The Fire and the Fog

by David Alloggia

  ‘Nope! You’re stuck with just me today’ Mae answered, inching closer, her grin showing all teeth. She looked almost evil somehow, and definitely scary.

  Gel noticed that he still held her wrist in one hand, and that she had wrapped her other arm around his. She was pressing closely against his shoulder, and he was having trouble breathing. Not because the smell of her was cloying, she smelled wonderful, but because his heart was beating too quickly.

  Anxious, Gel cast around for something, anything, to distract her with.

  ‘I didn’t write you a song today’ he started as he saw his lute sitting beside him and began to reach for it with his free arm. He was going to tell her that he would write her one now, which should gain him some distance, and the use of his other arm, but Mae was too fast for him.

  As he was reaching for his lute, Mae quickly shifted. One second she was sitting on the ground next to him, her arms around his, the next she had plopped herself down in his lap, and had wrapped his arm tightly around her small waist. Gel couldn’t quite understand how she had managed it. She held his arm there in a viselike grip, and Gel had to use the arm that had been reaching for his lute to keep from falling over completely.

  ‘Well, you’ll have to give me something else then, won’t you?’ she said, and he thought he saw her cheeks flush before he looked away. He would not look into her face this close, or he might lose any chance he had to get out of this alive, and with dignity.

  Once more, Gel cast around for something, anything that could save him. But he was distracted. Mae was sitting on him. His arm wrapped around her waist, the smell of her hair, the way her skirts had hiked up again and he could see her pretty legs, this time close enough to reach out and touch. Gel was not thinking straight. And so he said the first thing that came to mind.

  ‘I want to ask you to the festival’ he started, swallowing nervously. Once again, he had more to say. He was going to continue with “but I also want to ask Sheane, and I can’t ask you both, and I don’t know what to do”, but he never got that far. Once again, he wasn’t given the chance.

  With those few words, Mae’s eyes went wide. She let out what Gel could only describe as a squeal of some sort, and she hugged Gel, throwing herself into him. Gel’s supporting arm gave out, and he fell back into the grass, Mae falling with him to lie on top, her arms still wrapped around his neck. Her short, golden hair had fallen around his face in the fall, and it felt and smelled lovely. Mae pressing against him felt lovely as well, but he had to try again.

  ‘But, Mae, listen’ he started, trying to push Mae up and off of him. He did not get far.

  As soon as he started, Mae untangled her arms from around his neck, put them on his shoulders, and pushed. Pinned as he was by her legs laying across him, and her arms on his shoulders, Gel could not help but look into her beautiful blue eyes, now only a few inches from his face. Her short hair was just long enough to fall around his face, and it cut his vision off from everything but her determined gaze.

  ‘No, Gel, no,’ she said, suddenly serious, and staring straight at him, ‘No buts. No listens, no bringing up Sheane. You’re mine now, and I’m not letting go.’ Gel had never seen her so serious, or so beautiful.

  As Gel tried to come up with any sort of protest he could, his mouth opening and closing silently in stunned confusion, Mae shut off any further chance for salvation.

  She leaned forward, pressing herself against him, her eyes closed, and she kissed him. And Gel lost track of everything.

  Protesting that he liked Sheane too, that he couldn’t choose between them. Concentrating on the Duke’s recital the next day. Even complaints about how annoying studying with his tutors was. All these thoughts and more disappeared, and the afternoon did too.

  Several hours later, Mae stood in front of him, quickly straightening her dress and hair, and blushing furiously. Gel still didn’t know what to say as Mae leaned in, quickly brushed his lips with a kiss, and whispered ‘well…bye’ before running off towards the town.

  Gel stood and watched her leave for a while, trying to process an afternoon spent kissing his best friend, a girl he now thought he loved, before picking up his lute case and starting the slow walk home, shaking his head in confusion most of the way.

  When Gel reached the old stone house, he walked slowly up to his room, tossed his lute on the floor, and flopped, spread-eagle, onto his bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to make sense of what had just happened.

  He ignored calls from his mother, trying to get him downstairs for dinner, and instead lay in bed thinking, staring up at the ceiling yet seeing nothing till he fell asleep, and yet he was no closer to an answer than when he had started.

  The Girl

  I

  Erris was excited. She woke up excited, she worked excited, she went to sleep excited. Every day in the past week she had been excited, and she knew nothing would be different in the next two days either. In two days, she would be sixteen.

  Not that it was as important for her as for other girls, or so she’d heard. She wouldn’t be pampered and trained to be a lady like some city girl, pretty and plump and useless. She would continue to work on her fathers’ farm, the way it should be. But she could be married now, if her father ever found her a suitable husband. Or at least she could be in two days. She wondered, sometimes, what that would be like. Cooking and cleaning, helping to run a farm. Someday having children…

  Still, turning sixteen was supposed to be an important day for a girl. She wasn’t quite sure why, but it was, so she was excited.

  She would be sixteen; no longer a child in the eyes of the Church, although she couldn’t yet be called an adult. She would be allowed to commune and confess when her family went to church, but not to vote. They seldom went to church, it was rare to be able to put the time in to go; even more rare to be called in to a vote. A day’s ride away, the nearest church was small, with an even smaller congregation. Well, the nearest Regan church. There were several Rognian churches closer, but they weren’t allowed to those. Rognia was very strict about its churches.

  The border between the two countries was fluid, and both churches worshipped Ragn. Why it mattered which church someone worshipped at though, Erris didn’t know. And her father had been vague the last time she asked, saying something about different hierarchies and different rules. She suspected he didn’t know either.

  Still, while the confession and communion might be nice, there were better rewards for turning sixteen; she had convinced her father to take the family into town, to the tavern, for her birthday supper. Trips into town were rare, and she was sure there would be cute soldier boys there for her to practice blushing over; there almost always were.

  So if Erris woke quickly that morning, excited and ready to hurry through another day, well, at least no-one could blame her.

  Of course, having a birthday soon never meant the chores disappeared. Chores were like time; they were always there, even when you didn’t notice them. So, as the sun rose slowly in the East, as it did every morning, and as roosters rushed to be the first to wake everyone, as they did every morning, Erris rose. She doused her face quickly with water from the washbasin in her room, slipped on her rough-woven wool trousers and tunic and slid barefoot out the window of the room she shared with her sisters, to the dirt below.

  She could have left the room through the door; it was a working door, and more than adequate in size. She could even have gone through the door without waking her sisters; Joahn and Serah were not exactly light sleepers. But then she would have run into her parents and brothers, all likely already at the breakfast table. If she made an appearance in the morning, her mother would try, again, to force her to eat till she burst. Her mother thought her too skinny, but Erris simply didn’t feel like eating ninety-seven helpings of eggs and bread every morning. She wouldn’t eat unless she was hungry, and right then she wasn’t, so why force it.

  So instead of padding lightly across the polished wooden floors of t
he house towards the kitchen to sit on whichever of the eight sturdy wooden chairs happened to be available, Erris’ bare feet hit soft soil, still cold and moist from the morning dew, and she scampered quietly off towards the barn.

  She knew that the chickens would not lay their eggs until around midday, and even then her mother and Serah would collect them, so Erris would instead deal with the rest of the farm’s livestock, before any of her siblings got there. The animals were, after all, the things that Erris loved most about living on the farm.

  She had spent all of her nearly sixteen years on her parents’ farm; only leaving for occasional trips to town on special occasions, and one unfortunately memorable trip to Vhyindar, Rege’s capital city.

  Vhyindar had taught her that cities were horrible places. They reeked of human refuse, garbage, and the stinking masses. They teemed with so many people, milling around like less-intelligent sheep, that Erris truly wondered how any of them got anything done.

  And what exactly did city people do? They had no livestock to care for, no mouths to feed, no crops to grow. Most of them barely even had families, sticking to a paltry one or two children. It seemed as if they were simply flitting aimlessly around all day, pretending they were so busy, so important, that they mattered somehow in the grand scheme of things, but Erris knew better.

  But no, the worst thing about cities, as far as Erris was concerned, was that they had no animals. Oh sure, they might have a few flea-ridden dogs, maybe a horse or two festering away in too-small stables. But they had no real animals. No plough horses, 20 hands tall and muscled everywhere, strong enough to pull huge loads, but nice enough to eat salt from a child’s palm. No sheep, fluffy and loyal, but as shy and skittish as anything. They had no pigs, dirty geniuses that they are, masters of wallowing in mud, and escaping from pens. The list went on.

  And even worse than having no real animals, city people mistreated the ones they did have.

  Of course, Erris’ opinion of cities, and their inhabitants, came solely from the books she would read through voraciously at night, and from her one excursion to Vhindyar when she was ten. But it made no difference. She would never live in the city, and that was the end of it.

  No, she thought to herself as she opened the barn door and began preparing food for Marmot, their young, strong plough horse. She would live on a farm for the rest of her life. Eventually she would be married, and her husband’s family would build her a home, just as her family had done for her brother Jayke, and his wife Yolan. Then she would have a husband and a house, she could start having children and raising a family, and all would be as it should be.

  Until then, she thought as she leaned hard against Marmot’s tall shoulder and distractedly stroked his mane, having already pulled over an armful or two of hay for the horse to slowly mulch contentedly; until then she would just have to occupy herself with chores and books.

  Giving Marmot one last hug, Erris left his pen, swinging the gate tightly shut behind her. As sedate as he was, it could lead to an entire afternoon of chasing if he got out again, and Erris had too many other chores to do. It had been Joahn’s fault the last time he escaped, but Erris had been tasked with getting him back, as usual. Every time Joahn made a mistake, Erris had to fix it. It was patently unfair. Erris had never made so many mistakes when she was young, so why did Joahn? And why was Erris stuck cleaning up after her?

  Still, she had one animal down, and the rest of the farm to feed. Erris would leave the pigs; one of her sisters would likely bring out the leftovers from breakfast and last night’s supper for them when her family finished eating, and the chickens could wait. The chickens probably hadn’t even left their shady coop to parade around the yard yet, and there would be no eggs to collect until midday or so, so Erris headed for the farm’s sedate cow, Ms. Spots.

  The problem with multiple siblings, Erris figured, was that you had to take turns naming new animals. The problem with taking turns was that, eventually, even the youngest got a turn.

  Joahn, Erris’ youngest sister, had her first chance to name one of the farm animals four years ago when they had bought Ms. Spots. Joahn was six at the time, and had chosen, for obvious reasons, to name the milk cow Ms. Spots, though a more ridiculous name, Erris felt, could not have been possible.

  Erris had named Marmot, which she felt was a perfectly appropriate name for a horse. It was not a common horse’s name, like Francis or Henry or Betsy, nor was it too ridiculous for a horse. Her brother Boll had named a piglet Soldier last year, which was just silly and inappropriate Erris thought as she dragged up a stool and placed an empty bucket under the cow’s udders. No, the problem with Ms. Spots’ name was that it was too plain. It lacked flair, finesse, originality. It was almost as bad as calling a horse blackie or brownie, or a calling a dog goldie, or a pig pinkie. Naming animals after their colour was just silly and infantile.

  She knew that Joahn had been young when she named the cow, but just last year, she had named two newborn piglets Ms. Rolly and Mr. Polly, which was also just wrong. No, Erris thought, and not for the first time, she should have been given exclusive naming rights to all the farm’s animals. She would name them well. She would certainly name all her own animals when she had her own farm.

  Erris smiled as she finished milking the unfortunately-named cow. Joahn would grow up eventually, and she would learn to choose more sophisticated, more imaginative, more…appropriate, names, she thought as she picked up the now full bucket in both hands, and walked awkwardly sideways towards the house, the bucket swinging low beside her. Not to mention Joahn wouldn’t get another turn at naming for a decent while; she was last in line now, since the pigs.

  As Erris laboriously climbed the steps up to the house, lugging the basket behind her, and shouldered aside the door into the kitchen, she saw that her family had already finished their breakfast, and that cleanup was well underway.

  Her mother and her older sister Serah stood at the sink, washing the dishes from buckets of water that one of her brothers must have drawn up from the well.

  Serah was Erris’ eldest sister, and at eighteen it was starting to look like she might never marry. It was not that she wasn’t nice; Serah was sweet, gentle, and a fantastic cook, second only to her mother, but an accident at birth had left her with a mangled left leg. She could still walk, but only with great difficulty and pain, and it made it much more difficult for her father to find her a husband.

  Erris always felt a pang of sadness when she saw her sister. She always wished there was some way she could have helped, even though she knew there wasn’t. She had even had her father trade for several basic medical texts for her to read, in hopes she could find some miracle cure, but there had been nothing in them to help her sister.

  Still, through it all, through the pain and the knowledge that she would likely end a spinster, Serah smiled. She was a saint, Erris knew, if only some man could look past her leg. Someday that might happen, Erris hoped and prayed, but it couldn’t happen soon enough. Erris knew that Ragn must have had a reason to cripple her sister, as Ragn had a reason for all He did, she just couldn’t fathom it.

  Distracted by thoughts of Serah, Erris failed to notice her mother. Short and wide, with a white apron wrapped around her waste, she headed straight towards Erris, a wooden spoon still covered in soap suds in one hand, and a scowl on her face.

  ‘You!’ her mother said, pointing the wooden spoon only inches away from Erris’ nose and flinging soap suds in her face, causing her to flinch her eyes closed momentarily in surprise.

  ‘So nice of you to show up for breakfast. Now march.’ Her mother said officiously, pointing towards the table with her free hand.

  Erris saw to her dismay that a place had been left for her at the table, with a plate piled high with eggs, bacon and bread. She had lost track daydreaming during her chores; had forgotten why she had snuck out the back of the house in the first place. Resigned to her fate, Erris only got two steps towards the table when she felt her mother
rap her hard on her rear with the spoon.

  ‘Moooom, that hurts’ Erris whined as she turned around, her hands reaching back to cover herself from the assault, intending to glare at her mother.

  All it took for Omah to stop her daughter in her tracks was a single raised eyebrow though, the kind of eyebrow that says “Try it, I dare you”. Omah was a master of the eyebrow. She had been using it on her children for twenty years, just as her mother had used it against her. Erris couldn’t raise her eyebrow yet, even though she had practiced in a mirror for hours.

  Unfortunately for Erris, there was no fighting the eyebrow, or her mother. Giving up, she slouched unhappily to the table where she sat, poking at her breakfast in front of her, wondering which of the pigs had provided the bacon that sat, still glistening, in front of her. She always felt bad eating meat, because it inevitably came from one of the farm’s animals. She figured it was probably Mallow. He was the oldest pig on the farm at the time. She really hoped it wasn’t; she always felt worse eating one of the animals she had named.

  In retrospect, Erris decided as she glumly dunked a slice of bread into one of the eggs light yellow domes, causing it to shatter and break and spill its admittedly delicious golden insides, maybe the day wasn’t going to be nearly as exciting as she had thought it would be. Not that breakfast was the end of her day by any means. There was a whole day’s work for everyone on the farm, from cleaning and cooking, to caring for the animals and repairing tools, to preparing for next months harvest. Nothing but a fever that had you bed-ridden ever got you out of chores. Erris had tried.

  Her father Johan had sequestered himself in the tool shed with some new contraption he had bought, one that supposedly promised to not only reduce the work and time required for the harvest, but also to increase the harvests yield. So far no-one had seen it but her father and Jayke, and both were being silent and secretive about the whole project, which was slowly annoying Erris. She wanted to know. She had to know. There was a secret out there in the tool shed, and she couldn’t find out what it was. The ignominy of it was galling, almost painful.