Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [35]
Mari, with Sarri trailing in silent curiosity, took Fawn out back and showed her where the privy was hidden among the trees: not a shed but a slit trench with a hide blind, very tentlike. Water was drawn from the lake, and kettles kept permanently on the hob to boil that intended for drinking. Inside Mari’s cabin, Fawn saw that the fireplace had a real oven, which she eyed enviously. Lakewalker women were not limited to pan bread cooked over an open fire, evidently. Though it seemed futile to ask to borrow the oven when Fawn owned no flour, baking pans, lard, butter, eggs, milk, or yeast.
Against the wall in Sarri’s cabin stood a simple vertical loom loaded with work in progress, some tough-looking tight-woven fabric Fawn recognized from Lakewalker riding trousers. Fawn wondered at the thread; Sarri explained it was from the ever-useful plunkin, the stems of which, when retted, yielded up a long, strong, durable fiber, which accounted for the retting cradle in the lake. Fawn didn’t see a spinning wheel. Little furniture met her eye, apart from some trestle tables and the common upended-log seats. There were no bed frames inside at all; by the bundles of bedding stacked along a wall, it seemed Lakewalkers slept in bedrolls even at home, and Fawn realized why Dag had taken so happily to the floor of Aunt Nattie’s weaving room.
They went outside again to find that Dag and the cart had returned. Besides their saddles and bridles, a sword in a worn leather sheath, and a spear, it held only one trunk.
“Is this all you have?” Fawn asked him, as he set it all in a pile beside the tent for later stowage. The trunk hardly seemed large enough to contain, for example, surprise kitchen tackle. It barely seemed large enough for spare boots.
Dag stretched his back and grimaced. “My winter gear’s in storage at Bearsford.”
Fawn suspected it amounted to little more.
He added, “I also have my camp credit. You’ll see tomorrow how that works.”
And he was off again, dragging the emptied cart with his hook.
“What shall I do?” Fawn asked rather desperately after him.
“Take a rest!” he called unhelpfully over his shoulder, and turned onto the road.
Rest? She’d been resting, or at least, traveling, which while not restful was certainly not useful work. Her hand traced her wrist cord, and she looked up at the two Lakewalker women, looking down—dubiously?—at her. Sarri’s cord, she saw, was two cords wrapped around each other.
“I aim to be a good wife to Dag,” Fawn said resolutely, then her voice wavered. “But I don’t know what that means here. Mama trained me up. If this were a farm, I could run it. I could make soap and candles, but I have no tallow or anything to make lye in. I can cook and preserve, but there’s no jars and no storage cellars. If I had a cow, I could milk her, and make cheese and butter, if I had a churn. Aunt Nattie gave me spindles and knitting needles and scissors and needles and pins. Never saw a man more in need of socks than Dag, and I could make good ones, but I have no fiber. I can keep accounts, and make a fair ink, but there’s no paper nor anything to record.” Although those turkeys, she considered, could be forced to yield up quills. “I have knowing hands, but no tools. There must be more for me to do here than sit and eat plunkin!”
Mari smiled. “Let me tell you, farmer child, when you come back from weeks out on patrol, you’re right glad to sit and eat plunkin for a time. Even Dag is.” She added after a moment’s reflection, “For about three days, then he’s back badgering Fairbolt for a place in the next patrol going out. Fairbolt figures that the reason he has three times the malice kills of anyone else is that he spends twice the time looking for ’em.”
Sarri said curiously, “What accounts for the rest?”
“Fairbolt wishes he knew.” Mari scratched her head and regarded