The Fire and the Fog (7 page)

***

Supper done, and its mess cleaned, Serah
retired to knit in the living room, to listen to their mother tell
the youngest, Boll and Joahn, their bedtime stories. Johan the
younger, her brother not her father, stayed at the kitchen table,
bringing out his woodworking tools. Johan carved things constantly.
For the time, he mainly carved small wooden soldiers, and wooden
animals. Erris had heard their parents talking though, her father
suggesting Johan be apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in town. It would
be good if it happened, Erris thought. Good for the family, and
good for Johan. Well-made furniture was always needed.

Everyone retiring to their activities, their
hobbies, was in the normal course of an evening, and it left Erris
free to return to her room, and her books. She grabbed herself a
candle to light her bedside lamp before leaving, then padded back
over the smooth wooden floor to the large room at the back of the
house that she shared with her sisters.

Their house was standard for a farm, as far
as she could tell. Her parents had one room, the boys had one room,
and she and her sisters had another. The rest of the space was
taken up by the family room, bathroom, and kitchen. There was
storage up in the attic, and Erris knew her brothers went up there
to play sometimes, but there were spiders there. Erris didn’t like
spiders, what with their creepy legs and fangs and eyes and their
hair. She shuddered just thinking about them. So she left the Attic
to the boys.

Really all that concerned her in the house
were her books. She loved to read, and did so every chance she got.
Books were chock full of new worlds, new places. They held
knowledge, adventure, romance; really everything a girl could want.
And if there was ever one thing she knew she wanted, it was more
books.

She had inherited several books from her
father years ago, after he realized how voracious a reader his
daughter was, and once she had finished the meager supply he had
been able to provide, she had slowly collected several dozen more.
She asked for them at birthdays, saved her allowance for them, even
got her father to trade for them when he went into town. It always
gave her a good feeling going to sleep, knowing that tucked away
under her bed lay a good fifty odd texts. Medical tomes, farming
almanacs, philosophical theses, even an obscure mathematical text
that she had not as yet been able to fully decipher. Not
understanding the books didn’t matter though. They were knowledge,
and they were hers.

She reminisced as she lit her bedside lamp
from the candle, and blew out the candle and set it aside. She
first learned to read through the Texts of Ragn, as had most
people, and she still kept a much-used copy of the small, red,
leather-bound religious text beside her bed. The text of Ragn
taught how to live under Ragn’s eyes, how to obey his wishes and be
welcomed by him in the afterlife, and it was used by both Regan and
Rognian churches. But mostly it taught people how to read. It was
the most common text in all of Dohm, and according to the Church
everyone had one. Well, everyone that wasn’t from Heyle, and maybe
Maarin, but they were all heathens, as the Alde of the small church
they visited was so fond of saying. The texts of Ragn made it so
almost everyone in Dohm knew how to read, and for that it was
important.

Still, it was the treasures that hid
underneath her bed, the ones that taught of new places and new
ideas, that she truly loved; books about astronomy and philosophy,
history and politics; books about legends and fairy tales. Ragn’s
texts couldn’t hold a candle to them.

Not that she didn’t believe in Ragn of
course, she thought as she knelt and mouthed a quick evening prayer
to Him before reaching under her bed for the latest book that her
father had found her. It was hard to think that he didn’t exist,
when he raised the sun in the sky every day, let it fall back
behind the world each night. It was just…the texts were stuffy. And
boring. The texts were important, yes, but Erris always wondered if
maybe they were the reason so many people didn’t read anything
else. Their only introduction to reading had been the texts, so
they didn’t know that better books existed; books like the one she
pried out from under her bed and placed in the center of her
pillow.

At a first glance, the book seemed a
collection of legends and fairy tales, but at the end of each tale
the author had collected all manner of scientific proof and
first-hand witness statements that proved the legends were true.
Stories of great sea monsters swallowing fishing boats whole were
accompanied with a drawing of one of the monsters skulls, found
washed ashore on a beach in northern Rege. There were other tales;
from people living on the moon, and drawings of the large domes
they lived in to protect them from the Sun, to stories of another
continent somewhere across the sea, and copies of strange markings
the author swore were another language, found on board what he
claimed was a shipwreck.

But it was the tales of magic that interested
her most; that she wanted most to believe in. Unfortunately, they
always boiled down to drunken merchants or street thugs who claimed
to have seen a cloaked man calling down lightning, or throwing
sheets of fire from his outstretched palms. They were the most
interesting, but were always followed by the least amount of proof.
It was sad, she thought as she opened the book. She very much
wanted to believe in a tall, dark, handsome man, hooded and
cloaked, visiting towns and cities and righting wrongs, and
punishing evildoers. It seemed so…romantic.

No, Erris thought as she stared once again at
the drawing of the sea-monster skull, its huge jaws agape and a man
standing beside them as measurement, here was proof. The jaws were
half again as tall as the man, and three times as wide as his
outstretched arms would be. This was proof that sea monsters were
real, right in her hands. She could believe in the sea monster, but
the man, as much as she wished him to be real, couldn’t be.

She read for a time, reading and rereading
the new book till she could remember everything it said, but she
kept going back to the stories about the sea monsters. As she
slowly drifted to sleep, Erris thought about how someday she would
capture one of the monsters for herself, how she would train it,
and teach it to eat her meat for her at meals. Then she would ride
her pet sea monster across the ocean to a mystical land populated
entirely by tall, handsome princes, who would conjure fire and
right wrongs, and kiss her softly. She thought something else would
happen then, drowsily fading between reading and dreaming, but she
still wasn’t sure what.

***

Serah hobbled into the room an hour later
with her father, he carrying a sleeping Joahn. As her father softly
dropped Joahn into her bed on the far side of the room, Serah blew
out the still-lit lamp by Erris’ bed, but she left Erris as she
was, fast asleep and curled up happily around her book.

II

The next morning dawned in much the same
manner for Erris. She was excited and awake before her sisters,
waking as the sun started peeking over the low horizon. The
roosters would start their annoying calls soon, but Erris seldom
needed them. She had fallen asleep with her book still open, but
she was glad to see that she hadn’t damaged any of the pages this
time. After carefully putting away her book and its sea monsters,
Erris donned the same trousers and shirt that she had worn the day
before. They would need to be washed soon, but they could probably
last another day at least; a little more dirt would do them no
harm, and it would save Serah the pain of having to do more
laundry.

The only difference from the day before was
that Erris decided to head to the kitchen, instead of slipping out
the window and going off on her own, to sit with the rest of the
family and receive her instructions for the day. She was about to
be older, and she should start acting like it. Also she had to make
sure her parents didn’t get angry at her the day before her
birthday. It was never a good idea to make parents angry when
presents and trips to town were riding on their good humour.

Leaving her room and shutting the thin wooden
door, slowly forcing it into its frame so as to not wake her two
still sleeping sisters, Erris joined her already eating brothers at
the table. The door to her room would have to be fixed soon, she
knew. It had started to warp, and no longer fit quite rightly in
the doorframe. But that was a task for another day, when Johan the
younger had some time to spend on woodwork. Taking a seat beside
her father, Erris sat with a straight back, her hands in her lap as
she had read a lady should. She could be a good, proper daughter if
she wanted to, she was sure.

‘Nice of you to join us today, girl’ her
father said, tousling her hair with one of his large hands. His
hands were clean, but calloused, and they would be covered in dirt
before the day was done, as they always were. Her father was large,
and strong. He had a broad chest, and very wide shoulders. He may
not have been the tallest man she had ever seen, but a lifetime of
hard work on a farm had left him well muscled, even as he got
older. True, he was starting to grow a belly, but Erris had decided
he was allowed to. It made him look a bit more like her books had
said an old man should.

‘I’m being responsible’ Erris replied, eyeing
a large bundle of paper that sat on the table between her father
and her brother Jayke, ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a secret’ Jayke said, grinning over her
father’s shoulder as her father replied. Jayke sat on the other
side of her father, on the same side of the table, while Boll and
Johan the younger sat on the other side, intent on dispatching
plates of omelette and sausage that sat before them. Jayke was
taller than her father, but leaner, while Johan the younger was
taller than them both, and still growing. Boll was too young to
tell yet, he still had some of his baby fat, but Omah had said that
he would be big someday like her brothers, so it must be true.

‘It’s the manual for the new tool we’re
building’ her father said as he turned his attention back to the
manual, and breakfast, ‘Don’t worry, you can have it when we’ve
finished with it. You’ll probably be able to understand better than
us anyway.’

Boll, Erris’ youngest brother at thirteen,
kicked the underside of the table in complaint, hard enough to
voice displeasure, but not too hard as to cause any of the milk on
the table to spill. He knew he could still get away with some
outbursts of complaint, but if he spilt breakfast, he was sure to
get the wooden spoon from Omah in punishment.

‘Why does Erris always get things? Why can’t
I have something” he whined angrily, glaring jealously at his older
sister.

‘Because I’m smart, and you’re dumb’ Erris
retorted, sticking out her tongue across the table. Erris wanted to
ask her father if she could help him translate the manual, both to
read it and to find out the secret, almost as much as she wanted to
argue with Boll, but before the two could get a decent argument
going, Erris’ mother rapped her on the head again, this time with
her bare knuckles, as she put a plate of leftovers on the table in
front of Erris, the same fare as her brothers were already midway
through.

‘I thought we were going to be mature today’
Omah said, smiling and turning back to the stove to prepare food
for Erris’ other, still sleeping, sisters.

‘I was, but I got bored’ Erris replied, as
she began to eat. ‘Can I help with the tool?’ she asked, mouth half
full of omelette. If she couldn’t argue, at least she could try to
find out the secret.

‘Sorry munchkin, I want it to be a surprise’
her father replied. ‘Jayke, where’s Yolan?’ Johan asked as Serah
and Joahn walked slowly into the kitchen, Serah with an arm around
Joahn as a modicum of support.

‘Uh, she’s still asleep’ Jayke answered,
stammering the first words, ‘She’ll come help when she’s feeling
better’ he said, blushing slightly. Erris wondered briefly why
Jayke would be blushing, but quickly became more interested in her
breakfast. She missed her mother’s beaming smile.

‘Right, anyway, now that everyone’s
here…tasks for the day.’ Erris’ father said as her mother set down
the remaining plates for breakfast, one for each of her daughters
and one for herself. ‘Serah, Joahn, help your mother again, you
know the drill. Fetch the water, feed the chickens, help clean up
around the house, whatever your mother needs help with, you do
it.’

‘Yes papa’ the girls replied as Johan
continued.

‘Jayke and Johan, I’ll be in the shed again,
that leaves you two to start on the fence work.’ Several of the
large logs that formed the fence around the barn had rotted through
and broken apart in a recent storm. An entire section of the fence
would have to be rebuilt from scratch, the old fence posts dug out
and new holes dug for new posts, before the larger animals could
safely be let out of the barn. The boys had been working on it for
two days, and there was still days more work to do.

‘Boll, Erris, that will leave you two with
the rest of the chores. Roll in a new hay bale, muck out the barn
and feed the animals, then check on the garden. Once that’s done,
Boll start on the firewood, but be careful with the axe. Erris,
milk the cow, then help your brothers with the fence’

As the family around the table nodded in
general assent, Joahn stood up on her chair, her hands on the table
in front of her. Even standing on the chair, the ten year old stood
inches shorter than her still-seated father, her cheeks ballooning
out from stuffing too much food in at once.

‘Hew naemse Ms Sspots!’ Joahn yelled angrily,
tiny bits of egg flew from her mouth, fortunately only landing on
the table in front of her.