Wedding by Ann Herendeen Page B

onto the roof, here
we had a special turret, a shallow cup on the highest tower. It was
used as a lookout post most of the time, but when the daily eclipse
began the watchman descended and the gifted inhabitants took his
place. I found it by instinct the first time; each day after that
the watchman would hold the door open, reporting the weather as I
pulled myself up the last few steps. Here in the mountains we were
buffeted by wind even on fair days, but regardless of rain or
sleet, snow or fog, there was no better way to replenish our
strength. Every day I could feel it, the crypta energy
surging through my body, nourishing me and the child.
    After I had memorized the basic plan and
could find my way from my room to the great hall and back, I was
ready to learn about the work that went on. Everywhere I went, from
morning to evening, there was some kind of purposeful activity,
much of it segregated by sex. Maids mopped corridors and bathrooms
and swept out the occupied bedrooms. Seamstresses made new clothes
and linens for the household, and mended old ones. Footmen did
heavy lifting and household repairs. A cobbler and an apprentice, a
man and a boy, resoled boots and sandals and made new ones as
needed. The guards left behind to defend the castle manned the
gates and the entrances, and drilled in the courtyards.
    There was a full-time laundry in the second
cellar for the larger items that could not easily be washed by
hand—sheets and towels, tablecloths and napkins. Huge stationary
washtubs were filled from taps, heated over cast-iron stoves and
agitated by a manual crank. Strong young women worked here, turning
the handles to wash and rinse, feeding the dripping things into
wringers and lugging them upstairs in baskets. In winter everything
was hung in an attic to catch the heat rising from the lower
floors. In the warmer weather that was coming now it was hung
outside.
    Only the kitchen employed both men and women,
because of the variety of jobs. Enough people worked in the kitchen
to populate their own village. There were the cooks, men and women,
a true meritocracy, but there were also assistants of all kinds, to
knead dough and form it into loaves and pie shells, to chop and to
mince, to make sauces and to dress meat. There were girls to peel
vegetables and pluck and clean fowl, others to wash the dishes and
scrub the pots. There were boys to bring wood and tend the fire,
and to turn the spits on which some animal was always broiling,
making the fire hiss with the drippings that missed the pan
underneath. People were constantly running in and out of the
connecting rooms—pantries, root cellars and wine cellars, cold
rooms for meat and milk and for fruit and vegetables, warmer rooms
for breads and pies—fetching things the cooks called for, taking
back what was not used.
    With its roaring fire going from dawn until
after dark, for boiling caldrons and roasting meat, and to heat the
ovens built into the walls around the hearth, the kitchen seemed to
me a hellish environment. It was hot and smoky, noisy and crowded,
huge though it was in area. The cooks banged pots and pans and
waved knives, shouting and cursing at their helpers. But it was, I
soon learned, a coveted assignment. The kitchen staff worked
inside, out of the weather, and had first taste of the best food.
Nobody so privileged would complain about the fuggy atmosphere or a
few rough words from a cook.
    Soon I discovered a refuge, cool and quiet:
Dominic’s library. On Terra the word is still used occasionally,
although it merely means a place where people work at retrieving
and sending information through computers and the holonet. Now I
entered a real library. Dominic likes to read when he has the
chance and he had added greatly to the collection amassed by the
previous generations of literate Margraves Aranyi. The walls were
lined with shelves filled with leather-covered books. I knew what
they were, had learned about the way in which text used to