Seed Time Harvest Time. Writer's Choice Shorts: A taste of history, #4

Ula was the one they barely forgave. She became the one who saved them. *Seed Time Harvest Time* is a taut, atmospheric story of one sharp-eyed young woman whose instincts are the only thing standing between her people and catastrophe. In an Iron Age village on the edge of famine, the Spring Festival of the earth goddess Nerthus is not a celebration. It is a desperate prayer. Two previous harvests have been destroyed.
Winter taught the village what hunger feels like. Now everything depends on the goddess's blessing, on sacred fires lit correctly, on seeds counted and praised and returned to the sacred lake, on the community's faith holding firm through one more season. Ula knows how fragile faith can be. A forbidden love affair with a promised man left her disgraced, struck by her father's hand, and handed over to serve Priest Caradoc and the goddess, Nerthus.
She counts herself fortunate. She is still here. Still useful. Slowly, carefully, she is earning her way back. The village is beginning to accept her again. The goddess seems pleased with her service. Then the traders arrive. Dark-eyed and beardless and nothing like the blond men of the village, they bring silver bowls and polished manners and gifts for the goddess. The priests are satisfied. The community feasts.
But Ula watches the strangers' eyes moving over the women's gold ear drops, the priests' fine drinking cups, the arm rings and finger rings, always counting, always weighing. She has learned, through hard experience, to trust what she sees rather than what she is told. Late at night when the moon is at its fullest and the frost has silvered the sleeping village, Ula wakes and discovers the truth about the traders.
Then she acts to try and save the village and her people. Seed Time, Harvest Time is a gripping, richly atmospheric work of historical fiction rooted in the ancient world of Iron Age Northern Europe. Drawing on the historical traditions of the goddess Nerthus, bog ritual and sacrifice, Iron Age community life, and the social world of tribal Germanic and Celtic peoples, this story brings the ancient past to vivid, immediate life through the eyes of one unforgettable young woman.