Lamplighter

by D M Cornish

  “Maybe they were delivering parts for the dark trades.” Rossamünd spoke up, thinking of the hint of swine’s lard he had detected.

  That struck the others dumb.

  “Carry for the dark trades right under our noses?” Smellgrove snorted.

  Rossamünd shrugged. “I’ve seen some bad fellows try to get a rever-man through the Spindle. It’s not impossible.”

  His fellow prentices looked at him oddly and lapsed into ruminative silence.

  Soon the mood of the Hesiod Gaeta prentices affected the whole platoon, and a heavy glumness settled on them all.

  For Rossamünd, the sorrow of the lampsman’s passing and the Trought’s imminent destruction was far bleaker than he had reckoned upon. In a few months he had seen so much death—violent and stark and shocking quick—nothing like the glorious end that his pamphlets described for its heroes. The life of adventure was a life of violence. He had been seeking this, but now found he did not want it; men died, monsters died, and only grief and self-doubt remained. Barely eating his skilly and ignoring all about him, the young prentice felt a light touch on his shoulder. It was Threnody, looking at him with guarded and unexpected sympathy, perhaps to show that she understood. Rossamünd was not sure anyone could.Who else was able to comprehend sadness for the slaughter of a monster?

  Grindrod was determined not to let the boys wallow in the aftermath. They were set to marching, stepping-regular across the Grand Mead and back, across and back, left, right, left . . . for what remained of that grief-struck day. “Good practicing for tomorrow morning’s pageant-of-arms,” as the lamplighter-sergeant put it. However, Grindrod was himself more irascible than usual, and bawled out even the slightest error. “Keep to yer dressing, ye splashing salamanders! I didn’t stand out here hollering at ye for more than two months to witness this clod-footed display! Step-regular like I have showed ye! Swift and even!”

  The Lamplighter-Marshal visited the prentices at mains. He told them that he had halted the prentice-watch once more, and spoke quietly to each member of Q Hesiod Gaeta. “It is a hard thing to lose a brother-in-arms, Prentice Bookchild,” the Marshal said gently, pale eyes genuine in their commiseration. “Grieve freely, and remember well why it is we stand here against the wicked foe.”

  But what if the foe is one only because we make him so? Rossamünd quashed the troubling thought.

  “Lamplighter-Marshal, sir?” piped Smellgrove. “What happened to that butcher’s wagon?”

  The Marshal smiled. “Ah, those fellows hid scared in the Bowels till middens then went down the Gainway, very anxious to be gone—not like ye stout gents standing afore the front of stiffest dangers!” He looked at all the prentices with fatherly esteem. “Bravely done, my boys, bravely done!”

  Every face, whether it had suffered trauma that day or not, beamed at him.

  A double tot of grog was given out as a treat that night, an especial consideration to the boys who had suffered that morning.They all drank openly in memorial to Bellicos, and the eight quietly in thankfulness for their own survival.

  “A confusion on the nickers!” Arabis boisterously cried the habitual toast.

  It was repeated lustily by all but Rossamünd, who barely murmured, “A confusion on the nickers,” and then mouthed, and an end to my own.

  Mains came to its end and evenstalls began. While the other prentices,Threnody with them, went to their confines to polish and prepare for tomorrow’s full parade, Rossamünd was required to present himself at the kitchen for his scullery punishment. He was given no dispensation for the terrible attack of the Trought. Exhausted, he stowed his hat, frock coat and weskit safely in his cell, put on a smock issued to all prentices for laboring duties, then hurried out.

  Only four sharp turns from the prentices’ mess hall were the enormous kitchens with their sweating, white daubed walls and high ceilings of intersecting smoke- and fat-blackened beams. Cookhouse, buttery, small-mill, scullery and slaughter yard were together run by the culinaire, a woman infamously known as the Snooks. She was stout and lumpy and not much taller than Rossamünd, dressed in gray, with a puckered perspiring face, its age hidden beneath a trowel’s worth of boudoir cream. Worse, her lips and jowls were pinked with rouge, making her look like an ancient kind of good-day gala-girl, such as those Rossamünd had passed in less seemly parts of Boschenberg.

  A near-mythic fear of her made pots-and-pans an excellent punishment for defaulting prentices. From her throne at the end of a long-scarred bench the Snooks glowered at Rossamünd through thick double spectacles as he entered the steam, stink and sweat.

  “Hark ’ee, another weedy lantern-stick sent by old Grind-yer-bones to do me dishes!” she cried at him above the clangor of chopping knives and stirring ladles. “Ye lads come to me so often I don’t have any labors for me scullery maids to work,” she added with a chuckle, a strangled wheezing gurgle.

  Rossamünd swallowed a gasp at the sharp, distinctly unpleasant odor of the kitchens. He had expected they would always smell sweet, of baking crusts and roasting sides: where Mother Snooks sat reeked more of fat and some acrid cleaning paste. “I’ve come for pots-and-pans.”

  “Yes, yes, I know that!” the Snooks snapped. “It’s the only reason ye bantlings come to me.” She squinted at him through fogging glasses, her lips pursing and puckering over and over. She took out a small, well-thumbed tally book and flipped many pages. “Let us spy on who we’ve got ourselves here,” she muttered, running a stubby finger as if down a list. “Ninth of Pulvis . . . ninth of . . . Ah! Here ye be! Ye pasty li’l sugarloaf,” she stated in small triumph, then looked hard and close at the page. “Oh.” She gave Rossamünd a quizzing look. “Ye’re not the new girl, are ye?”

  “Ah . . . No, ma’am.” Then it occurred to him what she meant. A little glimmer of self-respect expired within. “I . . . I just have a—a girl’s name.”

  The Snooks gave a strange, high snort and her gurgling forgery of a laugh. “Well, perhaps we should find ye a pretty pinafore to wear!” This made her laugh even harder.

  Rossamünd stood stiffly and waited for her to stop.

  She wagged her head and dabbed at an oily tear. “The burdens some of us have to bear, eh?” she sighed. She marked the tally book with the greasy stub-end of a pencil and put the book away somewhere in her apron. Pointing into the confusion of the cries and the cooking she instructed him, “Off ye go—scullery’s through there and down yon stairs. Philostrata is always ready for the help.”

  Rossamünd rolled up the sleeves of his smock and made his way through the bustling kitchen. He passed the small-mill, where the pistor ground and pounded the flour in a great granite mortar ready for hasty pudding, the little treat allowed the prentices on Domesdays. His stomach gurgled. Some might have said it was bland stuff, hasty pudding, but as an interruption to the repetitive menu, it was a small ladling of bliss. Rossamünd stepped aside as the furner stoked the ten-door oven that dominated the center of the great room, bumping into one of the baxters as she prodded and checked her baking breads.

  THE SNOOKS

  “Oi there, pip-squeak,” the baxter warned. “Best mind yourself, afore you wind up in one of me loaves!”

  At last in the farther corner he found an oblong hole in the floor through which steam was continuously venting in churning swirls. The scullery cellar. Paved steps went down and Rossamünd descended till he was standing by a line of scrubbers, great wooden vats brimful of frothy, near-scalding water. The rosy-faced scullery maids, arms up to elbows in suds, greeted him with singsong cheer. The head scullery maid, Philostrata, handed him a soap-greasy cloth. “Sooner to start is sooner to end.” She pointed with a nod to a tub crowded about with unsteady piles of grimed crockery and smeared turnery.

  Vinegar flies floated about the stack delicately.

  Pots-and-pans!

  The water was tremendously hot, but when Rossamünd flinched, the nearest scullery maid chided him gently. “Don’t be a mewling great babbie, now.�
� She smiled. “You’ll get used to the scald. Young lantern-sticks need to grow into hardy lighters.”

  Rossamünd washed pots, pans, plates, griddles, saucers, fine Gomroon porcelain, dainty Heil glassware, sturdy mugs, cutlery and turnery. Sweat dripped from his brow and soaked his shirt as he scrubbed away the grease and washed off the spittles and scraps. The water turned into a foul, tepid soup that was promptly replaced with steaming new water poured from large coppers and made sudsy with great scoops of scarlet-powder. Scullery hands bustled about taking washed plates, drying them, hustling them off to be stored.

  As the scullery maids worked they gossiped and griped. “. . . Did you see what she upstairs had delivered today?” one woman huffed with a ceilingward glance and a dripping poke of her thumb in the vague direction of the Snooks. “We only used to get the finest, but now she rules the roost. Acacia says she carts in this awful cheap wheat dust from Doggenbrass! She ought to know better!”

  “Tut!” another maid exclaimed. “The finest fields in the Sundergird just north of us, and she’s importing poor stuffs from across the Grume! All because of that pinch-a-goose, Odious Podious.”

  “Larks! Been here but three years and it’s like he rules the place!”

  “Or like he wants to,” came the first scullery maid’s shrewd answer.

  “Mm-hmm,” her colleagues-in-suds agreed.

  Rossamünd washed for an hour, his puckered hands becoming insensible to the steaming water, and was relieved when Philostrata told him that his job was done and he could leave. Feeling a weight lifted, he hurried up the scullery steps eager for the seclusion of his cell.

  His joy was premature.

  Finding the happy prentice without a task and ready to leave, the Snooks put a heavy arm about Rossamünd and guided him over to an enormous fireplace filled with chains and lumpish levers. The pendulous fat of her limb flowed about either side of his neck. Rossamünd strained his head away from the noxious mixing of her posy-perfume and the funk of her armpits. Before him was a great cauldron, removed from its hooks over the hearth.

  “Now I want ye to hop into there,” the Snooks said, pointing to the enormous pot, “and scrub away till it all gleams.”

  The young prentice regarded the cauldron with sinking, wide-eyed disgust. With a helping hoist up and over from a soup cook, he was made to climb inside, and to his horror the pot was still warm from its cooking. He was expected to scratch at the crust of ages within with little more than a bent butter knife and an old brush. Squashed on his knees, Rossamünd labored in dread of being forgotten and having some boiling, putrid fish-head stew poured atop him. Hacking at the crust with the handle of the brush, he had managed to make a fair pile of burnt smithereens at the bottom of the great pot when he felt it being lifted and saw the stone mantel of the fireplace loom over the rim to eclipse the smoke-stained white ceiling. They were going to boil him!

  “Ahoy! Ahoy there! I’m in here!” he hollered. “I’m in here!”

  The cauldron was tipped on its side and Rossamünd rolled on to the slate-paved floor. Small unidentifiable pieces of char stuck to his face, hands and clothes.

  “I’m sure ye’re very tasty, me lad,” the soup cook grinned, “though I reckon yer boots might make for some prodigious chewing.”

  Shaking just a little, Rossamünd grinned with him. Brushing off the char, he presented himself back at the Snooks’ chair. The kitchen was beginning to empty now, staff retiring for the night as their duties finished, and Rossamünd was hopeful he would be among them.

  Regarding him through light-reflecting lenses, the Snooks pursed and unpursed her lips. “What to do with ye now, eh?” she muttered. “What to do with ye now . . . I tell ye what, boyo,” the old potato sack of a woman offered at last, “I need ye to do a little favor for yer old Mother Snooks.What do ye say?”

  “W-What would I have to do, ma’am?”

  “Why, just carry a trifling thing up some stairs for me, that is all.”

  “I . . . er . . . ,” Rossamünd started.

  “Or shall I tell dear Grind-yer-bones just how contrary ye are? I’d be happy to give ye a more regular place in me kitchen.” The Snooks gave him an appraising look.

  Rossamünd made a strangled noise.

  “I’ll take that to be a ‘yes,’ shall I?” The culinaire grinned wickedly. “Good lantern-stick.”

  With that she took him back through the cookhouse and out into a small quadrangle that he never knew existed. It was sunk right down like a well amid the lofty walls of Winstermill and was lit dimly by the light showing from the kitchen door and slit windows. Stars showed through the high oblong hole above, blue Gethsemenë—the brightest—winking at him silently. In the twilight Rossamünd could tell the place was both manger and slaughterhouse, the stink of pig’s sweat, lanolin, dung and blood mixing with the smoke of a fitfully glowing brazier. By it a man stood, warming his hands, clearly oblivious to the stink. He wore a striped apron and a belt holding wicked-looking carvers—a slaughterman.

  The Snooks went to him. “Well, hello there, Slarks,” she said in her friendliest voice. “Give my parcel to the lad.”

  “Right you are, Mother Snooks.” Slarks hesitated, looked dubiously at Rossamünd from crown to boot-toe and then went to fetch this “parcel.”With a grunt he hefted a sack and handed it straight to the young prentice. “Watch out, lad—it might be a mite weighty for you!”

  Rossamünd grappled with it clumsily, expecting to be toppled by a ponderous weight. It smelled strongly of pigs and made vile squished noises, but it was not heavy.

  The slaughterman regarded Rossamünd. “You’re a wiry little stick, ain’t you?” He indicated the sack with a wink. “We won’t be havin’ the soup this week, eh?”

  Rossamünd had no notion what he meant.

  “Follow me, me darling dumb-muscle, follow me!” The Snooks led the way back through the kitchen, past the mill to the pantry stalls. Into the leftmost of these the culinaire ambled, going to the very back. Behind a stack of wheat and barley bags was a red door, ironbound and locked. With a large key, the Snooks released the door, picked a bright-limn from the wall and took Rossamünd beyond into a small cold room. Here were kept all the sweet dainties and rare nourishments set aside for the officers—and especially the Master-of-Clerks. Labels—handwritten, hand-pasted—identified the contents of many sacks, bags, boxes, tins and other containers: pickled peaches, plums, apricots, small black fish and so much more Rossamünd could not catch a glimpse of in the swinging light as he was rushed through the store. For a breath they paused before a meat safe and several enormous earthen pots of unknown content.

  What now? Rossamünd wondered.

  Partly concealed behind the pots was another door barely big enough for the old woman to fit through. A second key opened this port, and she encouraged Rossamünd through with a firm hand.

  At first Rossamünd thought he had been shown into some kind of cupboard, but as the Snooks pushed in with her bright-limn he discovered that it was actually a landing. Before him he discerned a tightly winding wooden stair going up and going down. It was a furtigrade—a secret stair—cunningly built in a cavity between the walls, barely lit with ill-kept bright-limns fixed to the banister posts.

  “This nasty squeeze’ll take ye right up to where ye need to go.” The Snooks patted a rail. “For too long I’ve been jamming me girth between them banisters, and now I hurt right deep in here,” she said, patting her right hip tenderly. “I’d rather not climb anymore.”

  The meager width of the furtigrade was such that Rossamünd marveled that the Snooks had been able to make the ascent at all.

  “So that’s why ye’re here and that’s where ye’re to go with yer bundle. Just take the stairs all the way till ye come to a door and can’t go no more. Bang hard low down and go through.To ye left ye’ll find the surgeon’s door, dark purple and banded in iron. Knock three times, then a pause, then three more, then another pause, then two.”

  Very uns
ure, Rossamünd shifted his load. “The surgeon, ma’am?” he asked bemusedly. “Do you mean Swill?”

  “Aye!” she snapped. “And ye tell him when he asks—and I know he’ll ask,” the corpulent culinare insisted as sweat-melted boudoir cream congealed on her brow in the cool of the landing, “that Mother Snooks is a-getting too age-ed to be running errands through back ways and is fed up of nasty, dusty, too-steep, too-narrow stairs. That she has seen fit to send me—that’s ye, boyo—in her stead.”

  Rossamünd hesitated.

  “Up ye go, boyo!” She gave a ghastly grin.

  That was enough for the prentice; he climbed. Each stair was just that inch higher than was comfortable to climb, requiring him to lift his feet awkwardly, every step creaking a protest as it bore his weight.

  One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten, he counted under his breath, switch back!

  The whole structure seemed to tremble slightly with every step. Between the rough stone wall and rickety rail there was barely room for the prentice to swing his elbows. The Snooks must have been squished like pudding in a dish to come up here.

  Gritting his teeth determinedly, Rossamünd climbed in the stuffy, dusty, closetlike dark, marveling at this secret stair and wondering how many folk in Winstermill knew of its existence. Eyes wide to make the best of the weak light, he hoisted the sack over his back. Something soft and blunt bumped and prodded again and again into his kidney.

  One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten . . . Switch back!

  Over and over, higher and higher, and it was colder and darker as he went.

  On a landing by a dirty green bright-limn, Rossamünd put the sack down. As he caught his wind he indulged a little curiosity.

  He toed the bag. It rocked and squelched softly.

  He gingerly undid the cord that bound the top, already loose and in need of retying—or so he told himself. The sack sagged open but that was all.

  He lifted it up to the light and peeked within . . . and sat back with a stifled yelp.