The Camelot Spell - Laura Anne Gilman [11]
“Is anyone there?” Gerard called down the hallway, walking forward with his shoulders hunched as though expecting to be attacked at any moment. Or perhaps to fall asleep as suddenly as the knights and revelers had. A faint noise answered him. He hurried his steps and threw open a wooden door to reveal a very young page, clutching one of Arthur’s hounds and sobbing his heart out. The dog looked up at Gerard with large, mournful brown eyes, as though to say “What could I do? The little one grabbed me and won’t let go.”
The boy was safe enough with the hound, and Gerard had other rooms to explore.
He went first toward the kitchen. It was the busiest place on a normal day, thrice so on a feast day. If anyone with authority were still awake, they would be there.
What greeted him, however, was not encouraging. Where earlier in the day the kitchen had moved with purpose and order, now it limped, blindly feeling its way. The youngest children were still turning the spit on which a boar roasted over the flames. Three small figures—boys or girls, you couldn’t tell under the flour that dusted them—were at the huge wooden table in the middle of the room, trying desperately to gather the pastry scraps to roll into something resembling a pie crust. Another child—no more than seven or eight—fed wood into a small fire by the far wall, while a taller one stirred a great black pot that simmered with the smell of warmed cider and made Gerard’s stomach rumble. Despite everything that had happened, his body was still concerned about being fed.
Cook’s massive form had clearly fallen too close to one of the cookfires and been dragged away; Gerard saw soot and a few singe marks on the man’s clothing. He lay on his back on the floor, the older assistants likewise scattered in sleeping disarray around him.
“What’s happening?” one of the children called as he saw Gerard in the doorway, not pausing in his work as he spoke.
Gerard could only shake his head. Only ten remained awake in the kitchen, of the thirty or more bodies he could count, and the oldest of them looked perhaps all of eleven years old.
Thinking quickly, Gerard realized that he was likely the oldest person still awake in the entire castle! It was a sobering thought. He put it aside for the moment in order to deal with more immediate problems.
“Come with me,” he ordered the children. “No, wait, stay here.” They were doing the right thing. If they couldn’t get the adults to wake up, they would still need to eat. “Move the sleepers out of the way, and make sure the food doesn’t burn. Don’t worry about making anything more for the feast; nothing fancy, just basic foods. Can you do that?” He directed his questions to the oldest, most steady-looking of the bunch, a boy with huge brown eyes and a smudge of something dark across his face.
“Yes,” the boy responded promptly, clearly relieved to be given specific instructions. As Gerard turned to leave, he heard the kitchen boy calling out instructions to the others in a sweet, piping voice.
Somehow Gerard didn’t think anything else was going to be that easy. The sound of children’s raised voices crying and shouting as he came closer to the Great Hall confirmed his fears. He bypassed the feast, instead heading to the huge outer doors and into the courtyard. Perhaps whatever was happening was restricted to the building itself.
But outside, under the clear black sky, the situation was much the same. The guards posted to the castle’s perimeter had slumped against the crenellations. Their dogs, cousins to the hound inside, sniffed anxiously at their masters’ hands.
Gerard found himself retracing his steps of that afternoon, back to the stables. But inside, he found horses unattended and the stable workers asleep in the straw. Gerard looked for the stable boy he had fought with—Newt—but didn’t see him among the sleepers. He paused to move some of the men who had fallen dangerously close to their charges’ hooves, and made sure all the horses were secured, before