The Fire and the Fog

by David Alloggia

  It was sad really. Boll had followed Dom everywhere, pretending to be a soldier with him. Back then, Boll had been happy, as young boys should be, unaware that Dom was, well, bad. But now, he was angry all the time, and would start fights at the drop of a hat.

  Erris wondered sometimes what had happened to Dom. He had left to join the church, that she knew, but she couldn’t imagine him as an Alde, running a congregation and delivering Ragn’s word to the people. He had probably become a Hunar or a Legnar; a soldier of the church, fighting to expand Rognia, and Ragn’s, influence over Dohm.

  Still, she and Boll had a job to do, and the work was heavy enough that it didn’t leave much time for talking. Not that she and Boll ever had much to talk about anyway. He wanted to run off and become a soldier, or a priest, just because Dom had. When he did talk, he would talk about Dom only, and Erris had never liked Dom. He had burned one of her books once, saying it was heresy. He had been given a good beating by her father as punishment, and her mother gave him burnt food for a week, but still. That book was gone, Erris would never get to read it again. Erris knew everything it said of course, but still. The book itself was gone, and that was just sad.

  Erris was sweating profusely by the time they rolled the hay bale into the barn; clammy, sweating, and smelling of manure by the time they mucked out the stalls in the barn, and just plain tired when she finished milking Ms. Spots. Her mother and sisters were in the garden when she got to the house, lugging the full pail of milk, so she left it on the floor of the kitchen and quickly threw water on her face before heading back out into the sun. If her mother and sisters were in the garden, they wouldn’t need help, so she would have to go off to help her other brothers while Boll chopped firewood.

  The earlier work hadn’t been as bad. When she and Boll were bringing in the hay, the sun was still low in the sky, and while mucking the barn and milking the cow she had been in the shade. The walk to the fence was short, but the day was starting to warm. It was with some apprehension that she joined her brothers, both shirtless and sweaty under the midday sun, to help remove another post.

  ‘Is it hard?’ she asked as she reached the two boys, who were both leaning on their shovels and breathing heavily. She pulled off her tunic, leaving on her loose fitting undershirt. She was going to boil; they all were, but at least years of work in the sun had made her almost immune to sunburns. Her skin was tanned, her hands calloused, her nails short and cracked, and her hair short and unkempt, but she didn’t care. There was no-one around the farm to think her pretty, so why try when you were only going to get dirtier the next day?

  ‘Oh, you’re going to love this, E,’ Jayke said, grinning at her. ‘Grab the crowbar and come help us pry this post out.’

  It took the three of them a good half hour to lever, heave, and pull the old wooden post out of the ground, and then another half hour to widen the hole enough to fit in a new, freshly cut post, and fill in the soil around it.

  Joahn was sent to them several times, with water and glasses to keep from dehydrating, but by the time the three got the last rotten post out, and the last new post in, a good five and a half hours had past. All three were dirty, tired, and hungry.

  ‘Right! That’s it. We’re done here for today’ Jayke said, as all three collapsed on the soil around the last post, panting heavily and wiping the sweat from their brows. ‘You two head back to the house. I’ll take the tools back to Father, and let him know we’re done here. Check on Boll, see if he’s finished.’ Jayke, true to his word, stood and began collecting the tools that lay scattered around the freshly churned dirt. The job was not done, but it would probably take them another three days to fix the rest of the fence, and it was getting late.

  With their brother up and moving, Erris and Johan had no choice but to get up and move as well, even though their muscles ached and protested vehemently. They went to check on Boll first, but the only sign that he had been chopping logs were a number of messily stacked rows of firewood. Someday Boll would do a good job at one of his chores, and Erris thought she might throw a party. Content that he was already at the house, even if he hadn’t worked well, the two slowly ached their way back home.

  ***

  ‘I’

  ‘Hate’

  ‘Fences’

  Johan cursed, panting as they approached the front steps, and Erris could only nod in accord as they climbed to the door, and walked in.

  Inside, everyone was too exhausted for a lively meal. A day of double work had taken its toll on the whole family. Only Erris’ father had a smile on his face.

  ‘It’s ready’ he said, wiping the head from his upper lip as he drank from a mug of his dark, homemade ale. Erris couldn’t stand the stuff, ale. She had tried some several weeks ago, but the bitter taste threw her off. Still, as much as her father and brothers enjoyed it, it was probably the reason her father was growing a belly, so she was glad she didn’t like it. She didn’t want to be fat.

  ‘Day after tomorrow, when we get back from town, I’ll show it to everyone.’ Her father finished with a grin.

  Even the announcement that Johans secret project, the tool that he had been working on for weeks, was done couldn’t energize the exhausted group, and the family almost as a whole went to bed early that night. Erris birthday was the next day, and they would all need rest for the morning chores, and then the ride to Oortain’s Copse.

  Erris thought fondly of Oortain’s Copse as she and her sisters readied themselves for bed. Her sisters were talking in low whispers, excited for the trip, but Erris stayed silent. The rest of the family liked the Copse for the shops, or the inn, or whatever else. Erris though, liked the Copse for an entirely different reason.

  Settling herself into bed, Erris read briefly from her book on legends before putting out her small bedside lamp, and this time, rather than sea monsters, she found herself dreaming of a tall, black-cloaked man, who brought justice to the lands with lightning called from his fingertips, and wielded a flaming sword to do away with wrongdoers.

  He was righteous of course, he protected the weak and punished the evil, and he cared so much for the little people. And most of all, he could do magic.

  He was a prince of course, with a large black stallion, and she rode with him, her arms clenched across his chest and her face buried in his strong, muscular shoulders as her hair whipped behind her, and the horse beneath them moved and stretched like something not of this world, flying swifter than the wind. It rode into the sky, and then flew from cloud to wispy cloud, its hooves barely stirring the soft white clouds as they galloped across the heavens, gazing at the infinite expanse of stars above them.

  It was a good dream.

  III

  When Erris woke the next morning, she was sixteen. She opened her eyes and lay staring at the ceiling, watching as dust motes danced and twirled slowly through the shafts of morning light that shone through the window. The sunlight cut sharply through the darkness of the room, and she found herself wondering why it really mattered.

  A birthday was just a number, after all; an arbitrary means of measuring a person’s age and maturity without taking into any consideration the person themselves. Nothing concrete was gained on a birthday. No life altering lessons were imparted when you woke, magically one year older. There was no swift increase in height or chest size or intelligence. A birthday was simply a number, a number that realistically meant nothing, yet technically meant everything.

  She knew from her books that some people never really grew up, never matured, but they were considered adults because they were older. Why were they allowed to make decisions and vote, and she wasn’t? She was certainly smart. She had read more books than almost everyone she knew, and weren’t books the source of knowledge?

  As she lay motionless in bed, basking in the warmth of the sun, and the day, Erris knew her logic was sound. A birthday was not really an important or meaningful occasion. She wondered, then, why she found herself so excited.

  Still
, she thought as she closed her eyes against the bright morning light, thinking about the uselessness of birthdays wouldn’t help her at all. What with the trip to the village later in the day, chores for the morning would be reduced, and mostly done by her brothers and sisters, so maybe if she just went back to sleep no-one would notice. It was her birthday after all. Birthdays might not mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but if she was allowed to stay abed, they might not be as silly and useless as she thought. Erris smiled as she rolled over, curling around and hugging her warm covers to her chest. She was a butterfly, wrapped in a cocoon of warmth and serenity.

  Unfortunately, the extravagance of having a few more hours of sleep never manifested itself. No sooner had Erris rolled over and snuggled herself comfortably into her blankets than she was hit in the back with a flurried tangle of arms and legs.

  ‘Erris! Erris! You’re ooooooold!’

  Joahn dragged out the syllables of that last word, using a piercing pitch that should have been impossible for human vocal chords to reach, to further draw out the pain of being called old. As bad as being called old was, being denied sleep was worse. Erris shrugged and struggled as her youngest sister, now six years younger but still strong and agile, tried to wrap her arms and legs around Erris in her covers in a perverse, unwanted sort of bear-hug.

  As Erris tried to free an arm to swat at the troublesome rodent clinging rat-like to her back, she heard a noise in front of her face that made her snap her eyes open immediately, already glaring at the visage in front of her.

  ‘Erris! Erris! You’re oooold!’ Serah whispered, her round face taking up all of Erris vision while she grinned ferociously and drew out old as mockingly as humanly possible before she too jumped onto Erris bed in a slow tackle.

  ‘Nooooo lemme sleep’ Erris tried to mumble, but she knew when she was defeated. Still trapped in her blankets, with a sister hugging her on either side, she gave up. Uttering a final, muffled noise of complaint as she tucked her head into her covers, Erris cocooned and lay still. She regretted the loss of extra sleep, but, after a minute or so of warm hug from her sisters, decided that maybe birthdays weren’t so bad after all.

  ***

  Time passed; hours filled with waking, food, chores. Hours filled with a mounting excitement. The hours passed, and finally Erris’ family was on the road. The morning chores had been finished quickly; the animals were milked, fed, and ensconced safely in their pens while Johan senior hitched Marmot to the wagon. For the two hours since then Erris, her mother and father and brothers and sisters, had all been either been walking alongside or riding on the wagon, while fields of golden wheat passed slowly by on either side.

  Erris had started out on top of the wagon, in part to read the new historical text she had been given by her father for her birthday, in part to keep her nice summer dress as clean from the dirt and dust of the road as possible. It was a pretty dress after all, white and hemmed with nice blue needlework. It came down just past her knees, which left her feeling much more free than her regular work trousers, but the neckline wasn’t low enough for it to seem risqué.

  Time had worn on that morning though, and concerns for her dress had lost the battle to the jostle and bounce of the wagon, the noise of her siblings, and the dryness of her new book. The wagon jumped with every dip and rise in the road, and the crates of salted pork and sacks of flour jumped with it. Joahn and Boll argued constantly, ignoring any ultimatums delivered from her parents. And her new book, a historical text with an intricate, blow by blow accounting of the political strife and turmoil between Dheme and Dhome over the past century, was dry. So it was that noon found Erris walking alongside Marmot, kicking lazily at passing clumps of dirt with her heavy leather shoes, unconcerned about the fine brown dust that was slowly settling onto the bottom of her dress.

  Not that the story of Dheme and Dhome wasn’t interesting. Two democracies at the very eastern edge of the continent sharing everything, from religion to currency to their capital city, yet hating each other, was just strange. It was also confusing. Erris didn’t understand why they had chosen names so close to Dohm, the name of the continent, or why they had named the two halves of the capital city they shared after each other. The capital city was split by a river, and Dheme's half was named Dhome, and Dhome's half was named Dheme. There was even an island in between the two cities, and it housed both the countries governments. At the same time. They even shared the same legislature, each country getting half of the chamber. It was just madness, and it sounded incredibly confusing. Confusing and interesting. Erris decided she needed to concentrate on reading it.

  Her family had broken off into little groups a while ago. Joahn was bothering Boll with little girls’ games in the back of the wagon, Boll trying his best to ignore her and failing, while Omah, Yolan and Serah sat, heads together on the wagons front seat, whispering in hushed tones. Erris was sure she heard occasional giggles coming from her older sisters, but couldn’t concern herself to join them, even if there had been room on the front of the wagon. Her father, Jayke and Johan were walking ahead of the wagon, her father laughing loudly and frequently with an arm draped over Jayke's shoulder.

  This left Erris alone with Marmot, to walk and think. Her father had given her the history text for her birthday, and she knew she would enjoy it when she had more time to spend prowling its hard-bound depths, hopefully surrounded by fewer distractions, but the text had brought several questions to mind. She still had a present to ask for from her mother, and from her brothers and sisters. Normally, as in years past, she would have asked for even more books, and she would have enjoyed whatever they found for her, but she was starting to question.

  She loved almost everything she read, whether it was the religious sermons of Ragn's text or fairy tales or educational texts or philosophical musings, it didn’t matter. But most of her collection of books did not warrant repeated reading. She would absorb a book in a half-day or so, and she would remember it. This left her only the most interesting, or the most difficult, books to reread.

  As such, it was hard for Erris to say if it was worthwhile to ask for more books. She loved reading, to be sure, but surely she could do more with her presents.. Surely, after everything she had read, she could write too. She had not tried writing; not yet. Paper and ink were not a staple of farm life. But if she used her remaining presents on writing supplies…

  Erris walked in contemplative silence as Marmot and her family slowly made their way towards Oortain's Copse, and the afternoon plodded slowly on.

  ***

  Oortain’s Copse was a small village, seventy or eighty buildings total, nestled in a small valley and surrounded by a lush green forest. The forest was small as well, small enough that it only barely enfolded the village, a tiny patch of green surrounded by an ocean of golden wheat on every side, and as such, both the forest and the village looked strangely out of place, like they belonged in another part of the world.

  At only an eight-hour walk away, Oortain’s Copse was the closest village to the farm, but it stood in Rognia. This meant that, at some point during the day’s walk, the family and Marmot had crossed the border from Rege into Rognia. But a border separating wheat from more wheat was both useless and indistinguishable, and it was never until she reached Oortain’s Copse that Erris felt she had entered another country. Entering Rognia meant entering the dominion of a different Church. Both Rege and Rognia believed in Ragn, as did virtually all of Dohm, but they differed greatly on how that church should be run. Rege had a Monarchy, a good old King and Queen who lived in Vhindyar, while Rognia was a religious state. The Maeter was the master of the army, the priesthood, and everything in between in Rognia. The Regan priesthood took their cues largely from Rognia, but they were not so absolute, or so fervent, in their devotion to Ragn.

  There were other differences too. In Rege, houses tended to be low, long, and wooden, often with an attic but seldom with a second story. It was a style Erris was both used to and prefe
rred, while the houses in Rognia, at least those she had seen, tended to be tall and narrow, with brightly coloured panels separated by thin strips of wood.

  Rognian clothing was much more chaste as well. The women never bared any leg, and hardly any chest at all in their long, beautifully coloured and frilled dresses, and the men wore tight-fitted jackets that buttoned almost all the way to their chin. The people themselves though, at least those she had met, were just as nice as Regans. It was hard for Erris to say more really. She learned everything from books, and the one book that might have been able to tell her more about Rognia, her brother Dom had burned. She was still sad about that book. She always wondered what it had said about the people of Rognia, and thereby Oortain’s Copse, for her brother to have burnt it.

  Then again, Oortain’s Copse was on the very edge of the Rognian Empire, and had a fair amount of intermarriage between Rege and Rognia. They were less religious, and more accepting than the center of Rognia, where Erris had heard stories of women being arrested and beaten by the church, for wearing nothing worse than she wore now. Those stories were passed along by word of mouth though, and Erris could never fully trust something that wasn’t written down on paper or parchment.

  Still, while she knew they were not utilitarian at all, Erris always found herself wanting one of the lovely Rognian dresses, with their lace and frills and petticoats, and all the differently coloured layers. The way the layered skirts spread out in a wide circle, rather than clinging closely to the legs like Regan dresses made them so interesting. It would be completely un-wearable around the farm, of course, but maybe when her chest had filled out some more… Her mother and sisters had, so surely hers would someday too. Erris barely noticed that the streets were virtually deserted as she pondered what she would look like in her new dress. All she managed to notice was that there were none of the pretty Rognian dresses out in the street for her to see, which made her momentarily sad. She liked inspecting them, liked imagining what the frills and petticoats would feel like swishing about her legs as she walked, wondering what would happen if she jumped, or twirled on the spot, while wearing them.