evolutions training in the correct movements in marching and the right handling of weapons and other equipment. Evolutions are taken very seriously in military organs, especially in armies, where pediteers are drilled over and over and over in all the marches and skills required until they become a habit. Failure to perform evolutions successfully is punished, sometimes severely, and this is usually enough to scare people into excellence. THE coursing party that finally left by the middle of that very same day was constituted of the scourge Josclin and another skold Rossamund had never met before, Clement, Sebastipole, a quarto of lurksmen, a platoon of ambuscadiers and musketeers, the tractors of the dogs, and two mules with their muleteers to bear comestibles. No one thought the coursers would be gone long, and everyone expected them to return victorious.
Dolours had not joined in the course, which Rossamund thought strange given her venturing out to help fight the Trought. "Not well enough to travel," he overheard the bane say in a brief word with Threnody.
Bellicos' death was a heavy blow to everyone at Winstermill. He might have been a world-weary veteran pensioned off, so to speak, along the safest stretch of the way, but he was one of their own. Reports of lighters from other parts of the highroad coming to their end were common enough, but this was the first lighter from the manse to be killed in a long while. Ol' Barny was flown at half-mast, and the lighters, pediteers, servants and even the clerks wore long faces and did their duty perfunctorily.
At limes, and more so at middens, the other prentices-those who had been safely in Winstermill washing and breakfasting and marching while their fellows were fleeing the umbergog-nagged those of Q Hesiod Gaeta to recount every particular of their flight. Their own deaths so nearly realized that morning, those of Rossamund's quarto were unwilling to endlessly repeat their small parts in the rampaging of the Trought. Deeply shocked, they had no heart for the usual showing away and idle brags, but sat together in the mess hall in a melancholy huddle.Threnody would not sit with them, but stayed very near, cleaning her fusil ostentatiously. Unsatisfied, their fellows diverted themselves, wondering what the coursing party might do to the creature, wandering off to ignorant conjectures about whether Clement or Sebastipole or Laudibus Pile was the best leer.
"Did you see how the basket tried to get into the Bowels?" Crofton Wheede wondered quietly, his haunted gaze looking at nothing. "I thought he was after us, but he was set fast on that meat cart."
"Maybe they were baiting it," Smellgrove offered in a whisper.
"They looked too a-frighted for that," countered Pillow.
"Exactly," said Threnody from outside the circle. "Besides, who'd be simple-headed enough to bait an umbergog?"
"Me dead dad," Wrangle muttered, flashing a look of suppressed fury at the girl.
"Maybe they were delivering parts for the dark trades." Rossamund spoke up, thinking of the hint of swine's lard he had detected.
That struck the others dumb.
"Carry for the dark trades right under our noses?" Smellgrove snorted.
Rossamund shrugged. "I've seen some bad fellows try to get a rever-man through the Spindle. It's not impossible."
His fellow prentices looked at him oddly and lapsed into ruminative silence.
Soon the mood of the Hesiod Gaeta prentices affected the whole platoon, and a heavy glumness settled on them all.
For Rossamund, the sorrow of the lampsman's passing and the Trought's imminent destruction was far bleaker than he had reckoned upon. In a few months he had seen so much death-violent and stark and shocking quick-nothing like the glorious end that his pamphlets described for its heroes. The life of adventure was a life of violence. He had been seeking this, but now found he did not want it; men died, monsters died, and only grief and self-doubt remained. Barely eating his skilly and ignoring all about him, the young prentice felt a light touch on his shoulder. It was Threnody, looking at him with guarded and unexpected sympathy, perhaps to show that she understood. Rossamund was not sure anyone could.Who else was able to comprehend sadness for the slaughter of a monster?
Grindrod was determined not to let the boys wallow in the aftermath. They were set to marching, stepping-regular across the Grand Mead and back, across and back, left, right, left… for what remained of that grief-struck day. "Good practicing for tomorrow morning's pageant-of-arms," as the lamplighter-sergeant put it. However, Grindrod was himself more irascible than usual, and bawled out even the slightest error. "Keep to yer dressing, ye splashing salamanders! I didn't stand out here hollering at ye for more than two months to witness this clod-footed display! Step-regular like I have showed ye! Swift and even!"
The Lamplighter-Marshal visited the prentices at mains. He told them that he had halted the prentice-watch once more, and spoke quietly to each member of Q Hesiod Gaeta. "It is a hard thing to lose a brother-in-arms, Prentice Bookchild," the Marshal said gently, pale eyes genuine in their commiseration. "Grieve freely, and remember well why it is we stand here against the wicked foe."
But what if the foe is one only because we make him so? Rossamund quashed the troubling thought.
"Lamplighter-Marshal, sir?" piped Smellgrove. "What happened to that butcher's wagon?"
The Marshal smiled. "Ah, those fellows hid scared in the Bowels till middens then went down the Gainway, very anxious to be gone-not like ye stout gents standing afore the front of stiffest dangers!" He looked at all the prentices with fatherly esteem. "Bravely done, my boys, bravely done!"
Every face, whether it had suffered trauma that day or not, beamed at him.
A double tot of grog was given out as a treat that night, an especial consideration to the boys who had suffered that morning.They all drank openly in memorial to Bellicos, and the eight quietly in thankfulness for their own survival.
"A confusion on the nickers!" Arabis boisterously cried the habitual toast.
It was repeated lustily by all but Rossamund, who barely murmured, "A confusion on the nickers," and then mouthed, and an end to my own.
Mains came to its end and evenstalls began. While the other prentices,Threnody with them, went to their confines to polish and prepare for tomorrow's full parade, Rossamund was required to present himself at the kitchen for his scullery punishment. He was given no dispensation for the terrible attack of the Trought. Exhausted, he stowed his hat, frock coat and weskit safely in his cell, put on a smock issued to all prentices for laboring duties, then hurried out.
Only four sharp turns from the prentices' mess hall were the enormous kitchens with their sweating, white daubed walls and high ceilings of intersecting smoke- and fat-blackened beams. Cookhouse, buttery, small-mill, scullery and slaughter yard were together run by the culinaire, a woman infamously known as the Snooks. She was stout and lumpy and not much taller than Rossamund, dressed in gray, with a puckered perspiring face, its age hidden beneath a trowel's worth of boudoir cream. Worse, her lips and jowls were pinked with rouge, making her look like an ancient kind of good-day gala-girl, such as those Rossamund had passed in less seemly parts of Boschenberg.
A near-mythic fear of her made pots-and-pans an excellent punishment for defaulting prentices. From her throne at the end of a long-scarred bench the Snooks glowered at Rossamund through thick double spectacles as he entered the steam, stink and sweat.
"Hark 'ee, another weedy lantern-stick sent by old Grind-yer-bones to do me dishes!" she cried at him above the clangor of chopping knives and stirring ladles. "Ye lads come to me so often I don't have any labors for me scullery maids to work," she added with a chuckle, a strangled wheezing gurgle.
Rossamund swallowed a gasp at the sharp, distinctly unpleasant odor of the kitchens. He had expected they would always smell sweet, of baking crusts and roasting sides: where Mother Snooks sat reeked more of fat and some acrid cleaning paste. "I've come for pots-and-pans."
"Yes, yes, I know that!" the Snooks snapped. "It's the only reason ye bantlings come to me." She squinted at him through fogging glasses, her lips pursing and puckering over and over. She took out a small, well-thumbed tally book and flipped many pages. "Let us spy on who we've got ourselves here," she muttered, running a stubby finger as if down a list. "Ninth of Pulvis… ninth of… Ah! Here ye be! Ye pasty li'l sugarloaf," she stated in small triumph, then looked hard and close at the page. "Oh." She gave Rossamund a quizzing look. "Ye're not the new girl, are ye?"
"Ah… No, ma'am." Then it occurred to him what she meant. A little glimmer of self-respect expired within. "I… I just have a-a girl's name."
The Snooks gave a strange, high snort and her gurgling forgery of a laugh. "Well, perhaps we should find ye a pretty pinafore to wear!" This made her laugh even harder.
Rossamund stood stiffly and waited for her to stop.
She wagged her head and dabbed at an oily tear. "The burdens some of us have to bear, eh?" she sighed. She marked the tally book with the greasy stub-end of a pencil and put the book away somewhere in her apron. Pointing into the confusion of the cries and the cooking she instructed him, "Off ye go-scullery's through there and down yon stairs. Philostrata is always ready for the help."
Rossamund rolled up the sleeves of his smock and made his way through the bustling kitchen. He passed the small-mill, where the pistor ground and pounded the flour in a great granite mortar ready for hasty pudding, the little treat allowed the prentices on Domesdays. His stomach gurgled. Some might have said it was bland stuff, hasty pudding, but as an interruption to the repetitive menu, it was a small ladling of bliss. Rossamund stepped aside as the furner stoked the ten-door oven that dominated the center of the great room, bumping into one of the baxters as she prodded and checked her baking breads.