11. N #3
Aelford glanced around the room. “We have to deliver eighteen bricks per food worker per day to the king and the city. Make sixteen and the last two will either come out of Haldeen’s stockpile or the gels will get squeezed to make up the difference. Haldeen puts the bite on us when a gel goes short.
”
She looked at Triana seriously, and focused on minimizing her accent.
“I have seen girls get knifed by their coworkers after missing quotas.”
She led Triana to an empty table, with its own forms, paddles, and bucket of paste. Up close, the whitish mess had an unsavory smell, something a bit like cooking oil gone rancid. She sat where Aelford gestured, and picked up the paddle uncertainly.
“Dip it in the bucket, and use the paddle to fill the form.”
Triana did her best to follow Aelford’s instructions, sneaking glances left and right to see how the other women did it.
Aelford intervened once or twice, taking her hand with the paddle and showing her how to smooth the paste so that it was level with the top of the form.
Aelford took a small sliver of ration bar from a box and held it up where Triana could see it, then pressed it down into the paste.
“Now, do a Making spell. Remember, you can’t create, you can’t destroy, you can only Make one thing into another. Alorahen’s Incantation is a good one … helps the mind shape the task, and is easy to repeat while you are gathering and releasing the ambient magic.”
“I … don’t know what that is,” Triana stammered, completely taken aback. “That’s nothing I’ve ever heard of.”
Aelford stared at her. “Oh, come now, gel. It’s basic, and learned as soon as children discover they can make their own sweets.”
She shook her head. “I told you, we grow food, we don’t make it. If a child wants a sweet, they just … send a servant for one. Or if they are the children of servants, they ask their parents to bring them some, or they hunt out wild fruits or steal some from the garden. I made. Once.
There wasn’t a spell involved. It was just my mother showing me something to … keep me busy, I suppose.”
For once, the absolute truth was surprised out of her, she was so taken aback by these so-called instructions.
Aelford looked skeptical, but went and got a chair and sat across from her. She scooped out a gob of paste from the form. “Show me,” she commanded. “Show me what you can do.”
Triana squinted her eyes, doubtful about the whole process.
She tried to remember what her mother had told her, and looked skeptically at the paste.
She looked up at Aelford and saw the older woman watching her, her jaw set in what Triana interpreted as disapproval.
A couple of the women around her, having finished their bricks and curious at the novelty, came to observe.
Triana looked at the blob of paste. The thing would have to be essayed.
She set her hands on the table, fingers down, as she and her mother had none.
None of this hand waving and mumbo-jumbo for her.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember the day, how it warm and pleasant it felt …
a spring day, she thought … but that could easily be wrong.
Memory was fickle. Her mother, tired but lucid, with a wan smile for a young Triana that made her feel warm inside.
The joy of the day, and putting the ingredients together, pouring a tiny dab of honey on top of the milk, putting the flour into the milk …
she thought, though that didn’t seem quite right.
When all the ingredients were in the cup, she recalled how she focused on how it felt to eat the warm sweet cake, how the texture felt against her lips and tongue, both a bit grainy and crunchy from the outer crust, and sweeter and buttery on the inside.
She remembered the smell of it, the warm wafting of nutty and sweet aroma certain to draw the hungry from every direction.
In the end, she recalled her mother’s satisfied little smile, and that she had hugged Triana close …
one of the few times Triana could remember …
and for what turned out to be the last time.
Triana broke out of the memory, and wiped the tears from her cheeks.
There, where the paste had been, sat a single tea cake.
Its sides were uneven, and it looked a bit lumpy, but that same sweet smell came from it …
well almost the same. There was an undertone of sharpness she didn’t remember, an undertone that suggested the flavor might not be what she remembered.
Aelford looked at her in surprise. “May I?”
Triana nodded.
Aelford reached over and broke a small piece of the cake off and ate it. “Well, so that is a tea cake. Sweet. Tastes good. Lots of sugar.” She looked at the other workers who had been watching. “I didn’t feel any ambient magic move. Did you?”
The others shook heads or shrugged shoulders. One, a fox-faced little brunette, spoke up. “It’s pretty small. Perhaps the magic is too insignificant to be detectable.”
“Perhaps,” Aelford replied. She turned back to Triana.
“I’ve never seen anyone do it that way … no incantations, no shaping … but if it works for you, who am I to judge?”
She leaned over the table to where the tea cake sat and tapped it with a fingernail.
“Do it bigger … this size,” she said, tapping the form.
“Do it, umm, six more times today, and call it done.”
Triana followed the fox-faced woman, struggling to keep her eyes open. She was still disoriented and confused by the changes. Had it only been a day since she had slept in her own comfortable bed, in her own room?
“The dormitory is this way,” the woman said.
“You get a bed, clean sheets every third day … if you turn the dirties in before you break your fast. Turn them in, get a laundry token. After your shift you pick up clean sheets on your way back. You are allowed in the workrooms, the female dormitory, and the common areas.
Stay out of the males’ dorms, if you know what’s good for you.”
She knew what a “dormitory” was, since that was where slaves slept.
Slaves! Was that how far she had fallen?
She had not slept with someone else in the same room (other than filling her bed) since she was a baby!
How would she ever sleep with all those others around her?
It made her skin crawl. How many females would she have to share the room with?
Perhaps something showed in her face. The fox-faced woman scowled a bit.
“I don’t know what your deal is. Rumor says you’re some highborn, for all you got a sewer mouth. Get this. Here, no one cares. Make your bricks, don’t make trouble, we’ll get along just fine. Don’t pull your weight … well, just remember,
you share a room with the people who have to cover your shortage.”
She tipped her head to one side. “You did what … six today … right through dinner?”
Triana nodded.
The woman made no effort to hide her disdain. “And now, you’re so tired that you skipped your evening ration and are about to fall over. Six. That’s not even one quarter of your quota.”
Triana said nothing. Her eyes felt hot and dry, and she wanted nothing more than to lay down and go to sleep.
The woman made a clicking sound through her teeth. “They give you a full eight-day to get up to speed. After that, well. Penalties start. First, you go into debt. Then, you don’t eat. Then …. ” She shook her head. “You heard the boss. Overseer steps in.”
They stopped at an … opening in the wall. It wasn’t even a door you could close, just an opening. Inside to her horror, were some sort of bed-like contraptions. Except they were stacked on top of each other, two high. And they looked just barely big enough to fit her height. Maybe.
The fox-faced woman chuckled. “You’re lucky, milady. There’s a top and a bottom bunk open. Most people don’t get to choose. Top bunk, you gotta climb. Bottom bunk, you sleep in someone else’s farts. Which you want?”
Triana wasn’t sure she had the strength to climb, and pointed with her chin to the bottom bunk.
“Farts it is.” the woman replied. “You get a small box for your personal things, but I guess you ain’t got any?”
She shrugged, feeling utterly helpless, a feeling so foreign to her that she had no idea how to process it.
As far as she knew everything had been taken away when her room was cleaned out.
Part of her wanted to rage at the treatment, to demand her rights as a noble born …
to refuse this whole sick farce, but that part gave way to fatigue and the day’s confusion.
She collapsed onto the unmade “bunk,” turned her face away from the light. She heard the fox-faced woman leave, and thought she should have said something, perhaps a “thank you.” She just didn’t have the energy.
She expected to be asleep at once … she was certainly weary enough …
but her mind refused to stop whirling. She kept replaying the day, the way it had started, waiting for Nora, then the sharp turn and down this hole.
She still hoped Nora would turn up, and explain this was all a mistake, and get her out of here …
but she understood that was a fading fantasy.
She understood that Nora had been doing a job, and had been an employee.
She’d been hired to work on Triana’s speech, though the conversation topics had certainly ranged across Triana’s home, life, and how her world was organized.
Triana recognized that while Nora had an agenda in the questions she asked and the way she steered the conversations, she’d done so in a way that drew Triana in, and made her want to talk.
Triana saw what Nora was about and hadn’t cared, answering openly and honestly, though with debatable objectivity.
Lying in the rough, unmade bunk, Triana recognized that she had been seeing something that probably wasn’t there …
. Nora had done her job, building a rapport with her subject to gain the information she wanted.
Triana had been alone and isolated, and the small courtesies had been like water on a parched desert.
Nora had coaxed Triana’s trust, and built what was a polite and professional relationship into something that Triana saw as a budding friendship.
And in the absence of being in her proper place, where she was the one on top, friendship had suddenly looked a lot more attractive as a place to start making an ally.