The Hyperborean Tales take place in a unique world; one of ancient barbarian cultures pitted against cosmic beings, alien races, and each other. It’s a world that deserves some development so I’m diving into some extensive worldbuilding. Since Book 4 begins on a farm, I figured I’d share some of that today.
Origins
Small farms on Hyperborea started less out of any agricultural need, and more because successful warriors had taken more female captives than they knew what to do with.
Where could they keep them?
How could they feed them?
What if it rains?
If a warrior chooses not to sell his slaves, then he may instead settle with them. Especially if he is a soldier from a successful military campaign, along with captured females he will have captured land. Having displaced the local power, with possession of land and coerced labor, he can become the next local power.
There are a variety of basic and secondary needs that small farms are well set up to address on Hyperborea. Their success not only benefits them, but also the larger economy and social structures of the world’s villages, towns, and cities.
Basic Needs
Food
Agriculture is labor-intensive. When not pleasuring their masters, slaves will find most of the time taken up with tending to fields of grain, fruit, and vegetables. Livestock add another dimension: slave girls may work as shepherdesses, or be set to fishing.
Dairy
One big difference between an ancient or classical era farm and a Hyperborean one, is that cattle and goats are not used for dairy production. Instead, the slave girls are. Masters will either breed their slaves, or feed them herbs that induce lactation. Milking slave girls has its benefits: the milk produced is very sweet and high in fats, superior to cow’s milk. It also encourages stronger bonds between the slaves and their master.
Goods and Simple Manufacturing
Food isn't the only thing needed on a farm. Slaves may be set to weaving, sewing, baking, pottery, or leatherworking. All of these tasks require some degree of specialization to be done effectively, and this is often burdensome on a small harem farm. As such, farms will tend to specialize in one or two of these tasks, and trade with their neighbors who in turn specialize in other tasks. This has the added benefit of encouraging warrior farmers to maintain good relations with each other.
Mining and metalworking
Mining and metalworking are a variant set of manufacturing needs. If they are in regions gifted with easily accessed minerals, farms will also set their slaves to mining ore, or coal. Metalworking however is rarely done by slave girls; it is too dangerous to the masters.
Protection
There is no point in having slaves and land, if you cannot keep yourself and your property safe. Harem farm girls are also set to work building mud walls, erecting palisades, digging pits and setting traps. The farmer master may also have a fortified farmhouse. This would be built from stone, and even protected by a small moat. Ramparts on the roof provide an advantage to a defender or defenders.
If a farmer master is powerful enough to have a fortified farmhouse, he will also have the support of his own sons, or tenant farmers. Tenant farmers have no claim to the lands they work, but they would own their own slaves. They serve the same function of medieval vassals: alloted land to work – to which they set their slaves - in exchange for military service when the farm as a whole is threatened.
Captivity
The Hyperborean master must of course keep his slaves secure. The ideal farm is isolated or cut off in some way, perhaps in a choking desert or beset by Dunkleosteus-infested waters. This makes escape impractical at the least, and ideally quite deadly. Slaves would be kept in secure barracks or pens, or even pits that can be sealed over with a single point of entry and exit. They would be secured with chains, sometimes several girls linked by a single coffle. Their legs may also be hobbled to prevent them from running, and they may wear bells at their collars so they can be easily located. Harem farm girls would also almost always be kept naked. This is to offer them poor environmental protection should they choose to attempt an escape, and no way to hide tools.
There are also informal systems of control. Some farmer masters may encourage some slaves to be informants on the others in exchange for simple favors and privileges. Other masters may simply set up their slaves to have overlapping responsibilities with zero-sum solutions. This ensures that the girls will turn against each other, and feud. Divide and preserve the conquest.
Sex
Let us not forget the primary draw for a warrior to keep many females as slaves. Harem farms become a place where play areas can be erected, complete with chains, bondage structures, whipping posts, and more. Fertility and aphrodisiac herbs may be grown in quantity. Every farm would have a breeding chamber; a room with perhaps an idol of Set, the serpent god of fertility. Chaining rings, muzzles, gags, and lubricant would be present to aid a master when breeding.
Slave areas such as barracks and bathing pools would also be designed to enhance the opportunities open to the farmer master. Barracks for example may have large beds of hay available for a master’s late night visit. The morning bathing area could be set up to face an open window of the farmer master’s bedchamber.
Secondary Needs
Heirs
A farmer master can breed as many children as he likes, by his slaves. Those offspring he wishes to raise as his own children, he may do so.
If he has a wife, should she wish children, she will insist that he breed at least several slaves at a time. This gives the wife the power to pit the slaves’ fertility against Hyperborea’s high infant mortality (as during the ancient era, two thirds of children die before maturity). Those that survive she will adopt as her own.
Using the slaves also protects the wife from the high risk of death during childbirth (unless she chooses to risk it for her own reasons). This risk is forced onto the slaves.
Like most forms of domestication,it is a good deal. The wives get children at no cost or risk to themselves, and in exchange, they do not murder their husband’s slave girls.
The Growth of Cities
Hyperborean cities, like all others on Earth until the 20th century, have a net negative population growth. This means they only grow through immigration; they are too unsafe and unsanitary to produce enough people, left to their own devices. Their death rates will always exceed the fertility rates.
As such, Hyperborean city dwellers (who tend to be poorer than their rural counterparts, and may only own one or two girls), are keen to adopt children to make up for high infant mortality. The adoption trade between small farms and nearby cities is highly lucrative. A larger proportion of slave girls in such farms are pregnant at any given time, feeding the urban demand for children.
Taxes
It is the slave girls who bear the brunt of these costs. If a farm is taxed by a nearby city or lord, that tax will come in grain or simple goods such as leather or cloth. If that tax cannot be paid for any reason, slave girls will be levied instead.
Sacrifices
A religious farmer master always sees the potential of his slaves as gifts to his gods. Especially when he may come home with a new girl or girls, there is great fear among his other females. That is when it is most likely that he will take the oldest or least pleasing, to the altar to be sacrificed.
However, if he is particularly grateful for the support of his gods, he may instead take the girl he values the most to the altar. A slave owned by a religious Hyperborean is never safe.