Chapter 6 – A Poisoned Sweet #2
“Then why’d ye bring her to me, then,” the cook grumbled, but finally, grudgingly, bowed. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, m’lady. Name’s Wen. Just Wen. Consider me hands your own, unless you ask for bleeding pudding.”
“Pleased to meet you,” the princess said a little faintly, looking at him as if he were a bomb that might go off. But she was trying; she had taken Remin’s advice about offering a few personal words to each person she met to heart. “Thank you for supper. Last night, I mean. The bread was good.”
“Aye, aye, glad to hear it. Ye’re not to come in me kitchen.” Wen jabbed an enormous finger at her. “Ye want something, ye stand in the doorway and wait ’til I stop chopping. Princess or no princess, never talk to me when I’ve a knife in me hand, understand?”
She nodded silently, round-eyed. Imagining this scene with the haughty princess he had expected to retrieve from Aldeburke had entertained Remin no end, but this was like watching someone shout at a kitten.
“Breakfast, Wen,” he said flatly. The sun hadn’t even cleared the horizon yet and everything was much more complicated than he expected.
* * *
“We’ll be at the south side of the wall,” said Sir Miche later that morning, walking south beside Ophele along the lane to the wall.
The maids at Aldeburke had sighed over Sir Miche in the few days he was there, and loudly enough for even Ophele to hear about it; he was very, very beautiful, with long golden hair and light hazel eyes, seven or eight years older than the duke.
“You might have seen it on the way in, they finished almost a mile of wall while we were gone. Eventually it’ll be the base for a new bridge over the Brede, they’ve already finished one caisson and are working on the footings. ”
“What’s a caisson?”
“A wall that holds back the river, basically.” Sir Miche nudged her around a mud puddle.
The road was almost all mud, but it was very picturesque otherwise, with the sun casting a golden light over green hills and the birds singing their morning songs.
“Not the sort of thing that a lot of ignorant soldiers can tackle, I assure you. We’re just laborers for the experts. ”
“What do you need me to do?” she asked.
“Fetch and carry, though I beg your pardon for saying it. Normally the sort of thing we’d have squires to do, or pages, but we’re short of both and it’s a waste to have a grown man doing such work.
Just having someone to haul water will save them coming off the wall or up out of the ditch for a drink. ”
Ophele pondered this. “That will really be helpful?”
“Every foot we can add to the wall matters.” Sir Miche glanced down at her. “Did Rem tell you about some of the…problems we have in the valley?”
“Wolf demons?”
“Oh, thank the stars.” He heaved an exaggerated sigh of relief, hand over his heart, and made her giggle.
“Rem’s spreading the word about the beasties through the Empire now, to dissuade some of the settlers, but now all the scholars are curious and the only thing worse than a rabble of farmers is a passel of academics from the Tower. But it’s no joke to us, I’m afraid.”
“Keeping the hungry things out,” she guessed, and he nodded.
“We have a palisade coming down from the north, but stranglers don’t think much of a wooden fence.
It has to be stone, and stone takes time.
We’re lucky we’ve got the river on two sides.
That gives us nine miles of stone wall to build, about five and a half running north to south, and four miles east-west. In a few months, hopefully we’ll join up with the north wall crew.
But don’t be scared,” he added quickly. “We’ve been in this valley for seven years, and contending with the beasties for almost half of that. We know what we’re about.”
The only thing she could do was trust him when he said that. But Ophele still looked over the hills to the distant mountains and the tangled forest at their feet, where the hungry things were, and wondered if she was afraid.
The wall itself was amazing. She was used to the almost decorative walls of Aldeburke, fine white plaster and short enough that she could have climbed over them by herself, if she wanted to.
The stone wall cutting through stands of black pine had to be at least twenty feet tall, with the dark water of the Brede flowing behind it at the foot of a steep bank.
It was early enough that the work crews were still gathering, brawny stonemasons and mortarmen, an engineer named Guisse who was very eager to explain absolutely everything, and an ever-increasing number of laborers whose task was to dig and haul stone.
The wall was covered with wooden scaffolding, ladders, pulleys, and ropes, and several blacksmiths were on hand to repair and cast new metal parts as needed.
Before work began, Sir Miche gathered them all together.
“Most of you were introduced to Her Grace last night,” he began, suddenly all business and looking from one man to the next as if he were memorizing faces.
“To show you how seriously His Grace is taking the construction of this wall, he has asked his lady to lend her own fair hands to help. You will never in this life have such an honor again. I trust you will be appropriately humbled.”
Deeply uncomfortable under the weight of so many eyes, Ophele wished she at least had a crown or something. She felt a very poor specimen of the princess variety.
But at least Sir Miche didn’t expect her to make a speech. He clapped his hands and sent them off to work, then bent down to mutter, “Don’t worry, they’re as scared of you as you are of them.”
That startled her into a laugh, and she quickly covered her mouth with her hand, giggling. He grinned, dimples flickering in his cheeks.
“Come, I’ll show you where the well is. We didn’t mean to dig one, actually, we just hit bedrock and up came the water. Did Rem already warn you to stay away from the wall and the ditch?”
“Yes.” All through breakfast.
“Then I won’t belabor the point. But you’re to be careful, for the men’s sake if not your own, and if you’re not sure of anything, I’ll always be in shouting distance.
And don’t be climbing things,” he added with a flicker of humor, reminding her that he had been there that day in Aldeburke, when the duke plucked her out of a fir tree.
A proper princess should be horrified by this.
It was squires’ work, the lowest kind of labor, so far beneath her that she should be unaware of its existence.
And it was also much harder than she expected.
Ophele had to stand nearly on tiptoe to push the windlass on the well, and after five buckets she was puffing and reminding herself that thirteen year-old boys did this work.
Boys that wanted to be knights, true, but still.
She was stronger than a thirteen year-old boy, surely.
There were nearly a hundred men working on just this section of the wall, and she could see the construction process in all its stages.
At the furthest end were the excavators, digging all the way down to the bedrock to give the wall an unshakable footing.
From there came the men with mortar and stone, building a thick shell of carefully cut and fitted blocks that would rise up twenty-some feet, with a hollow space in the middle to be filled with a thick, chalky powder and crushed stones.
Wagons creaked back and forth from the wall to the quarry to the west, oxen groaning as they trundled away, and Ophele was careful to stay out of their path as she set down the buckets where Sir Miche had told her and then waited to be told what else to do.
And waited.
And waited.
The men didn’t refuse to drink the water she had brought for them, but an hour passed before she realized that no one was going to ask the Duchess of Andelin to fetch a shovel for him.
She didn’t think they were being rude. They said thank you every time they came for a dipper of water, drank nervously, bowed, and then hurried back to their work.
And she didn’t want to bother Sir Miche; he was working as hard as any of them, stripped to the waist and pitching in with a shovel at the far end of the trench.
“Is there anything else I can do?” she asked the next man who came to drink, reminding herself to speak up, as the duke so often admonished her.
“Aye? That is, no, lady, I’m fine,” he said, looking startled. “Very grateful for your help. Thankee.”
And he was gone, as if a wolf demon were on his heels.
She sighed and moved to the shade of a nearby oak tree, sitting down on a high root to watch.
Remember your rank, the duke had admonished her as he left her with Sir Miche that morning.
Don’t let them order you about. It looked as if that would not be the problem.
Sir Miche was right, what she was doing wasn’t useless; so many men went through water buckets remarkably fast, and when there were only two full buckets left, she went to refill the rest, picking her way down the hillside to the well, which stood on a paved platform overlooking the river, sheltered by tall trees.
Drop the bucket. Crank the windlass. She tried carrying two buckets at once up the hill, but a wooden bucket filled with water was surprisingly heavy, so she went back and forth eight times, puffing.
They would go through them faster as the day warmed, and her busy brain fastened on this problem, for lack of anything else to do.
There were three places where the men came down from the wall.
There were only two ways they came out of the deep part of the trench.
It was convenient for her to put all the buckets together in one place, but if it were about her convenience, she would have left the buckets by the well.
The stated objective, as defined by Sir Miche, was to reduce the amount of time the men spent off the scaffolding or out of the trench.