The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,69

that wouldn’t clear.

That was how I worked.

Until the pile of green wood went down to just loose sticks, and the steeping troughs was all full, and the drying racks too. Until the catchers complained to my mother, for I found and cut so many branches that we was hauling them home right up to lock-tide. Until my spoiling the green wood in the yard was forgot, and the jokes was about the feats I done rather than the foolishness.

But as hard as I pushed myself, I couldn’t put Monono and what I done to her out of my mind. I kept thinking of her as being out there in the deep woods, though I knowed really that the network she spoke of was somewhere else again. I wondered if she had got herself lost somewhere, and if she did then would my calling to her bring her back again?

I thought most likely it would not, but I done it just the same. When I lay down at the end of the day, my back and arms all on fire with cramps and aches, I set the DreamSleeve next to me on the bed and whispered Monono’s name to it for as long as I could stay awake. Gate guards was wont to set a torch over the gate sometimes, for hunters that was out too late, to give them something to aim for if they was in the deep woods with the dark coming on. It was like that.

And in the day I kept the DreamSleeve with me, tucked into my belt the whole time. I already told you, I think, that I knowed how foolish that was. If music gun to come out of the box when I was working, I wouldn’t have no way to explain it or justify it. Tech was too important a thing to be hid. But if she come back, I didn’t want to miss her, which I might easily do if I left the DreamSleeve under my bed.

That’s where the other six DreamSleeves was. I never got my courage up to go into the Underhold a second time and put them back, which had always been my intention. In any case, I was too bone-tired at the end of each day to do more than stumble off to my bed and fall into it.

So the eve of the wedding come, which was also to be the day of the slaughter. Most years the slaughter was on the Salt Feast itself, but if the Salt Feast was to be a wedding feast too, then it was a bad foretell if something died on that day. That was what most people was thinking anyway, and the Count and Seal said it too. So it was agreed the pig should be killed and salted on the day before.

Everyone went up to the gather-ground both to help with the killing and salting and to drink some of the blood as was customary. It would feel a little strange to come away again without tasting any of the meat, but there would be plenty the next day. And maybe, my mother said, it would be enjoyed even more on account of the waiting. Athen said she never found nothing that was improved by waiting, and Mull said, “Yeah, I seen you and Mott Beekeeper putting that to the proof on Summer-dance!” Which led to a great deal of outrageous things being said by the women of my family, each to other, and to me going up to the gather-ground ahead of all of them out of what you might call an excess of blushing.

When I got there, Cal Shepherd, that was Veso’s father, was sharpening his knives out in front of the salt lodge on the big stropping stone that he kept in his yard. The stone had been picked up and carried there by Veso and his brother Yan, and they was standing by while Cal worked, seeming both happy and a little sheepish to be right where everyone was looking.

Cal’s knives was awesome things. He was Mythen Rood’s butcher as well as being in charge of the little Herdwick flock we kept up on the forward slope. Most times, it’s true, the meat we et was from birds taken in snares or from beasts the hunters brung back. The sheep, being good for milk and cheese and fleeces, was not often killed for food. So what butchering Cal done in the regular way of things tended