The Fire and the Fog

by David Alloggia

  Still, despite all complaints and concerns for which pig she was eating, Erris eventually finished breakfast. She found out it was in fact Mallow that had provided the bacon when she delivered the pigs their slops, and it made her sad for a moment to remember the old pig. He had certainly been a model example for a pig, grunting and rolling and eating. Really that’s all he did, but still, she would miss him.

  Erris stopped for a moment after emptying the bucket, wondering to herself as the pigs waddled quickly over to the trough and started eating. She was sure that Joahn or Boll would be given the slop to take out, instead of her. Somewhere during breakfast she had been tricked, somehow. She only had a few seconds to wonder though, as her mother yelling her name from inside the house quickly had her picking up the empty bucket, and dashing towards the house, and more chores.

  The day passed, as days often do, and it eventually ended. Johan being sequestered in the tool shed annoyed Erris, as it meant there was more work for the rest of the family to do. With Omah, Serah and Joahn limited to easier, household specific chores, it meant that Erris had to pull the same load as her brothers. Not that she couldn’t pull the same weight as them, just that it was a slightly more battered and tired Erris that finally slid into a chair at the dinner table that night, just as the sun was hiding itself behind the distant mountains it used as blankets once more.

  Dinner was a relatively simple affair. Several omelets made with the eggs Erris had stolen from the chickens at midday, and cheese and bacon. She always hated having to fetch the eggs. The chickens always hid and protected the eggs, and rarely gave them up without a fight. She had been pecked more times than she liked to admit that afternoon. A link of sausage and bread, washed down with glasses of chilled milk completed the meal, which was more or less standard dinner fare. Erris would have liked something more green, but as she didn’t do the cooking, she didn’t get to make the choices. So she swallowed her complaints and ate, knowing that her mother would do worse than hit her with a wooden spoon if she tried ignoring two meals in a row.

  Dinner and its cleanup lasted an hour, and then left the rest of the evening as free time. Erris’ father, Johan, left immediately for his tool shed, to spend more time with his new project, while her brother Jayke and his wife Yolan retired to their home, built not far from the farm’s main house. They had not been married long, and Erris knew that Yolan was trying her best to get pregnant, whatever that meant. Whatever it involved, no-one had consented to tell her yet, even though she had asked. Twice

  ***

  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 pro
of 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.

  ‘Yes, right, sorry. Erris, milk Ms. Spots’ her father said sighing and massaging his forehead with his right hand. He had learnt decades ago that you don’t try to argue with a ten year old, and Joahn, as the youngest of seven children, was worse than most. She always got what she wanted; her parents were generally too tired to discipline her, up to and including bringing her stuffed bear toy to every meal, and pretending to feed it. Erris still di
dn’t understand how she kept it free from mess. Somehow Joahn always got more food on herself than on her bear.

  With breakfast done, chairs were pushed away from the table, bumping and grinding over the wood floor, and the family went to work. Erris’ mother and sisters stayed to clear the table, while her father and older brothers left in the direction of the tool shed. Her father would pass them out the tools they would need, post-digger, shovels, crowbar, so that Johan the younger wouldn’t be able to see the secret project.

  That left Erris with Boll. Unfortunately. Now thirteen, Boll had at one time been a happy, energetic boy, equally eager to help and to play. Two years ago however, Dom, the second eldest brother, had cut off his ties with the family, and had left to join the priesthood. Apparently the rest of the family hadn’t been devout enough for him, and while Erris was starting to understand the fights between Dom and her father, Boll did not. To Boll, he was missing his big brother; his best friend.

  Erris didn’t remember very much about Dom anymore. It had been years since he’d left, years since anyone in the family but Boll had talked about him, and even longer since she’d last talked to him. She had never been a party to the loud arguments between Dom and her parents, but she remembered hiding her head under her pillow some nights, trying to drown out the yelling.

  What she did remember about Dom was that she hadn’t liked him. He had always ignored his chores, gone off on his own, leaving extra work for the rest of the family. And he had been mean to the animals. Erris could remember him walking through the yard, distracted, kicking angrily at any of the chickens that strayed into his path. Erris didn’t think he meant it, he was just…angry. Violent.