and reclimbing the gravel pile.
"There is a difficulty, my David," Ahn-Kha said.
"What's that?"
"I have spoken to a few old friends, and last night I met with the Speakers of the Castes. They will not take up arms against this Baron. Here." He passed Valentine an orange.
"He has them working like slaves!"