He tapped on the door—he didn’t even know whose house this was, only that it was moderately sized, and wasn’t Master Soren’s. A frazzled kitchen-maid answered it. Her apron was splashed and stained with whatever she had just been working on, and there was flour in her hair.
“Got work?” he asked, dully.
“Mebbe. Stay here,” she replied, and scuttled off. She came back with a broad man in a white shirt and enveloping apron.
The red-faced, balding cook eyed him, frowning. “One of our boys ran off. You gonna run off?”
“Nossir,” he mumbled, not looking at the cook, since that would be insolence.
“I ’spect hard work outa you. You don’t work, you get beat. You understand?”
“Yessir.” He looked at his feet.
“You get eats, and a bed at the fire. Twice a year, get a suit of clothes and three pennies. Understood?”
“Yessir.” He bobbed his head. “Thenkee sir.”
The cook shoved him inside the door, then to a place at a sink already full of hot water, soap, and pots. “Get to work.”
Evidently the staff here was considered large enough to keep two potboys busy; the other one was younger than Mags, but they were about the same size. And the size of the stack they were to clean was daunting. So, the household—or the cook—was frugal when it came to staffing. There was too much work for just two small boys, unless one of them was Mags, who threw himself into the job in a way that made the cook grunt with surprise and satisfaction.
This, at least, was one thing he could do right. With pumice stone and harsh soap, he attacked each pot as if it was his life. Unlike his life, he could clean this mess up. The cook was not stingy about hot water and soap, ordering them to change it whenever it got merely warm and not when it was as foul and cold as a sewer.
He did two pots for every one of the other boy’s, which made the other boy glower at him when the cook shouted abuse at him for not keeping up. Mags didn’t care. It wasn’t as if he was going to try and make friends ever again. So he kept his head down and his shoulders hunched over, and eventually the boy stopped bothering even to glare at him.
The other boy reminded him of the mine-kiddies, with his sullen looks and grunts instead of speaking—shoulders hunched much like Mags, and hair falling down over his face and into his eyes. But he didn’t look ill-fed, and there weren’t a lot of bruises on him. Maybe the cook beat him for assumed shirking, but it didn’t look as if people in this kitchen were beaten for no reason other than that the cook wanted to beat someone.
All afternoon they scrubbed the luncheon pots, which were snatched out of their hands as soon as they finished and pressed into service for dinner. Mags concentrated every bit of his mind on getting the pots so clean they were slick under his fingers. When the last of the pile was clean, he turned to look for more.
There weren’t any, and the other boy scuttled across the kitchen, a rapid sort of slinking walk that, again, was much as the mine-kiddies used to do. He sidled over to a table in an alcove, where the remains of the kitchen staff luncheon was. After a moment, Mags trudged over there too.
It appeared that the kitchen staff was fed on what the masters of the house left over, and right now, after everyone else had picked the remains over, what was left for him and the other boy looked like the aftermath of a plague of insects. Mostly what remained were odds and ends of bread, the crusts from pies, and some bits of vegetable. Some pickles. A little fruit. In terms of bulk, they wouldn’t go hungry. The other boy pounced on anything that looked like it had gravy or sauce on it, hunted for scraps of cheese or shreds of meat. He gathered his finds greedily to him, glaring at Mags.
Mags didn’t even bother picking things over, he just shoved whatever was nearest into his mouth, not even tasting it, just mechanically chewing and swallowing until his stomach told him he was full. Dully, he noted the other kitchen staff looked all right—not starved, and they didn’t cringe much. It looked as if he’d fallen into a situation where he was going to survive all right.
They weren’t given a moment of rest though, and no time for the sort of banter and gossip he’d seen in the Collegium kitchen—and others. They were working every moment, the head cook looming over them and lashing 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.