KHAR-THUL-KHAR-JUGUM

The Farming Levels  ·  Level Minus-Five  ·  The Agricultural Terraces  ·  Karneth-Khar-Thul

“Bera took me to the farming level on the seventh day. I was introduced to a retired Jugum whose name translates as 'Third of the Autumn Cohort Who Has Worked Twenty Years.' It allowed me to examine it with the patient tolerance of a large and confident creature that has no fear of small things. I have encountered more impressive animals. I have not encountered a more composed one. I stood in the farming level and looked at eight centuries of an underground civilisation feeding itself and found that I did not have the correct scholarly register for what I was seeing. I still do not.”

— G.C.P.S.A., Descriptio Aethermarchae, 1197 A.P.

The farming levels at Karneth are the most affecting thing Varro saw in eleven days -- the agricultural system that has fed a population of three hundred thousand underground for eight centuries, without sunlight or surface supplementation, through a continuously refined practice that Roman agricultural scholarship does not yet have the framework to describe. He stood at level minus-five and looked at it and found that he did not know where to begin. He began, eventually, with the Jugum.

Demographics

The farming caste at Karneth is the most academically engaged of any equivalent population in the seven holds -- a consequence of eight centuries of proximity to the hold's scholarly commercial orientation. The farming caste's records are the most formally structured agricultural documentation in the network, maintained to a standard closer to Academy research record than field notes. The Jugum handlers here are the families Varro met on the seventh day -- people whose relationship with the Jugum population is measured in generations, whose accumulated knowledge of individual Jugum temperament, health patterns, and capability constitutes the most detailed non-human animal study in the known world, maintained orally and through practice rather than in written form.

Points of interest

The retired Jugum pen at the farming level's easternmost corridor houses the hold's working-life-complete Jugum population -- animals whose years of active service have been fulfilled and who are maintained in comfort for the remainder of their lives, which can be considerable. Third of the Autumn Cohort Who Has Worked Twenty Years is the current eldest. It has been in the retired pen for six years. Its handler, who has worked with it since its first year of service, visits daily. The handler is sixty-three years old. Both parties understand the arithmetic of their remaining time together without discussing it.

The senior fungus cultivation bank occupies the deepest agricultural corridor, where eight centuries of temperature and humidity management have produced growing conditions that the farming caste describes as stable and that Varro's one-hour observation confirms as remarkably consistent -- the air in the senior cultivation corridor does not vary in temperature or humidity across the corridor's length in a way that his instruments can detect, a control precision that Roman agricultural infrastructure does not approach.

DM ONLY

The water management system at Karneth's farming level connects, through a series of channels the farming caste has maintained since the hold's founding, to the same aquifer network that runs beneath the eastern Iron Spine -- the same water table that the Fons Fluminis article establishes as being managed by the Khazadum across the full range. The Karneth farming caste knows their water supply is part of a managed system. They know it runs westward. They do not know it emerges at the Fons Fluminis. They have never been told. The farming caste master, Brek Vel-Skar-Jugum, 134, has been curious about the western source for forty years and has three times asked Dunkar Vel-Sar's archive for documentation on the water system's western extent. She has received, each time, a technically accurate description of the eastern range aquifer that does not mention what lies beyond it. She has filed this response and continued asking every decade. She considers herself a patient person.

Architecture

The farming corridors at Karneth are the most extensively modified underground agricultural space Varro has seen -- which is to say the only one he has seen, but the modification depth is visible even to an observer without a comparison. The wall sections between growing bays carry centuries of agricultural record: yield notes, variety adaptations, Jugum breeding records, and the management logs of farming caste decisions going back eight centuries in a continuous inscription that Varro spent twenty minutes reading before Bera pointed out that the wall of agricultural record extended for approximately three kilometres of corridor. He read a twentieth of it.

Geography

The farming level occupies the structural level minus-five and the agricultural corridors extending laterally into the eastern range geology from the atrium's base. The eastern range's geology produces a different soil-equivalent in the rock's mineral distribution -- the fungus bank growing medium here has a richer mineral content than the western holds' equivalents, a difference the farming caste has exploited over eight centuries into a cultivation system that produces higher caloric density per growing corridor than the other holds' comparable sections. The water management system connects to the eastern range's natural aquifer through channels the farming caste has been maintaining since the hold's founding.

Type

District

Population

~16,000 farming caste and Jugum handlers.

Owner/Ruler

BERA KHAR-THUL