Above the Snowline (45 page)
To watch the kiln, the woodsmen, prospectors and their families sat around the outside edge of the square. And in the space left for safety between the fire and the tables, servants walked to and fro with laden plates and jugs of beer. Here, a little girl stuffed her face with bread; there, a boy fed Snowblink under the table.
‘I thought I was late,’ I said. ‘But I see there’s no clay yet.’
‘It will be brought in shortly,’ said Raven. ‘In the meantime, please help yourself.’
‘Thank you, my lord.’
Imagine me rubbing shoulders with two Eszai and the king’s brother! Rachiswater and Micawater, a Lakeland full house - if I cared for distinguished company I might find myself flustered. But I’d much rather meet Tornado. Out of all the Eszai I loved hearing tales of his exploits best. He could be handy around the Frozen Hound; he appreciates a pie and mash, and; tell me true, what woman would turn down the opportunity of exploring a mountain of solid muscle?
Lightning’s bearing showed he was used to being the centre of attention and I made up my mind there and then not to be impressed. But I couldn’t stop looking at his broad shoulders and the girth of his biceps, which, with the rest of his big frame, were very graceful. His eyes were somewhat baggy and the beginnings of blond stubble was rather a shame as it hid his jaw. He wore his hair below shoulder level and tied in a ponytail, odd for an Awian, as long hair is a sign of mourning. Unlike Jant I wouldn’t find him lying drunk on my floor . . . I think.
A procession of servants emerged from the staircase and everyone gave a shout. The first ten waiters bore huge bowls of water. All our excited conversations grew louder as they walked among the tables, leaving a hand basin on each. A lad placed one in front of me, and I looked down to see dried blue petals floating on delightfully rose-scented water.
Now they brought the clay! It was very black and clean, in smooth domes like gigantic puddings, each on a silver salver. A servant placed one before Raven. It had been embossed in a mould with holly and ivy leaves. Sprigs of mistletoe decorated the top and it had been embossedbrushed with water to make it shine. ‘Carniss clay!’ proclaimed Raven. ‘As good as any in the lowlands, I promise you.’
‘It looks edible,’ I said and everyone laughed.
Raven picked up a palette knife. ‘For months I’ve been sending out patrols searching for the right type. Eventually they found this in the glacier outwash. It’s perfect.’
Lightning teased, ‘I bet you tested it thoroughly.’
‘Of course,’ said Raven seriously. ‘A fifty-fifty chance. I’m certain it will work.’ He sliced into the dome with the mock ceremony of a groom cutting a wedding cake. Grit scratched on the knife; he cut the dome into five segments and motioned that I should take the first. I held out my plate and received a slice.
‘As usual, every dome of clay contains one gold acorn. Who has it? Who’s the lucky one?’
I pressed my clay flat. ‘Not me.’
The servants brought a stand of five bowls, each containing coloured powder. Raven spun the stand and the bowls revolved like a spice tray. ‘We have blue, red, green, pink and purple. I will be blue. Ouzel, what colour do you want?’
‘Pink, my lord.’
‘Green!’ said Jant.
‘Lightning?’ Raven asked.
‘I will be red.’
‘That leaves Snipe with purple. To match his bruise, eh, Jant?’
We each took a dish and kneaded the coloured powder into our clay. The clay was smooth but contained the tiny quartzite grains that weather out of Darkling granite. It was not as silky as Rachiswater clay but still malleable and delightfully cold to the touch. I dug my fingers in and started rolling it into a sausage. What animal will I make to carry my wish into the new year? A rat, perhaps? No, an otter - sleek and playful. I tore off a piece and rolled it into a tail, then started sculpting an otter’s frisky body as best I could.
‘I’ve got the acorn!’ said Snipe.
‘Finders keepers,’ said Raven. How could he seem so cheerful when he was hiding so much?
Jant separated his clay into several chunks and moulded them into complicated shapes, but on his other side Lightning was very adeptly fashioning a deer. He pulled the clay into legs with elegantly minimal curves, and nipped one end of the body into a stylised head with an arched neck.
‘That’s beautiful,’ I said.
Jant grinned and shrugged. ‘He makes the same thing every year.’
With a few deft impressions of the edge of his fork, Lightning gave it eyes and criss-cross shading on its flank. He plucked two holly leaves from the wreath left on the platter and poked them into the deer’s head to form elk horns. Then he placed it on his plate and it stood with sophistication. ‘A wish deer,’ he said. He cupped his hands around it and whispered into them as if telling the deer a vital secret.
‘What are you wishing for?’ asked Jant.
Lightning leant back. ‘You should know by now that if you tell anyone, it doesn’t work.’
‘Rubbish. I bet you can all guess who
I’m
wishing for.’
I’m
wishing for.’
Lightning glanced at him and he fell quiet. Raven seemed to be making an eagle, and on his other side Snipe was elongating his clay into an S, but I couldn’t tell what animal he was making. I concentrated on my otter, which was not proceeding to plan. The clay was too soft for it to stand and it kept sagging. I decided it would have to be an otter couchant, lying in the way my dogs sleep, with its tail wrapped around its nose. Jant peered at it. ‘What’s that? A dormouse? Or a toad? A wish toad?’
‘It’s an otter,’ I said, laughing.
‘An otter that’s been run over?’
‘It’s not finished!’
‘This is not a competition,’ said Lightning.
‘Ha ha, I am pretty crap at it,’ I conceded, then vaguely wondered if that was the correct way to address an Eszai.
‘Well, it looks very much like an otter to me,’ said Raven. ‘At home in the River Rachis.’
‘Thank you, my lord.’ I picked up my knife and scored hairs in its tail.
Around us the shouts, as people found their acorns, had all finished and conversations were a low murmur as everyone concentrated on fashioning their Wishes. Occasional bouts of laughter broke out as they appraised each other’s efforts or gave up making difficult animals and plumped for snakes or owls. When I had finished my otter I held it in cupped hands and whispered, ‘Hello, otter. This year I have a new wish. I wish that Raven’s selfish Awians and Dellin’s militant Rhydanne would
fuck off
out of Carniss so that peaceful Rhydanne and Awians can continue trading more profitably than ever before.’
fuck off
out of Carniss so that peaceful Rhydanne and Awians can continue trading more profitably than ever before.’
‘What did you wish for?’ asked Jant.
‘The same as always. That next year my trade will be better than ever and that Macan will continue to grow strong and healthy.’
He wrinkled his nose as if he considered this boring.
‘It
is
supposed to be a secret,’ I added. ‘If you find other people’s secrets commonplace, you have only yourself to blame for asking.’
is
supposed to be a secret,’ I added. ‘If you find other people’s secrets commonplace, you have only yourself to blame for asking.’
Raven used his signet ring to impress his shoot-at-the-moon emblem on his eagle, and set it on his plate. It stood clasping a clay mountaintop with crooked claws and its beak had a very disdainful expression. Snipe had finished his model too, a lizard with holly berry eyes, but Jant was still sculpting intently.
‘It doesn’t have to be perfect,’ Lightning told him. ‘It is only a game.’
‘Perfection is in the eye of the beholder!’ Jant dipped his fingers in our hand-washing water, gave his sculpture a shine, and placed it on his plate. He had made a model of himself! A tiny Jant, unmistakable with roguish face, sitting cross-legged with a platter on his knees as if it was making a smaller model.
‘You’re supposed to make an animal,’ I said, laughing.
‘Raven insists that the Rhydanne
are
animals.’
are
animals.’
‘Jant!’ said Lightning. ‘Not now!’
‘Who better to carry my wishes into eighteen ninety-one than myself?’
I placed my admittedly rather squashed-looking otter with the rest of our Wishes onto the platter and a servant carried them down to the kiln. Throughout the hall, servants were collecting wish animals from all the tables: salvers full of black clay hedgehogs, rabbits and piglets, robins, tiny dormice and fat marmots. All were decorated with berries and leaves that the revellers had found to hand, but only ours were coloured. It’s the perk of the High Table to be first to know whether our Wishes will come true. Everyone else had to wait till morning, when they could pick over the cooled trays of ceramic figurines on display on the trestles and discover whether their animal had shattered or not.
The servants carefully took the animals - a huge, inventive variety so every maker could identify his Wish tomorrow - and placed them on great iron trays. They slid each tray into the kiln on runners. Ours was first to go in and, for an instant, I saw the silhouettes of our figurines black against the flames. Then the flames roared high; blue, green and red leapt from the top of the kiln and the audience watching cooed, ‘Ooh!’
Meanwhile, more serving boys were bringing in the feast. Two lads carried between them a whole roast ox on a tray more like a stretcher. They placed it in front of us then moored gravy boats and ramekins of hot horseradish sauce around it.
‘Amazing!’ I said. ‘It’s as big as a man!’
Jant choked on his beer and it frothed up over the rim of his glass onto the table.
‘What’s the matter?’
He glared and wiped his mouth. ‘As big as a man? Help yourself to him.’
I dealt some slices of beef onto my plate and poured on strong Bitterdale blue cheese sauce with mushrooms. Then came baskets of roast potatoes, tureens of crisp swede and parsnips glazed with honey, sauerkraut, carrots and peas shining with vinegar from the pickling jar, baked batter puddings, fried rice balls stuffed with figs and sultanas, and sausages wrapped in bacon. Platters clustered around the ox till there was no room left on the table.
Raven must be pining for a traditional Awian New Year. If the sweet course was just as customary I might almost be prepared to forgive him for wrecking my trade. I loved plum pudding in a moat of double cream and packed with cherries, almonds, all kinds of candied fruit, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Not to mention a festive splash of brandy.
Every table bore the same. The serving boys were queuing up on the staircase outside and bringing in ox after ox, roasted as dark as mahogany and lying with their legs tied on their trays. Domestics in Raven’s new livery entered to carve them and slices of rich meat accrued on the platters.
‘There’s nothing Darkling here at all,’ said Jant.
‘Nothing Rhydanne, you mean,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘We should ask Raven to give us some kutch.’
‘I think that would be a very bad idea.’
‘What is kutch?’ asked Lightning, leaning forward to look at me over Jant’s heaped plate.
‘A drink the Rhydanne brew,’ he said. ‘Any kind of meat stewed with any kind of alcohol.’
‘Often with water, blood or milk,’ I added. ‘It makes a sort of broth.’
Lightning considered this. ‘By god,’ he said, at length. ‘The horror.’
I ate happily, looking at the gorgeous decorations. All the beams were bedecked with satin ribbons and gloriously fat scarlet and pearl-white baubles. Each one reflected the flames of the two fireplaces and the flickering kiln. Wreaths draped the fireplaces, too; boughs of berried ivy looped up to bunches of mistletoe, with gold pine cones and purple baubles in their centres. Between the fireplaces was an enormous portrait of Raven looking haughty astride a black horse, but its grandiose frame was hidden by tinsel made of foil and silk, which fluttered in the rising heat. Decorations of gold bees and acorns - symbols of hard work and the subsequent rewards - hid among the tinsel. Beside the painting hung an ornate brass pendulum clock, at which everyone kept glancing. It now showed half past nine.
Whether it was accurate to Starglass time or not we didn’t care. It was Carniss time, our own time in this bizarre bubble Raven had made, and we were waiting excitedly for its twelve chimes to bring in midnight and eighteen ninety-one. A quartet of musicians, two violins, one viola and one cello, arranged themselves on chairs at the foot of the dais and began playing. Raven brightened considerably on hearing the first bars and nodded to Lightning. ‘They’re far from their best in this damn climate, but listen how they play
The Comic Turn
.’
The Comic Turn
.’
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