“Sir Robert planted extra this year, so’s he can give doles come winter,” she fretted. “But it won’t be enough. Nothing will be. When the people died, the oxen wandered off, and the horses, like the one you found. Some are probably out there, wandering, but many have been killed and eaten by the poor and the homeless. So, even if we had more men to plant more fields, we’d have no more plowbeasts. And the people, wandering about, taking refuge in old places, they make fires and burn the places down, not meaning to, just out of carelessness. The mill, that’s how the mill went. And the abbey. And nothing tastes like anything at all, either.” She put her hands on her ample hips and glared at me as though I might have occasioned the plague without knowing it. “There’s been no spices all this year. The traders died, too, just like everyone else. We’re lucky to have a priest about to keep us in the grace of God; most places have none at all.”
I thought of Father Raymond, asleep at Westfaire. It was no time to think of Westfaire.
“What’s the year?” I asked, ignorant country boy that I was. “I forget.”
“It’s the year of Our Lord thirteen fifty,” she said. “So says our learned priest. And no Death this year, which makes it a good year, boy, whatever else happens.” She gave me more soup and a pat on the head.
I had spent a year and a half in the twentieth, but three years had passed here since I had left. So much destruction and death in three little years.
“If everyone’s looking for workers, then maybe there’s room for me here?” I asked. “I’m thin, but I’m strong. I’m good with horses. I’ve done stable work since I was eight.”
“I’ll tell Sir Robert you want to speak to him,” she said.
She was good as her word, and the lord spoke to me the next morning, giving me my keep and space in the stables and a tiny wage for my work, as well. Considering everything, it seemed a good place to stay. Grumpkin agreed. The smells of the horses and the hay spoke to him of home. He made himself a nest in the loft and lay there much of the day, like a lion glorying in his past and future conquests, while I groomed horses and mucked out the stalls and rubbed oil into leather, just as I had used to do long ago, with Martin. He had schooled me well, for no one found fault with my work.
It was a strange time, that next time. Despite all the death around, I felt safe. Despite that the country was in ruins, I felt at home. Despite that I had to hide my hair and my body—easier then, in those loose smocks and unfitted trousers than it would have been in the twentieth—I felt myself. Anger left me, slowly, until I was able to acknowledge what had happened. It had happened, I said to myself. I had been defiled and terrorized, but I was still alive, unmutilated, sound in body and mind. My body had healed. Vengeance, I promised myself, but there was no hurry. I could take a time to simply be Havoc, the miller’s son. I had been away, I said when they asked. I had not known my family was gone until I came to the mill itself.
“I didn’t know the miller had another son than the three who died,” the Lady Janet said.
“Oh, yes,” someone said. “He had another son, but I’ve forgotten what it was about the boy.”
“He sent me to his sister when I was only a baby,” I told them. “I’ve been there since.” Who was to say I lied? Let them think what they would think anyhow, that Havoc had not been born in wedlock, that he had been the miller’s son but not of the miller’s wife.
Each day started with a bite of bread and a draft of beer in the kitchen, this through the kindness of the cook who said I was still a growing boy, for others of the servants and serfs got nothing until later. Then exercising the horses out on the meadows, staying away from the sheep and the cows so they would not be scattered by the dogs who came running after the horses, their tongues lalloping out of their mouths as they ran. Then grooming, and feeding, and taking care of the saddles and bridles. Some of the leather was worked in gilt, and the oil would strip it away, so it was mincy work with a little brush and a rag. The other stable hands hated it for their big hands were clumsy with the tools, so I did most of it myself. It was quiet. There was no one about.
Dinner at midday was bread and beer again, and salad or a bit of fruit and a bite of stringy mutton sometimes, or a piece of boiled fowl, sometimes juicy, sometimes powdery from being in the soup so long, tasting like the memory of chicken. Then there was hay to pitch up from the wains, or stalls to muck. Sometimes Grumpkin would bring me mice, strings of them, laying them out on the stable floor like toy soldiers. He was learning to be a real stable cat again.
Supper was in hall, everyone there except the kitchen servants, and me
