The rot reached the eastern fields on the forty-third day of the growing season, which was the growing season that Mekka had described to the building council as the first growing season conducted under a formalized plan rather than under the informal expansion that need and availability had previously determined.
The formalized plan was a document. Mekka had written it herself, in the administrative Orcish that Sakh'arran's systems had standardized, across eleven pages that described the crop allocation by field section, the irrigation schedule by channel, the harvest timeline by crop type, and the labor rotation by civilian track assignment. It was the first agricultural planning document in the history of the orcish people, which was the kind of distinction that meant nothing until you tried to grow fifty thousand people's food without one and discovered that the absence of the document was the absence of the ten thousand decisions that the document replaced.
