them with words, if not his fists. As Mags watched, he figured out what the pecking order was, and who was best to steer clear of. Then the cook, who had kept a fraction of his attention on them the whole time shouted at both of them. “Get your lazy bums over here, you two! Pots are piling up!” So it was back to the sink.
The kitchen was hot and noisy, the cook shouting at his helpers, the cook’s helpers shouting at the kitchen maids, and the maids shouting at each other. Pots and pans clanged and clattered, people bustled about, ran into each other, and cursed, people did things wrong and got yelled at or hit with a ladle or a ham-like hand—not a beating, but definitely a heavy cuff. And he and the boy just scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, while the sweat poured down his face and back, and the air filled with the smell of baking pie and cake and roasting meat and savories and complicated dishes involving cheese and spices.
The boy yearned piteously in the direction of the spits, where big roasts were turning. Mags felt apart from it all—he could remember being someone like the boy, for whom a taste of meat was the highest possible dream. And he could remember another Mags, who had rejoiced over his good fortune in landing somewhere like the Collegium with all its wondrous food. But he was neither of those boys. He was hollow and indifferent to his surroundings, and all he wanted was for exhaustion to numb his mind and make it impossible to think. He couldn’t help observing and filing it all away, but it dropped into an empty place in his head, a place where things that had no use would go.
Then the serving maids arrived, and were laden with trays that in turn were loaded down with food. The first course went out—coarse stuff for the servants that ate in hall, the best things for the master and his table.
Food went out to be served, remains returned from the hall and were piled on the table in the corner, atop the remains of the luncheon. Except for what came back untasted, which went into the pantry—probably to reappear at breakfast—and a few things that were set aside for the cook’s private table.
The pots continued to pile up, he continued to finish two for every single one of the boy’s, and finally, as clean pots were taken away and stored for tomorrow, or set up to cook porridge and the like overnight, the pile of stuff waiting to be scrubbed began to decrease. People gathered at the leftover table, squabbling over the best bits, heaping what they wanted on crude wooden plates or the leftover bread-trenchers from the lower tables up in the dining hall. The helpers ate first, then the kitchen maids. The helpers left after eating; the maids stayed to clean. This was no slattern’s kitchen; it was clear the cook here might be penny-pinching, but he knew his business. Every surface was scrubbed clean, every dish put away clean, only the floor was left to do.
The maids finished their cleaning, and left, probably for real beds somewhere. The cook was still making his leisurely way through his own dinner, one eye on his winecup and the other on the staff.
Finally there were only two pots left, and the boy scuttled to the table like a rat to scramble up onto a bench and stuff his face, leaving them to Mags.
Mags scrubbed them clean without a word, which evoked another grunt from the cook.
When he was done, he trudged to the other side of the table and picked up and ate whatever was nearest. He couldn’t have said if anything was bad or good, he was only interested in getting eating over with so he could go back to work. He couldn’t taste anything anyway.
The boy crammed food into his mouth with both hands and one eye on the cook, the other on Mags. Probably he was getting ready to grab anything Mags uncovered that looked better than what he had, but nothing turned up on Mags’ side of the table. The cook finished his dinner, heaved himself up, and evidently that was the signal for eating to stop.
“Clean up,” the cook said. The boy scuttled off and came back with a big hessian bag, grease-stained and grubby on the outside. He gestured to Mags to help him, and together they scraped everything off the table and into the bag, which was put outside the door.
Mags followed the boy’s lead without a word while the cook watched them both, arms folded over his chest. The boy kept glancing furtively at the cook, as if he was expecting a cuff to the head. The cook, however, kept most of his attention on Mags.
Next, they scraped all the crumbs off the table they’d eaten from, throwing them at the cook’s direction into the fire, and scrubbed down the table with soap and water and pumice-stone.
So that would be why no one got sick from the leftovers on the table.
The boy got brooms for them both, and they swept the floor, throwing the sweepings out the back door. Then they got down on hands and knees, with buckets of water and soap and big bristle-brushes and scrubbed it as the cook watched. Oddly, the cook washed his own plates and cutlery, but that might have been because he didn’t trust them with it. When they were done, he grunted approval, reached into a cupboard, and pulled out two bundles of bedding.
These proved to be a couple of thick sacks made of multiple layers stitched together, a patchwork of old, worn blankets. The cook tossed one to each of them. Mags caught the one thrown to him and watched the boy to see what he did with his. The boy moved his sack to the best place by the fire, pulled off his shoes, stuck his legs into the opening and wriggled until he was all the way inside it with just his head sticking out.
Mags copied him, and the cook grunted with satisfaction again. “Don’t think to steal anything from the pantry, boy,” he warned as he put the rushlights out, so that the only light was from the dying fire. “I’ll beat both of you senseless if anything is missing or nibbled. Both of you. So no use thinking you can nick something and get away with it by blaming the other.”
Then he left, and the kitchen was quiet except for the sound of the fire and the other boy breathing.
Mags became aware that his arms ached from scrubbing, his back ached from bending over the sink, and his legs and feet ached from standing on stone all that time. He welcomed the pain, even as his muscles began to stiffen and hurt more. Pain on the outside was easier to deal with than pain on the inside.
Nevertheless, black sorrow descended on him, and with his arms pillowing his head, he cried, silently sobbing himself to sleep.
A kick in the side roused him. He sat up in his cocoon of bedding with a groan, and was rewarded with another kick. He managed to squirm out of the bedding, and it was snatched away from him by a maid and bundled into the top of the cupboard.
The room was full of sleepy people, complaining, ordering each other about. He and the boy were put to fetching firewood from the pile outside, and the roasting fires and the big ovens were set to burning hotly. The bag of meal-remains they had left outside last night was gone. He remembered, now that he thought about it, that he had noticed chickens in a pen in one corner of the kitchen-garden. It probably went to feed them. Another evidence of frugality, that they kept hens to have their own eggs and roasting birds.
Last night’s bread was shoveled out of the oven and laid out in order of quality, to be served at breakfast. Huge pots of pease-porridge and oat-porridge emerged from the ovens as well, the staple breakfast food for the servants. Serving maids appeared, caps a little askew and yawning sleepily; they were swiftly burdened with great trays of bowls full of both, or baskets of bread. The servants would eat earliest of course, and not with the masters, who would lie abed and probably be served there.
As the porridge kettles emptied, they came to Mags and the boy, who began their work. The bowls and utensils from cooking the better foods came to them too, and they labored to keep up.
“New potboy?” asked one serving-maid of one of the cook’s helpers.
“Aye. Thick as two short planks, but does the work,” came the reply. “Hasn’t said a word since he was taken on yesterday.”
“That’ll suit Cookie, then,” came the laconic reply.
“It’ll suit Cookie better if he’s too thick to count to three,” said the helper. “Cookie’ll give him two pennies and keep the third.”
The maid snickered.
Mags kept scrubbing, concentrating with all his might, the way he used to concentrate on chipping out a stone without fracturing it, on getting every last fragment of food from every pot he was handed. When he and the boy ran out of pots, they were sent for more wood, or to haul in bags or baskets of coarser foodstuffs from a root cellar, or to carry the garbage from the cooking out to the chicken pen. They emptied out the peelings and ends and bad spots, the leaves and the burnt bits of bread into the pen and the hens fell on the bounty, clucking and fighting over the best bits, like the servants in the kitchen. Then back they went to scrubbing. Mags bent over the work, always with an ache in his soul that felt as if someone was squeezing his heart in a vice.
