by M K Hutchins
I should be grateful. No one would notice a crock scrubber. No one would ask me too many questions. No one would discover I wasn’t Dami.
I’d never cook here, but at least I’d be near the food. Not that I had the concentration to watch the apprentices and scrub crocks right now. My head felt like it floated above my body, with a string attaching the two.
“Dami!” Hawak shouted from across the kitchens. “You’ll have those pots scrubbed by next year at that rate! Come here.”
Bile rose in my throat. Hadn’t I been scrubbing furiously?
I stood. My visions swarmed with dark spots.
Then everything turned black.
“Her pulse says she’s dehydrated and underfed. What would you make her?” Hawak’s booming voice echoed through my skull. I groaned.
“Elk and carrot hotpot?”
“No. Dewar?” Hawak called.
“Bean cakes with blueberry jam?” the apprentice offered.
Hawak sighed. He shifted. From the savory smells floating through the air, he’d just lifted a crock lid. He continued his lecture in a scholarly, pragmatic tone. “A lack of food and water leaves one in need of all things—perception, dexterity, strength, and endurance. The whole body is likewise in need of help, but heavy food will hurt a weak stomach. Stock, made from a whole duck or rabbit carcass, is the answer.”
A spoonful of something warm dribbled into my mouth. Luscious and silky from the duck, with depth of flavor from sweet carrots, spicy garlic, and bright, sour parsley, it swirled around my tongue. Salt perfected the balance of all four flavors in that heavenly liquid.
I’d made thousands of broths and tasted thousands more. But none, not even my father’s, could match the subtlety of this one. Tears budded in the corners of my eyes. I’d tasted perfection. And I couldn’t ask Hawak how he’d made it, not without raising suspicions.
“Are you awake?” Hawak asked.
I opened my eyes, then wished I hadn’t. All twelve apprentices stared down at me. I’d become Hawak’s teaching moment. He strained the stock into a bowl, while ordering some of the apprentices to help me into a corner. They propped me against a bag of beans, then Hawak brought me a bowl of the amber liquid. “I thought you were lazy, not ill. I’m sorry.”
I raised the spoon to my mouth and sipped. I wanted to burst with enthusiastic praise for this stock. I wanted to weep over Hawak’s feet and beg him to teach me his techniques. But strong-of-arm Dami wouldn’t know she tasted nothing short of a masterpiece, the culmination of decades of study.
I’d almost been daughter-in-law to a man with this kind of skill. “This is delicious.”
“Well, I try,” Hawak said with a grin fully aware of his mastery of our art. “When you’ve eaten half, I’ll bring you a buckwheat branch to soak in the remaining stock. Your stomach will handle it by then.”
As he stood, the door opened. Fir.
My spoon froze, halfway to my mouth. Except the thief didn’t look like an unassuming boy from Meadowind anymore. His sleeves still indicated yellow-rank, but his hair was waxed into soft curves, the corners of his eyes touched with umber in the height of fashion.
“Ah, Hawak. Grandmother’s feeling partial for a mint infusion.”
I turned, trying to make myself small against the sacks of beans.
Hawak waved at one of the apprentices to handle it. Fir waited against the wall and stared at me, eyes hard. My arms prickled with gooseflesh. Tea tray in hand, he left without a word.
Hawak brought me the promised buckwheat branch.
“Who... was that?” Despite the stock, the question turned my mouth dry.
“Yellow-ranked Fir. He’s the grandson of Blue Lady Egal, King Alder’s first cousin once removed. But his mother married beneath herself. I’m sure if you want to gossip about his handsome features, you’ll find plenty of company among the other servants.”
I flushed. That wasn’t what I meant at all. “I was just asking.”
“Less asking, more eating. You still have crocks to scrub.”
Hawak had some semblance of fairness, at least. He left me with a crock of stock, keeping warm on the ashes, more branches, and an admonition to take breaks.
I did, of course, still need to finish all the dishes before going to bed.
The kitchens seemed almost peaceful, once the apprentices retired. The various hearths glowed, like the sleepy eyes of watchful grandparents. The dim light left the edges of the counters blurred, the ceiling hidden. I could imagine myself chopping onions over there. Seasoning a freshly-filleted trout here. Preparing berry pudding in the height of summer there.
My scrubbing slowed. Why would Fir rob me? He wasn’t poor and he had no reason to hate me.
My stomach turned icy. Not me, Dami. He’d asked my name and he’d been so happy to hear it. But he had no reason to hate her, either.
Unless she’d done more than mope when she disappeared into the woods.
I rubbed my eyes and paused for a ladle of the stock, hoping that would clear my mind. Its lulling warmth made my eyelids heavier. Maybe I could risk a nap on the grain bags? No. Better to finish. I couldn’t afford to lose my post.
Father, Mother, Nana, Dami. They all depended on me.
The outside door rattled. Strange. “Hello?”
Hawak had mentioned another dishwasher I’d share a bedroom with—she had her half-day off today. When the sun set, I’d assumed she was sleeping elsewhere tonight, maybe with family in town. A dishwasher would knock, though, and the door kept rattling—furiously.
“Hello?” I stood, clutching my half-scrubbed crock, the closest weapon to hand. A crock could probably knock out a thief. Still, no answer. Just more banging. Was someone injured?
My hands turned clammy. The long shadows on the wall shifted as I crossed the room.
I cracked the door. It burst open, whacking my hand and knocking me onto my backside. Sharp pain shot down my still-bruised hip.
A ghost loomed above me.
Corpulent rolls of tar-black skin covered its massive body, supporting a diminutive head with a pin-prick of a slime-dripping mouth. It stood on two tiny, withered legs that seemed too small to support such girth. Two tiny, withered arms dangled from its chest, barely visible against the mounds of slime-coated fat.
I wished, for once, that I wasn’t perceptive-of-taste-and-smell. It smelled like pickles gone bad and spoiled fish. It smelled like a deer’s carcass, left to rot on the forest floor. It smelled like an old man had died and voided himself.
The ghost tilted its disproportionately small head to the side and considered me.
Some kinds of ghosts ate corpses. Maybe this one wasn’t so particular as to require dead meat.
I hurled the crock.
It bounced off the mounds of fat and rolled to the floor. A well-made crock, not to break. The ghost pounced on it and slurped the half-scrubbed insides—tried to slurp the insides, anyway. That pin-prick mouth let nothing pass. Worse, its lips turned everything they sucked at into ooze. Sharp-scented, eggs-gone-bad ooze, thicker than the black slime that coated its body.
This was a Hungry Ghost, then. Not a Vengeful Ghost, or a Mournful Ghost, or a ghost with unfinished business, but some deceased spirit that could not rest for the famine burning in its belly. A belly regular food refused to fill.
It picked up the next crock and tried again, all interest in me gone.
I should have moved. I should have run. Gone to the room Hawak said I could sleep in and barred the door.
But I couldn’t tear my eyes from the sea of fat, the way it rippled when the ghost moved. I couldn’t breathe for all the stench in the air. I couldn’t think.
I’d had a half-dozen crocks left to wash. The ghost didn’t take long to lick them all into foulness. It shifted toward me, bringing its stench closer.
I gagged. And then I vomited broth and buckwheat all down my front.
It lowered its head and whined. Whimpered like a beaten dog. It looked from the stoves
to me, clutching its huge belly. Its tiny eyes flashed in the firelight, but they weren’t angry.
Sad. Sad and starving. Feed me. Cook for me, it seemed to plead. Its eyes were almost beautiful—a deep brown, like the bottom of a molasses pudding.
I shifted forward a step, then caught myself. Feed this thing? Feed it what, myself? I’d eaten everything Hawak left me.
Light shone in the outside doorway. A torch. I caught a glimpse of a young woman’s hardened face and long hair. She swung the torch like a club, right into the ghost’s back.
It howled with pain at the fire, jumped to the ceiling, and scurried upside down like a spider out into the night.
She smiled at me—a woman two or three years older than me with calloused hands and a plain, charcoal gray dress. “Welcome to the kitchens. I see you’ve met our ghost.”
“You must be Dami. I’m Osem, the other crock-scrubber,” she said, not getting any closer. She looked me and my vomit-splattered dress up and down. “Did laundry deliver you a dress?”
“I... umm... don’t know.” I vaguely remembered Lady Egal saying something about that to Nisaat, her gate servant.
Osem opened a door on the far side of the kitchens, near the stairway to the cellar. “It’s here. But we should clean crocks first. Outside.”
No sense in dirtying my only clean clothes. In the outside air, the crocks still reeked like something left in the sun for a week, but I could control my stomach. Each crock needed two scrubbings—I did the first round since I was already filthy. Osem folded her elbow-length, green-ranked sleeves on top of her shoulders and finished the work with practiced efficiency. Dami had been wrong about the yellow-ranked girls getting all the worst jobs.
“This sludge... it doesn’t cause disease, does it?” Not that I’d asked in time for it to matter.
Osem shrugged. “The ghost rots the food, but it’s just rot. Nothing us dish scrubbers can’t handle, eh?”
“Right. You’ve seen the ghost before?”
“Oh, a few times. Enough to figure out it’s scared of fire. You opened the door when it rattled, didn’t you?”
“Ah, yes.” I picked up another crock. The grime and water chilled my hands—there was nothing warm about scrubbing under a waning spring moon.
“Hungry Ghosts can’t open closed doors. Not even a cupboard. Hawak learned that in his research and it’s held true.”
Someone might have mentioned that before leaving me alone in the kitchens. I passed Osem the last crock. “Why hasn’t Hawak exorcised it?”
Part of exorcising a Hungry Ghost included cooking it a perfect meal. Surely a Master Chef like Hawak could handle the challenge.
“When he was busy researching, he relied on the apprentices to plan the menus. His Majesty noticed the change and commanded Hawak to stop.”
I blinked as we hauled the cleaned crocks back inside. “His Majesty wants a ghost in the palace?”
“Oh, he doesn’t believe it’s real, since only apprentices saw it. Or maybe he doesn’t like the idea that a Hungry Ghost could be in the Redwood Palace—he’s a proud man.”
I shook my head. Pride seemed a poor reason to avoid seeking out the truth. “I still can’t believe how calmly you waved that torch.”
“I’m not scared of our ghost, and I’m endurance-of-heart, too. Regular heartbeat. I don’t panic easily, and I’ve never managed to faint.”
Macerated strawberries for endurance-of-heart. I’d never heard of anyone with that gift.
“I know, I know. It’s a bit odd. My father was sickly his whole life—as far as we could tell, because of his erratic pulse. My parents hoped this birthgift would keep me from inheriting his difficulties.”
“That’s brilliant. It seems to have worked?”
Osem nodded. “I was lucky. During Mother’s pregnancy, the Master Chef of that day—Master Chef Yarrow—visited my home town. He suggested it.”
Former Master Chef Yarrow. Sorrel’s father. I could have studied with him. I swallowed the lump in my throat, but it felt like swallowing ghost slime.
We stacked the clean crocks upside down on their shelves to dry. Work finished, Osem yawned, reminding me of how tired I was. My body throbbed all over, most of it sticky from cleaning.
Osem led me to the door by the stairway. The room inside barely fit two mattresses and a pair of blankets. Osem didn’t quite slide the door shut so I could change by hearth light. I shoved my filthy dress under the empty basket and lay down.
By then, Osem was snoring like nothing had happened.
I tried to settle on my mattress, but this room smelled odd. The pine cuttings of our mattress were musty, the wood walls stale. Even from under the basket, I caught the acrid tang of my soiled dress. And, fainter still, I smelled the kitchens—ashes and herbs and well-oiled cutting boards I couldn’t use.
Hungry Ghosts plagued my dreams. Nana’s sweet face shrank, her middle bloated, and her arms and legs withered until she was as putrid as the ghost who attacked me. That’s what would happen to her, if no one cared for her—especially in this crucial first year after death. Without a daily offering in the shrine, she’d starve. She wouldn’t ascend into her deserved rest with her Ancestors.
But the palace didn’t lack food to offer the dead. Why would anyone be neglected? No, the palace shouldn’t harbor any such ghosts.
My dreams shifted. People with too much lust for this world could also burn with hunger, regardless of the food offerings proffered them. Murderers, adulterers, and gluttons. All night they chased me. Some slashed at me with obsidian knives. Another caressed me and whispered nightmarish nonsense. Others tried to crack my ribs open, like I was a stubborn clam hiding a delectable interior.
I woke in a cold sweat.
If I were king, I wouldn’t want to believe ghosts lived in my palace, either.
Osem didn’t act like the ghost posed a physical threat. It wasn’t a Vengeful Ghost, and it had seemed more interested in the crocks than devouring my internal organs. But I wasn’t sure. I knew so little about ghosts of any kind.
I’d just keep the door shut. Even if it seemed impossible that something as flimsy as a door could keep the Hungry Ghost’s bulk outside the kitchens.
Osem yawned, turned over, then nudged me with an elbow. “Are you awake yet, lazybones? We’ve got work to do.”
Darkness swallowed our small room. It didn’t feel like it could possibly be morning yet.
“The ghost didn’t scare you, did it?” Osem cracked the door, letting in the hearth light. The natural lift of her eyebrows gave her a friendly, perpetually-laughing appearance. “Maybe if we work fast enough, Hawak will give us some time off to go to the baths. I mean no insult, but you need it.”
Usually when people start something with “I mean no insult,” they intend exactly that—but not Osem.
“Aren’t you tired from being out after sunset? And then staying up to scrub all those crocks?” I asked.
She shrugged, offering no details on where she’d been. I followed her into the kitchens.
“We always get up before the apprentices and build the fires back up to full strength. Do you know how to tend a fire?”
My chest ached. I knew how to use every inch of this kitchen, from hearth to countertop. “Yes.”
“Good. Start over there.”
I blew on the coals and folded back in several unburnt ends of wood. Flames licked them up. Time to add more—but I frowned at the short stack of logs by the back door. “There’s hardly any wood here.”
“That falls to us, too.” She snatched two buckwheat branches from a basket inside the cupboard and tossed me one.
I hesitated, despite its shiny, brown-broiled crust.
“We’re allowed that for breakfast. I wasn’t stealing.” Osem imitated Hawak’s robust voice: “For there will be no stealing in my kitchen!”
I couldn’t help but smile. We munched the nutty branches as we walked into a cool, blue-black false dawn. The buildings, lawns, and gar
dens on either side of our gravel path rested peacefully—it seemed impossible that a ghost had roamed here last night.
Osem led me to a shed by the palace wall. “Half the palace gets their firewood from here. There’s the pile of sacks.”
We filled two up, stacked the split logs in the kitchen, then came back for another batch. The sky blushed pink. Birds called. At least I was used to getting up early. As we dumped out the wood, the apprentices staggered in, rubbing their bleary eyes.
After the fourth load, I groaned as I picked up the wood. My arms already ached from yesterday’s scrubbing.
Osem blinked at me. “Aren’t you strong-of-arm?”
I plastered a smile on my face and added a log to my sack, for show. “I’m just sleepy. That’s all.”
By the time we finished hauling wood, the apprentices had a heap of dirty dishes for us to clean. Hawak arrived to taste and re-season the breakfast dishes—buckwheat and a variety of sauces to go with them, pease porridge, easy-to-digest egg drop soup, and labor-intensive bean cakes. At home, we only made bean cakes for special occasions; the beans had to be ground into very fine flour, then whisked and whisked with hot water, then poured into molds and cooled. Only then could they be sliced and simmered in broth. Eating them for breakfast seemed ridiculously indulgent—but I guess this was the palace.
Hawak arrived with a smile and good-hearted laugh, but his demeanor soured as he rescued dish after dish from his apprentices’ careless mistakes. By the time servants arrived to whisk trays off to royals, nobles, and other servants, he was scowling and swearing. I didn’t blame him.
The servants returned with heaps of dirty dishes and the apprentices dove into lunch preparations. Hawak’s mood didn’t improve and I could smell why. One apprentice burned the honey. Another over-salted a soup—a hard mistake to recover from. The lanky one scorched the onions instead of sweating them.
I could cook better than that. How had these twelve bumbling young men gotten their places here? Family connections? Perhaps the number of chefs serving army units had left the country badly depleted of talent. But wouldn’t the best cooks have first choice to work in the palace?