The Fire and the Fog (8 page)

‘Yes, right, sorry. Erris, milk Ms. Spots’
her father said sighing and massaging his forehead with his right
hand. He had learnt decades ago that you don’t try to argue with a
ten year old, and Joahn, as the youngest of seven children, was
worse than most. She always got what she wanted; her parents were
generally too tired to discipline her, up to and including bringing
her stuffed bear toy to every meal, and pretending to feed it.
Erris still didn’t understand how she kept it free from mess.
Somehow Joahn always got more food on herself than on her bear.

With breakfast done, chairs were pushed away
from the table, bumping and grinding over the wood floor, and the
family went to work. Erris’ mother and sisters stayed to clear the
table, while her father and older brothers left in the direction of
the tool shed. Her father would pass them out the tools they would
need, post-digger, shovels, crowbar, so that Johan the younger
wouldn’t be able to see the secret project.

That left Erris with Boll. Unfortunately. Now
thirteen, Boll had at one time been a happy, energetic boy, equally
eager to help and to play. Two years ago however, Dom, the second
eldest brother, had cut off his ties with the family, and had left
to join the priesthood. Apparently the rest of the family hadn’t
been devout enough for him, and while Erris was starting to
understand the fights between Dom and her father, Boll did not. To
Boll, he was missing his big brother; his best friend.

Erris didn’t remember very much about Dom
anymore. It had been years since he’d left, years since anyone in
the family but Boll had talked about him, and even longer since
she’d last talked to him. She had never been a party to the loud
arguments between Dom and her parents, but she remembered hiding
her head under her pillow some nights, trying to drown out the
yelling.

What she did remember about Dom was that she
hadn’t liked him. He had always ignored his chores, gone off on his
own, leaving extra work for the rest of the family. And he had been
mean to the animals. Erris could remember him walking through the
yard, distracted, kicking angrily at any of the chickens that
strayed into his path. Erris didn’t think he meant it, he was
just…angry. Violent.

It was sad really. Boll had followed Dom
everywhere, pretending to be a soldier with him. Back then, Boll
had been happy, as young boys should be, unaware that Dom was,
well, bad. But now, he was angry all the time, and would start
fights at the drop of a hat.

Erris wondered sometimes what had happened to
Dom. He had left to join the church, that she knew, but she
couldn’t imagine him as an Alde, running a congregation and
delivering Ragn’s word to the people. He had probably become a
Hunar or a Legnar; a soldier of the church, fighting to expand
Rognia, and Ragn’s, influence over Dohm.

Still, she and Boll had a job to do, and the
work was heavy enough that it didn’t leave much time for talking.
Not that she and Boll ever had much to talk about anyway. He wanted
to run off and become a soldier, or a priest, just because Dom had.
When he did talk, he would talk about Dom only, and Erris had never
liked Dom. He had burned one of her books once, saying it was
heresy. He had been given a good beating by her father as
punishment, and her mother gave him burnt food for a week, but
still. That book was gone, Erris would never get to read it again.
Erris knew everything it said of course, but still. The book itself
was gone, and that was just sad.

Erris was sweating profusely by the time they
rolled the hay bale into the barn; clammy, sweating, and smelling
of manure by the time they mucked out the stalls in the barn, and
just plain tired when she finished milking Ms. Spots. Her mother
and sisters were in the garden when she got to the house, lugging
the full pail of milk, so she left it on the floor of the kitchen
and quickly threw water on her face before heading back out into
the sun. If her mother and sisters were in the garden, they
wouldn’t need help, so she would have to go off to help her other
brothers while Boll chopped firewood.

The earlier work hadn’t been as bad. When she
and Boll were bringing in the hay, the sun was still low in the
sky, and while mucking the barn and milking the cow she had been in
the shade. The walk to the fence was short, but the day was
starting to warm. It was with some apprehension that she joined her
brothers, both shirtless and sweaty under the midday sun, to help
remove another post.

‘Is it hard?’ she asked as she reached the
two boys, who were both leaning on their shovels and breathing
heavily. She pulled off her tunic, leaving on her loose fitting
undershirt. She was going to boil; they all were, but at least
years of work in the sun had made her almost immune to sunburns.
Her skin was tanned, her hands calloused, her nails short and
cracked, and her hair short and unkempt, but she didn’t care. There
was no-one around the farm to think her pretty, so why try when you
were only going to get dirtier the next day?

‘Oh, you’re going to love this, E,’ Jayke
said, grinning at her. ‘Grab the crowbar and come help us pry this
post out.’

It took the three of them a good half hour to
lever, heave, and pull the old wooden post out of the ground, and
then another half hour to widen the hole enough to fit in a new,
freshly cut post, and fill in the soil around it.

Joahn was sent to them several times, with
water and glasses to keep from dehydrating, but by the time the
three got the last rotten post out, and the last new post in, a
good five and a half hours had past. All three were dirty, tired,
and hungry.

‘Right! That’s it. We’re done here for today’
Jayke said, as all three collapsed on the soil around the last
post, panting heavily and wiping the sweat from their brows. ‘You
two head back to the house. I’ll take the tools back to Father, and
let him know we’re done here. Check on Boll, see if he’s finished.’
Jayke, true to his word, stood and began collecting the tools that
lay scattered around the freshly churned dirt. The job was not
done, but it would probably take them another three days to fix the
rest of the fence, and it was getting late.

With their brother up and moving, Erris and
Johan had no choice but to get up and move as well, even though
their muscles ached and protested vehemently. They went to check on
Boll first, but the only sign that he had been chopping logs were a
number of messily stacked rows of firewood. Someday Boll would do a
good job at one of his chores, and Erris thought she might throw a
party. Content that he was already at the house, even if he hadn’t
worked well, the two slowly ached their way back home.  

***

‘I’

‘Hate’

‘Fences’

Johan cursed, panting as they approached the
front steps, and Erris could only nod in accord as they climbed to
the door, and walked in.

Inside, everyone was too exhausted for a
lively meal. A day of double work had taken its toll on the whole
family. Only Erris’ father had a smile on his face.

‘It’s ready’ he said, wiping the head from
his upper lip as he drank from a mug of his dark, homemade ale.
Erris couldn’t stand the stuff, ale. She had tried some several
weeks ago, but the bitter taste threw her off. Still, as much as
her father and brothers enjoyed it, it was probably the reason her
father was growing a belly, so she was glad she didn’t like it. She
didn’t want to be fat.

‘Day after tomorrow, when we get back from
town, I’ll show it to everyone.’ Her father finished with a
grin.

Even the announcement that Johans secret
project, the tool that he had been working on for weeks, was done
couldn’t energize the exhausted group, and the family almost as a
whole went to bed early that night. Erris birthday was the next
day, and they would all need rest for the morning chores, and then
the ride to Oortain’s Copse.

Erris thought fondly of Oortain’s Copse as
she and her sisters readied themselves for bed. Her sisters were
talking in low whispers, excited for the trip, but Erris stayed
silent. The rest of the family liked the Copse for the shops, or
the inn, or whatever else. Erris though, liked the Copse for an
entirely different reason.

Settling herself into bed, Erris read briefly
from her book on legends before putting out her small bedside lamp,
and this time, rather than sea monsters, she found herself dreaming
of a tall, black-cloaked man, who brought justice to the lands with
lightning called from his fingertips, and wielded a flaming sword
to do away with wrongdoers.

He was righteous of course, he protected the
weak and punished the evil, and he cared so much for the little
people. And most of all, he could do magic.

He was a prince of course, with a large black
stallion, and she rode with him, her arms clenched across his chest
and her face buried in his strong, muscular shoulders as her hair
whipped behind her, and the horse beneath them moved and stretched
like something not of this world, flying swifter than the wind. It
rode into the sky, and then flew from cloud to wispy cloud, its
hooves barely stirring the soft white clouds as they galloped
across the heavens, gazing at the infinite expanse of stars above
them.

It was a good dream.

III

When Erris woke the next morning, she was
sixteen. She opened her eyes and lay staring at the ceiling,
watching as dust motes danced and twirled slowly through the shafts
of morning light that shone through the window. The sunlight cut
sharply through the darkness of the room, and she found herself
wondering why it really mattered.

A birthday was just a number, after all; an
arbitrary means of measuring a person’s age and maturity without
taking into any consideration the person themselves. Nothing
concrete was gained on a birthday. No life altering lessons were
imparted when you woke, magically one year older. There was no
swift increase in height or chest size or intelligence. A birthday
was simply a number, a number that realistically meant nothing, yet
technically meant everything.

She knew from her books that some people
never really grew up, never matured, but they were considered
adults because they were older. Why were they allowed to make
decisions and vote, and she wasn’t? She was certainly smart. She
had read more books than almost everyone she knew, and weren’t
books the source of knowledge?

As she lay motionless in bed, basking in the
warmth of the sun, and the day, Erris knew her logic was sound. A
birthday was not really an important or meaningful occasion. She
wondered, then, why she found herself so excited.

Still, she thought as she closed her eyes
against the bright morning light, thinking about the uselessness of
birthdays wouldn’t help her at all. What with the trip to the
village later in the day, chores for the morning would be reduced,
and mostly done by her brothers and sisters, so maybe if she just
went back to sleep no-one would notice. It was her birthday after
all. Birthdays might not mean anything in the grand scheme of
things, but if she was allowed to stay abed, they might not be as
silly and useless as she thought. Erris smiled as she rolled over,
curling around and hugging her warm covers to her chest. She was a
butterfly, wrapped in a cocoon of warmth and serenity.

Unfortunately, the extravagance of having a
few more hours of sleep never manifested itself. No sooner had
Erris rolled over and snuggled herself comfortably into her
blankets than she was hit in the back with a flurried tangle of
arms and legs.

‘Erris! Erris! You’re ooooooold!’

Joahn dragged out the syllables of that last
word, using a piercing pitch that should have been impossible for
human vocal chords to reach, to further draw out the pain of being
called old. As bad as being called old was, being denied sleep was
worse. Erris shrugged and struggled as her youngest sister, now six
years younger but still strong and agile, tried to wrap her arms
and legs around Erris in her covers in a perverse, unwanted sort of
bear-hug.

As Erris tried to free an arm to swat at the
troublesome rodent clinging rat-like to her back, she heard a noise
in front of her face that made her snap her eyes open immediately,
already glaring at the visage in front of her.

‘Erris! Erris! You’re oooold!’ Serah
whispered, her round face taking up all of Erris vision while she
grinned ferociously and drew out old as mockingly as humanly
possible before she too jumped onto Erris bed in a slow tackle.

‘Nooooo lemme sleep’ Erris tried to mumble,
but she knew when she was defeated. Still trapped in her blankets,
with a sister hugging her on either side, she gave up. Uttering a
final, muffled noise of complaint as she tucked her head into her
covers, Erris cocooned and lay still. She regretted the loss of
extra sleep, but, after a minute or so of warm hug from her
sisters, decided that maybe birthdays weren’t so bad after all.

***

Time passed; hours filled with waking, food,
chores. Hours filled with a mounting excitement. The hours passed,
and finally Erris’ family was on the road. The morning chores had
been finished quickly; the animals were milked, fed, and ensconced
safely in their pens while Johan senior hitched Marmot to the
wagon. For the two hours since then Erris, her mother and father
and brothers and sisters, had all been either been walking
alongside or riding on the wagon, while fields of golden wheat
passed slowly by on either side.

Erris had started out on top of the wagon, in
part to read the new historical text she had been given by her
father for her birthday, in part to keep her nice summer dress as
clean from the dirt and dust of the road as possible. It was a
pretty dress after all, white and hemmed with nice blue needlework.
It came down just past her knees, which left her feeling much more
free than her regular work trousers, but the neckline wasn’t low
enough for it to seem risqué.