Sighing, Ivis and Cob heaved themselves up, and the others followed. Gird led them to the waterfall. Once well wet, the men cheered up and began joking, splashing each other. Pidi had found a clump of soaproot, and sliced off sections with his knife. Soon the creek was splattered with heavy lather.
When Gird felt that the grime and sweat of the past days was finally gone, he washed his clothes as best he could, and saw the bloodstains from Parin and Rahi fade to brownish yellow. The other men watched him, curious, but some of them fetched their own ragged garments and tumbled them in the water. Gird smiled when he saw them laying out the wet clothes on bushes, as he was doing. Diamod brought him a clump of leaves.
“Here—rub this on, and the flies will stay away. Otherwise you’ll be eaten up by the time your things are dry.”
“I should’ve washed clothes first—now it’s near nightfall. But I have a spare shirt.”
“Most of them don’t.”
But even in dirty clothes, the men stank less, and carried themselves less furtively. Gird, with a clean shirt tickling his bare knees, suggested another change in their customs.
“Why not bake a hearthcake on one of these stones? Twouldn’t be bread, exactly, but it would be hot, and cooked—”
“If we had honey we could have honeycakes, an’ we had grain,” said Triga. Gird began to take a real dislike to Triga.
“There’s always bees in a wood,” he said crisply. “And stings to a bee, for all that.”
“There’s none knows how to make the batter, Gird,” said Ivis. “We’ve no mill or flour. All we know is crush the grain and soak it—if you know better, teach us that.”
Gird thought of the millstones left behind—but he could not have carried them and Rahi. He looked at the stones used as seats, and found one with a slightly hollowed surface. Then he went to the creekside, and looked for cobbles. He could feel the other men watching him, as if he were a strange animal, a marvel. But millstones, the cottage millstones, were no different. A hollowed stone, like a bowl, and the grinder. Some people had flatter ones, with a broader grinder. It had to be fine-grained stone, and hard. He picked up several cobbles he liked, and hefted them, felt along their smooth curves with a careful finger. Yes.
Ivis had the grainsack out for him when he returned. Gird wondered if it was grain he’d grown, or someone else’s contribution. It didn’t matter. He dipped a small handful, and poured it onto the stone, then rubbed with the cobble. It wasn’t the right shape—neither the bottom stone nor the grinder—and the half-ground grain wanted to spit out from under and fall off. He worked steadily, ignoring the others, pushing the meal back under the grinder with his finger. He was careful not to lick it, as he would have at home: thin as they all were, they must be keeping famine law, when all the food was shared equally.
When the first handful was ground to a medium meal, he brushed it into a wooden bowl that Ivis had brought. It was not enough to make any sort of bread for all of them, but he could test his memory. Cob brought him a small lump of tallow, and he took a pinch of salt from the saltbag he’d brought himself. Meal, water, fat, salt—not all he liked in his hearthcakes, but better than meal and water alone. He stirred it in the wooden bowl, while the fire crackled and Pidi brushed off the flattest of the stones facing the firepit. The tallow stayed in its lump, stubborn, and Gird remembered that he needed to heat it. He skewered it on a green stick, and held it over the fire, catching the drips in the bowl. Finally it melted off, and he stirred it in quickly. He felt the stone, and remembered that he should have greased it. The stick he’d used for the tallow was greasy now; he rubbed his fingers down it, and then smeared the stone. The stone was hot, but was it hot enough? He poured the batter out. It stiffened almost at once, the edges puckering. Hot enough. With his arm, he waved heat toward it, to cook the upper surface. Mali had had the skill to scoop up the hearthcakes and flip them, but the only times he’d tried it, they’d fallen in the fire.
The smell made his mouth water and his belly clench. He looked up, and saw hungry looks on all the faces. Now the upper side was stiff and dull—dry, and browning. He hoped he’d put enough tallow on the rock, He slid a thin twig under it, and it lifted. He got his fingers on it—hot!—and flipped it to Ivis. Ivis broke it in pieces—each man had a small bite—and then it was gone. But if his fighting had gotten their respect, this had gotten their interest.
“I thought you were a farmer, not a cook,” said Ivis.
“My wife was sick a lot, that last few years.” Gird gestured at the bowl. “May I give my son that?”
Ivis nodded. “Of course. It’s fair; he had none of the hearthcake itself.” Pidi grinned and began cleaning the batter from the bowl with busy fingers and agile tongue. “But tell us—what do we need?”
Gird thought about it. “Millstones—we can use this, but we can’t carry it along, not if the foresters come here. But we can put millstones in another place, if you have a particular place.”
“Where I came from, we all had to use the lord’s mill,” said Ivis.
Gird shrugged. “That was the rule for us, too, but most of us had handmills at home. Always had. The lord’s mill was a day’s journey away—we had no time for that. And then if you did go, you’d have to wait while he ground someone else’s, and might not get your own back. Anyway, we can have millstones for hand milling—it’ll take time, is the main thing. We can’t have bread every day. Tallow, we need, and a bit of honey if it’s available. Salt—I brought some with me, but we’ll need more—”
“There’s a salt lick downstream a bit,” said Cob. “I can show you.”
“And if we want lightbread, we’ll need a starter. Do you ever get milk?”
“D’you think we live in a great town market, where we can buy whatever we like?” asked Triga.
From the tone of the response, others were as tired of Triga’s complaints as Gird was. Gird waited until the others had spoken, then said “No, but I think you’re not so stupid as you act.” Cob grinned. Triga, predictably, scowled. Gird turned back to Ivis. “How long have you lived out here?”
“Me? A hand of years—five long winters. Artha’s been here longer, but most don’t stay that long. They move on, or they die.”
“You’ve done well, on beans and grain.”
“There’s more in the summer. We find herbs, do a little hunting, rob a hive once a year—no one wants to do it more, with all the stings we get. We do get milk sometimes, when we venture in close to a farmstead. Not all of us, o’ course. Milk, cheese, trade honey or herbs for a bit of cloth . . .”
Cloth, in fact, was one of the hardest things to come by. Gird, remembering his mother’s hours at the loom, and the value of each furl, did not wonder at this. To share food was one thing; to share the product of personal skill was another. The outlaws had learned to tan the hides of beasts they hunted—“Stick ’em in an oak stump that’s rotted and got water in it”—but good leather took more than that; many of the hides rotted, or came out too brittle to use for clothing.
As he listened to Ivis and Cob, and thought about all that this group needed, he thought back to his sergeant’s comments about the importance of supply. Soldiers did not grow their own food, or raise their own flocks, or build their own shelters—this, so they could have the time to practice soldiering. But these men would have to do it themselves. Could they do that, and learn to be soldiers as well?