HOME | DD

Description
--43--

Nathaniel groaned, ran his hand over his face, and rolled over to get out of bed. A thud and a curse from the room below brought him up short as he groped in the dark for the ladder.

"Behn?"

A wooden bench toppled sideways and one of the heavy tables shuddered across the floor.
"Sleep, Nat," Behn muttered from the bunk across the room.

But Nathaniel had already jumped to the floor, sending a shiver through the frame of the wooden bunk house, and a stifled yelp pulled him out the door and down the stairs before he could consider the possible consequences of breaking curfew.

Two people wrestled in the small clear space between the kitchen and the tables, which were misaligned for the first time since Nathaniel's arrival. The larger of the two figures had one hand twisted over his shoulder, his fingers caught in the second's ample mane of dark hair. The shorter had one arm around the other's neck and another under his arm, reaching for something that the first held close and tight like a sack of gold. Nathaniel hesitated, unsure who he ought to help, and in that moment the shorter person hooked their foot around the other's leg. He teetered backwards, the smaller one stumbled, and both of them toppled sideways over the bench they had knocked out of place. They crashed to the floor and sent the house shuddering again. The larger landed on top of the smaller, yanked forward the hand that held the hair, and elbowed the smaller in the face.

A wave of rage washed through Nathaniel's blood, and he let it carry his body into action. He leapt forward and grabbed the larger man's tunic, dragging him off the smaller person, then drew his arm back and swung forward as he knelt, throwing his full force into a single punch. His hand exploded with pain, but fortunately, his one blow was enough. The man went limp and his fingers released the object he had held so close. It rolled over just once before it stopped, and by the light of the coals in the kitchen fire, Nathanial saw what it was at last: a fist-sized ball of smoked traveler's ham.

"Thank you," the smaller person gasped.

"You're...welcome." Nat tore his bewildered gaze from the lump of meat to see who he had saved.

He noticed first the thin frame, then the slightly curved body. Amazed, he watched as the woman raked her tangled hair out of her face, then had to bite his lip to keep from gasping. The skin of her face was as pockmarked and pitted as the flesh of the corpse he had seen, though he could tell even by the dull glow of the fire that the wounds were old and healed.

She pushed herself into a sitting position and gently prodded her face to check the damage. Her fingers brushed the skin below her eye and she winched, which turned the circular pits nearby into ovals until she took a deep breath and relaxed.

"Did he break it?"

"What?"

"Did he break the skin?"

Nathaniel picked up the ham and turned it over in his hands. "No."

"Good." She sighed as she held out her hand and Nathaniel handed over the lump of meat. "Torvald's coming for inventory today."

"Torvald?"

She cocked an eyebrow and closed a few pockmarks. "How can you be here and not know Torvald?"

The name and face finally clicked. "That yellow-haired man."

"The overseer," she amended.

Knowing the name brought a kind of finality to Nathaniel's situation. He was no longer the uninformed idiot he had been just a few days before. Whether he liked it or not, wanted it or not, he belonged to the mill, as much a part of it as the barn or the bunks--a dovetail squeezed into a finger joint where it did not belong. He had not felt so burdened even when Avelina blamed him for pushing the Prince into the stream.

"You're the new one, aren't you?" the woman asked. Nathaniel nodded. "Is your name really Gnat?" He looked up at her, a twisted, sad smile on his face, and she nodded in open, honest sympathy. "I guessed as much." Her bitter smile would have matched his if her features had been properly intact. "I'm Jean, but he calls me John. Says that since I'm the only woman around here I might as well be a man."

Nathaniel was not sure how to respond to this.

Jean raised her eyebrows expectantly. "So...?"

"Nathaniel."

"Nathaniel..." She nodded. "Good name."

"Well..." He was not sure what he ought to say to this, so he settled with the simplest answer he could. "Thanks."

She smiled. "You've already stopped talking, haven't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Four syllables--that's better."

"But what do you mean about stopping talking?"

Jean shrugged. "Just happens. Even I do it a bit. The men who come here go silent, answer questions quick and quiet as they can, and try not to speak out. It's fear of Torvald that does it in the barn and the bunk house," she explained. "But out in the Forest it's because the silence eats up every word, and no one hears it and no one listens, so why bother talking at all?"

Nathaniel thought this over, realized it made sense and shed some much-needed light on why the men would not speak in the woods, and was immediately amazed that someone else would take the time to think through something as useless as that.

"How long have you been here?" he asked.

Jean shrugged again. "You don't count after a while."

Nathaniel bowed his head. "I've lost track already."

She reached forward to pat him on the shoulder, but Nathaniel jerked away from her touch without thinking.

She shook her head. "And you do that already, too!"

"Do what? Move away?"

Another nod. "That's also Torvald's doing."

"You blame everything on Torvald?"

"Only because it's all Torvald's fault. Torvald is the mill. The mill is Torvald. I don't know what would happen if it was anyone else out here."

The thought of Torvald made Nathaniel think of his hard bunk, where he was supposed to be from dinner to the predawn shift, but he could not bring himself to leave Jean. He had finally found a source of information that was willing to share. Just how much, he was determined to find out.
"Here, we need to get him back upstairs." Jean stood up, tossed her hair over her shoulder with a flick of her head, pulled it together at her neck, and literally tied it in a knot. "You take his legs."

Nathaniel obeyed, as he had already learned to do, without question, though he knew that she was lifting far more than most women her size ever could. As they headed towards the stairs, Jean kicked the bench out of the way, and the noise made Nathaniel wince.

"Won't Torvald hear?"

"He sleeps out by the barn, so the men can't steal the axes," she explained.

There was another of his questions, addressed--if not answered--at last:  Why didn't the men revolt against Torvald? Nathaniel had seen that he carried the only double-bladed axe in the mill in a loop of his belt, but that did not explain why men who far outnumbered their overseer and had access to almost ten different axes apiece did not demand a change.

No one moved in the dark room as Nathaniel and Jean stowed the man back in his second-level bunk, and it was so quiet that Nathaniel guessed that the men were all awake and holding their breaths. As he pushed the man's dangling boot into place beside the other in the bunk, Nathaniel wondered what he and Jean would have done if he had slept at the top.

"There," Jean whispered as she closed the door behind her. "That's him taken care of...though now I have to clean up the mess he made of the store house," she grumbled.

Some impulse made Nathaniel blurt, "Let me help you."

Jean was quiet for a moment. "You'll be tired for work," she warned.

"I really don't care."

She smiled and led the way back downstairs, toward the door. He hesitated when it was his turn to step outside, but not long enough for Jean to notice.

For some reason, it felt strange to put his hand on her shoulder, though he had long since gotten past that feeling among the men. If she knew he was uncomfortable, she ignored it as she led him, with no light and in total darkness, down the street that Nathaniel had seen when he arrived.

"So...what is this place?"

"I knew you weren't helping me out of the goodness of your soul."  There was a smile in her voice, so he knew she was teasing, and he appreciated it as much as he had hated the Princess's cruel prods. "It started as a normal settlement, a group of woodsmen led by a lesser noble who wanted to harvest wood more efficiently. But the darkness and quiet were unbearable, so the woodsmen and their families gave up before the year was out and left the noble and his family on his own. Well, the noble didn't like the lack of workers, so he marched all the way up to the Fortress while the King was there and presented his plans and his predicament. And of course the King liked the idea of cheap wood to help Tollan grow, so he started sending some of his prisoners into the woods, and even provided some supplies. The mill's done so well ever since that the King granted the noble Lordship over his lands."

"Torvald is a Lord?"

"So much for subtlety in my storytelling!" Jean said with another smile. "But yes, Torvald is, technically, a Lord, though he obviously doesn't live like one."

"You said Torvald had a family?"

"Yes." She did not elaborate.

He tried to tease her back to get her talking again. "Did the Forest silence suddenly get to you?"

"It's a rather delicate subject, and we're here anyway."

She pushed open a door in front of her and if she had not ducked to enter, Nathaniel probably would have walked right into the low lintel.

The room glared with light compared to the darkness outside, but the only sources Nathaniel could see were the low fire and a candle on the table (two others lay in pools of wax on their sides, extinguished when they fell). The building was low and long, with dozens of supports holding up the loft, and from the poor construction, Nathaniel guessed that this had been one of the first buildings erected in the clearing beneath the tree. The supports did serve some purpose now that the cabin was a storehouse: they acted as a rough grid, between which stood bundles of unused blankets, stacks of stone sharpening wheels, barrels of ale, racks of pristine metal cups and utensils, bolts of sturdy cloth, and more that Nathaniel could not see behind these.

"Why don't we use any of this?"

"Because Torvald says we can't," was Jean's simple reply. "Here, I'll show you what needs to be done."

With a carved wooden replica of the grid in hand, Jean led the way through the aisles of supplies to the mess that the man had made. Dozens of hams lay scattered among spilled black beans from a smashed barrel.

"I guess it's not that bad," Jean muttered, sounding embarrassed.

"Of course it's bad," said Nathaniel, hoping to make her feel better, and it seemed to work because soon they were both on their hands and knees chasing hams.

"Just pile them in front of the crates for now and I'll fix the box later."

Nathaniel glanced at the broken box, saw the cracked dovetails and smiled with a carpenter's understanding of the extra effort put into such a mundane item. "I can fix that."

"Yeah, so can I. Just take a hammer and--"

"No! I mean..." It was his turn to be embarrassed. "I can fix that so it will look like it never happened."

Jean blinked in surprise. "You a cooper?"

"No, a carpenter."

Her broad smile relieved so much of the tension that Nathaniel's gloomy existence had built up that he immediately wanted her to smile again. He had not realized that he was so starved for company.

"All right, go at it."

What looked like a long, difficult process of cutting and filing turned out to be simpler than Nathaniel could have expected. The man had thrown the box's lid to one side, so all Nathaniel had to do was pull it apart at the dovetails, trim the boards with one of the hoarded saws to fit the cuts on the sides, and use the trimmed pieces to fill any extra openings. He finished with enough time to move the pile of hams into the box while Jean swept the beans up into a bucket. When she was finished, she looked from the bucket to the smashed barrel and back and sighed.

"You sure you're not a cooper, too?"

Nathaniel smiled sadly and shook his head. "Sorry."

"You should be. Showing up at the mill of your own free will, breaking curfew to break up a fight, coming all the way down here to clean up someone else's mess, turning out to be a carpenter, and now you've failed in the one place I needed you." Her wide grin almost erased the pockmarks from her cheeks. "How dare you fail to be perfect!"

Nathaniel laughed for the first time in a long time. "Perfect! That's high praise coming from a woman!"

The grin vanished and a shadow of worry veiled her eyes.

"Oh no!" Nathaniel said quickly. "I only meant--"

She shook her head. "I know what you meant, Nathaniel. It's just..." She strained to smile. "Torvald and everyone have treated me the same and called me John so long...  It's almost like I forgot I was different."

"Except for the talking?"

The real smile returned to her eyes, even if it did not extend to her heart. "Yes, except for the talking."

They sat there in silence for a full minute before Jean spoke.

"You'd better go now. You're going to have a hard day from losing this much sleep as it is."

She was right, of course.

Description
--43--

Nathaniel groaned, ran his hand over his face, and rolled over to get out of bed. A thud and a curse from the room below brought him up short as he groped in the dark for the ladder.

"Behn?"

A wooden bench toppled sideways and one of the heavy tables shuddered across the floor.
"Sleep, Nat," Behn muttered from the bunk across the room.

But Nathaniel had already jumped to the floor, sending a shiver through the frame of the wooden bunk house, and a stifled yelp pulled him out the door and down the stairs before he could consider the possible consequences of breaking curfew.

Two people wrestled in the small clear space between the kitchen and the tables, which were misaligned for the first time since Nathaniel's arrival. The larger of the two figures had one hand twisted over his shoulder, his fingers caught in the second's ample mane of dark hair. The shorter had one arm around the other's neck and another under his arm, reaching for something that the first held close and tight like a sack of gold. Nathaniel hesitated, unsure who he ought to help, and in that moment the shorter person hooked their foot around the other's leg. He teetered backwards, the smaller one stumbled, and both of them toppled sideways over the bench they had knocked out of place. They crashed to the floor and sent the house shuddering again. The larger landed on top of the smaller, yanked forward the hand that held the hair, and elbowed the smaller in the face.

A wave of rage washed through Nathaniel's blood, and he let it carry his body into action. He leapt forward and grabbed the larger man's tunic, dragging him off the smaller person, then drew his arm back and swung forward as he knelt, throwing his full force into a single punch. His hand exploded with pain, but fortunately, his one blow was enough. The man went limp and his fingers released the object he had held so close. It rolled over just once before it stopped, and by the light of the coals in the kitchen fire, Nathanial saw what it was at last: a fist-sized ball of smoked traveler's ham.

"Thank you," the smaller person gasped.

"You're...welcome." Nat tore his bewildered gaze from the lump of meat to see who he had saved.

He noticed first the thin frame, then the slightly curved body. Amazed, he watched as the woman raked her tangled hair out of her face, then had to bite his lip to keep from gasping. The skin of her face was as pockmarked and pitted as the flesh of the corpse he had seen, though he could tell even by the dull glow of the fire that the wounds were old and healed.

She pushed herself into a sitting position and gently prodded her face to check the damage. Her fingers brushed the skin below her eye and she winched, which turned the circular pits nearby into ovals until she took a deep breath and relaxed.

"Did he break it?"

"What?"

"Did he break the skin?"

Nathaniel picked up the ham and turned it over in his hands. "No."

"Good." She sighed as she held out her hand and Nathaniel handed over the lump of meat. "Torvald's coming for inventory today."

"Torvald?"

She cocked an eyebrow and closed a few pockmarks. "How can you be here and not know Torvald?"

The name and face finally clicked. "That yellow-haired man."

"The overseer," she amended.

Knowing the name brought a kind of finality to Nathaniel's situation. He was no longer the uninformed idiot he had been just a few days before. Whether he liked it or not, wanted it or not, he belonged to the mill, as much a part of it as the barn or the bunks--a dovetail squeezed into a finger joint where it did not belong. He had not felt so burdened even when Avelina blamed him for pushing the Prince into the stream.

"You're the new one, aren't you?" the woman asked. Nathaniel nodded. "Is your name really Gnat?" He looked up at her, a twisted, sad smile on his face, and she nodded in open, honest sympathy. "I guessed as much." Her bitter smile would have matched his if her features had been properly intact. "I'm Jean, but he calls me John. Says that since I'm the only woman around here I might as well be a man."

Nathaniel was not sure how to respond to this.

Jean raised her eyebrows expectantly. "So...?"

"Nathaniel."

"Nathaniel..." She nodded. "Good name."

"Well..." He was not sure what he ought to say to this, so he settled with the simplest answer he could. "Thanks."

She smiled. "You've already stopped talking, haven't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Four syllables--that's better."

"But what do you mean about stopping talking?"

Jean shrugged. "Just happens. Even I do it a bit. The men who come here go silent, answer questions quick and quiet as they can, and try not to speak out. It's fear of Torvald that does it in the barn and the bunk house," she explained. "But out in the Forest it's because the silence eats up every word, and no one hears it and no one listens, so why bother talking at all?"

Nathaniel thought this over, realized it made sense and shed some much-needed light on why the men would not speak in the woods, and was immediately amazed that someone else would take the time to think through something as useless as that.

"How long have you been here?" he asked.

Jean shrugged again. "You don't count after a while."

Nathaniel bowed his head. "I've lost track already."

She reached forward to pat him on the shoulder, but Nathaniel jerked away from her touch without thinking.

She shook her head. "And you do that already, too!"

"Do what? Move away?"

Another nod. "That's also Torvald's doing."

"You blame everything on Torvald?"

"Only because it's all Torvald's fault. Torvald is the mill. The mill is Torvald. I don't know what would happen if it was anyone else out here."

The thought of Torvald made Nathaniel think of his hard bunk, where he was supposed to be from dinner to the predawn shift, but he could not bring himself to leave Jean. He had finally found a source of information that was willing to share. Just how much, he was determined to find out.
"Here, we need to get him back upstairs." Jean stood up, tossed her hair over her shoulder with a flick of her head, pulled it together at her neck, and literally tied it in a knot. "You take his legs."

Nathaniel obeyed, as he had already learned to do, without question, though he knew that she was lifting far more than most women her size ever could. As they headed towards the stairs, Jean kicked the bench out of the way, and the noise made Nathaniel wince.

"Won't Torvald hear?"

"He sleeps out by the barn, so the men can't steal the axes," she explained.

There was another of his questions, addressed--if not answered--at last:  Why didn't the men revolt against Torvald? Nathaniel had seen that he carried the only double-bladed axe in the mill in a loop of his belt, but that did not explain why men who far outnumbered their overseer and had access to almost ten different axes apiece did not demand a change.

No one moved in the dark room as Nathaniel and Jean stowed the man back in his second-level bunk, and it was so quiet that Nathaniel guessed that the men were all awake and holding their breaths. As he pushed the man's dangling boot into place beside the other in the bunk, Nathaniel wondered what he and Jean would have done if he had slept at the top.

"There," Jean whispered as she closed the door behind her. "That's him taken care of...though now I have to clean up the mess he made of the store house," she grumbled.

Some impulse made Nathaniel blurt, "Let me help you."

Jean was quiet for a moment. "You'll be tired for work," she warned.

"I really don't care."

She smiled and led the way back downstairs, toward the door. He hesitated when it was his turn to step outside, but not long enough for Jean to notice.

For some reason, it felt strange to put his hand on her shoulder, though he had long since gotten past that feeling among the men. If she knew he was uncomfortable, she ignored it as she led him, with no light and in total darkness, down the street that Nathaniel had seen when he arrived.

"So...what is this place?"

"I knew you weren't helping me out of the goodness of your soul."  There was a smile in her voice, so he knew she was teasing, and he appreciated it as much as he had hated the Princess's cruel prods. "It started as a normal settlement, a group of woodsmen led by a lesser noble who wanted to harvest wood more efficiently. But the darkness and quiet were unbearable, so the woodsmen and their families gave up before the year was out and left the noble and his family on his own. Well, the noble didn't like the lack of workers, so he marched all the way up to the Fortress while the King was there and presented his plans and his predicament. And of course the King liked the idea of cheap wood to help Tollan grow, so he started sending some of his prisoners into the woods, and even provided some supplies. The mill's done so well ever since that the King granted the noble Lordship over his lands."

"Torvald is a Lord?"

"So much for subtlety in my storytelling!" Jean said with another smile. "But yes, Torvald is, technically, a Lord, though he obviously doesn't live like one."

"You said Torvald had a family?"

"Yes." She did not elaborate.

He tried to tease her back to get her talking again. "Did the Forest silence suddenly get to you?"

"It's a rather delicate subject, and we're here anyway."

She pushed open a door in front of her and if she had not ducked to enter, Nathaniel probably would have walked right into the low lintel.

The room glared with light compared to the darkness outside, but the only sources Nathaniel could see were the low fire and a candle on the table (two others lay in pools of wax on their sides, extinguished when they fell). The building was low and long, with dozens of supports holding up the loft, and from the poor construction, Nathaniel guessed that this had been one of the first buildings erected in the clearing beneath the tree. The supports did serve some purpose now that the cabin was a storehouse: they acted as a rough grid, between which stood bundles of unused blankets, stacks of stone sharpening wheels, barrels of ale, racks of pristine metal cups and utensils, bolts of sturdy cloth, and more that Nathaniel could not see behind these.

"Why don't we use any of this?"

"Because Torvald says we can't," was Jean's simple reply. "Here, I'll show you what needs to be done."

With a carved wooden replica of the grid in hand, Jean led the way through the aisles of supplies to the mess that the man had made. Dozens of hams lay scattered among spilled black beans from a smashed barrel.

"I guess it's not that bad," Jean muttered, sounding embarrassed.

"Of course it's bad," said Nathaniel, hoping to make her feel better, and it seemed to work because soon they were both on their hands and knees chasing hams.

"Just pile them in front of the crates for now and I'll fix the box later."

Nathaniel glanced at the broken box, saw the cracked dovetails and smiled with a carpenter's understanding of the extra effort put into such a mundane item. "I can fix that."

"Yeah, so can I. Just take a hammer and--"

"No! I mean..." It was his turn to be embarrassed. "I can fix that so it will look like it never happened."

Jean blinked in surprise. "You a cooper?"

"No, a carpenter."

Her broad smile relieved so much of the tension that Nathaniel's gloomy existence had built up that he immediately wanted her to smile again. He had not realized that he was so starved for company.

"All right, go at it."

What looked like a long, difficult process of cutting and filing turned out to be simpler than Nathaniel could have expected. The man had thrown the box's lid to one side, so all Nathaniel had to do was pull it apart at the dovetails, trim the boards with one of the hoarded saws to fit the cuts on the sides, and use the trimmed pieces to fill any extra openings. He finished with enough time to move the pile of hams into the box while Jean swept the beans up into a bucket. When she was finished, she looked from the bucket to the smashed barrel and back and sighed.

"You sure you're not a cooper, too?"

Nathaniel smiled sadly and shook his head. "Sorry."

"You should be. Showing up at the mill of your own free will, breaking curfew to break up a fight, coming all the way down here to clean up someone else's mess, turning out to be a carpenter, and now you've failed in the one place I needed you." Her wide grin almost erased the pockmarks from her cheeks. "How dare you fail to be perfect!"

Nathaniel laughed for the first time in a long time. "Perfect! That's high praise coming from a woman!"

The grin vanished and a shadow of worry veiled her eyes.

"Oh no!" Nathaniel said quickly. "I only meant--"

She shook her head. "I know what you meant, Nathaniel. It's just..." She strained to smile. "Torvald and everyone have treated me the same and called me John so long...  It's almost like I forgot I was different."

"Except for the talking?"

The real smile returned to her eyes, even if it did not extend to her heart. "Yes, except for the talking."

They sat there in silence for a full minute before Jean spoke.

"You'd better go now. You're going to have a hard day from losing this much sleep as it is."

She was right, of course.