Homage and Honour (14 page)

Beth had met
him early on during her time at Vada but it wasn’t until later that
Anton decided that he would like to get to know her better. He had
realised as soon as she had uttered her first words that she
originated from the Southern Continent. He kept this knowledge to
himself but, remembering his first trying months when he had
vadeln-paired with Susya, he had resolved to help her. A talk
between his Susya and his friend Harld’s Alya might also have had
something to do with his decision. Anton’s and Susya’s duties might
be restricted to the cookhouse now but they still kept in touch
with their old friends.

By now, Anton
and Beth had struck up a friendship and Beth found herself looking
forward to the bells when she did chore-time in the kitchens.

Today, Anton
intended to make a dish called junket and Beth was going to help
him.

He beckoned her
over once she had donned the apron, required attire for his kitchen
workers, after making sure that the other cadets were applying
themselves to the jobs in hand under the watchful eyes of the
undercooks.

A pleased Beth
joined him at the worktable.

“Junket today
Beth,” he announced gesturing at the items laid out on the table.
“It’s a nutritious and tasty dish if it’s prepared right and
popular too, especially the way I make it.”

“Junket?” she
queried, the word was new to her.

“Yes, junket.
You’ve eaten it yourself. It takes a while to make but is worth it.
Look, I’ve already measured out the milk. It’s in that large cook
pot.”

Beth asked what
was in the covered dish standing beside the pot.

“That’s the
rennet,” explained Anton. “The other, smaller dish contains the
flavouring that we’re going to add. In fact, I’ve left the
sweetener on the shelf in the pantry. Go fetch it for me will
you?”

But Beth made
no move to do as he asked. She stood in front of Anton, a
bewildered expression on her face.

“What’s wrong
Beth?”

Beth was
feeling sick. “I’d never have eaten it if I’d known,” she managed
to get out. “If someone had told me that there was
that
in
it I would have spat it out. Why it’s just horrible!” She
shivered.

Anton’s
eyebrows rose. He couldn’t imagine why she was so upset.

What neither of
them realised was that Beth was confusing the word rennet with the
word jennet. Anton had a speech impediment that made him apt to
shorten the first consonants of his words. He realised that this
was another of those times.

“Rennet,” he
repeated, emphasising the first consonant.

It didn’t help.
Beth remained confused and shocked.

A jennet was a
southern term for a certain type of horse, usually ridden by
noblewomen. It was noted for its smooth ambling gait, was around
fourteen hands high and had a gentle disposition, thus considered
the perfect mount for females to whom fast, rough riding and
hunting was forbidden.

Beth’s mother
rode a jennet, a fine-boned animal that Beth had been permitted to
ride once or twice.

She thought
Anton was about to prepare a dish made out of milk and horsemeat.
She had also never heard of a dish that mixed milk and meat and
when Anton had mentioned sweetener she had begun to think that he
had gone slightly mad.

She backed
away, “I don’t think I want to help cook that.”

“Why ever not?”
asked the confused Anton. “It’s a very tasty pudding.”

“Pudding? A
pudding made out of
meat
?”

Anton tried to
work out why Beth believed he was about to make a pudding out of
meat. Enlightenment came after a few moments and he burst into a
cheery laugh. “My dear girl,” he said, “I said rennet, not jennet.”
He chortled and one or two nearby looked up to see what the joke
was. “I can see I’ll have to be more careful with my words when
you’re around.”

Beth
blushed.

“Junket,”
explained Anton, “is a pudding, a dessert, made out of milk,
sweetening and
rennet
. Rennet isn’t even made out of any
part of an animal although in the dim and distant past it was. A
jennet
is a horse.”

Beth emitted an
embarrassed laugh, “I did confuse the two rather didn’t I? Silly
mistake. I seem to be making a lot of them lately.”

“Nerves,” Anton
said, “try to relax Beth, go with the flow and try to enjoy
yourself.”

“I’m scared of
making more mistakes.”

“But because
you are nervy you are making mistakes, believe me, I know. I’ve
been there, so keen to prove that I, as a southerner, was as good
as the next and blundering into things, saying stupid things. Stop;
take a deep breath and listen. Listen to what your instructors are
telling you and only take action when you really understand.”

: Man is
right :
Xei advised her
: he understands. I tell you later
of some things he said and did when he first became cadet :

“Xei?” queried
Anton, noting her abstracted face.

“Yes, he says
…”

“I can
imagine,” mock-grimaced Anton, “Susya still harks back to those
days when she feels I need taking down a peg or two. Compared with
what I did and said, your confusion of rennet and jennet pales into
insignificance. One day soon we’ll have a long chat about the
differences between our former lives and now.”

“I would like
that,” said Beth, who was by now beginning to laugh at her mistake.
“So what exactly is rennet?”

“Rennet is an
enzyme, we don’t need to go into details about what that is,
suffice to say that it solidifies parts of the milk and causes it
to separate into solids and liquids. It used to be made from the
stomachs of young animals, such as cows. That’s still how it is
done in the South. Their cheeses are solidified using animal
rennet. Here we don’t have any cows, the stomachs of the native
kura and zarova are different and don’t produce the enzymes. Here
we use other ingredients to produce the rennet. We extract the
enzymes from vegetables and roots. Most roots endemic to Rybak have
coagulating properties, especially whiteroot.”

“What does
coagulating mean?”

“It’s the verb
meaning the solidification of liquid such as the separation from
cheese-milk into curds and whey.”

Beth understood
that, remembering her governess’s patient instructions as to how
cheese was made in the cool dairy adjoining the castle kitchens. It
was part of a noble girl’s training to understand how the household
was ordered and how it worked. Not that Beth had been able to
experience the actual making of the dairy produce, but she knew the
theory of how the processes worked.

“So how do we
make junket?”

Anton smiled at
her enthusiasm, “to begin with we heat the milk and add the
sweetener, so you go off to the pantry and get it while I put the
pot on the stove.”

When Beth
returned she was set to spooning six measures of sweetening into
the milk. Anton told her to stand by the pot and stir it with the
huge wooden-handled ladle to make sure that it heated evenly and
did not stick. He told her to watch as he dissolved the rennet in
water before adding it to the pot.

“Keep
stirring,” he said, peering into it, “and let me know when it
begins to boil.” He then left her for a while, she, anxiously
stirring, whilst he went off to oversee what else was happening in
his kitchens.

Beth was
beginning to enjoy herself. Anton looked over from time to time but
she seemed to be coping with her task. He was surprised however,
when he looked over to find Beth not at her position beside the
stove but supervising two of the male kitchen workers as they
carried the steaming pot over to the long table next to the cold
room where it could cool before being transferred into the said
room to set.

He nodded to
himself, pleased to see this show of initiative. Who she had asked
what to do next when she had realised that he was too busy to
attend to her, he never found out.

This incident
marked the beginning of Beth’s independence, the first time since
she had arrived at the Stronghold that she had thought out the
problem, come to a decision and acted upon it.

Anton would
build on this show of confidence during the months ahead.

Incidentally,
Beth became almost the only member of the cadet fraternity who
actually enjoyed cookhouse duty, especially the bells she spent
helping Anton concoct some of the delicious dishes for which he was
famous.

* * * * *

Dunthed (First Month of Winter) –
AL156

Quartet (3)

It was the
first long leave for the junior cadets.

Hannah and
Kolyei were to spend their leave in Argyll at her parent’s farm.
She was to act as escort for young Robain and Balindifya who were
also returning home for a visit.

After waving
goodbye to them, Jess and Tana, followed by the more sedate Beth
made their way to Ryzcka Melody’s office to sign out on their own
account.

“You’re all
going to Jess’s parents?” queried the pleasant-faced woman, adding,
“I hope they know what they’re letting themselves in for!”

“That’s not
fair,” exclaimed an indignant Tana.

The woman in
charge of the senior cadets laughed, “have a good time and don’t be
late back. If you are you’ll be on fatigues duty for at least a
month!”

They all
resolved to be back with plenty of time to spare.

At the farm
that was their destination, Jess’s mother Anne was readying herself
for the onslaught. She had decided to put all three girls and their
Lind in the main parlour of the farmhouse. The family bedrooms were
upstairs and access was by way of a narrow and steep wooden
stairway, impossible for the Lind to negotiate without a lot of
trouble. She pushed the furniture against one wall and brought in
three large truckle beds for the visitors to sleep on. There was no
question of relegating their four-pawed guests to sleep outside in
the barn.

“It’ll be a bit
of a squash,” she said to her daughter Annette, “but I don’t
suppose they’ll mind.”

“Shall I bring
in the covers Mummy, now that the mattresses are in place?”

“You could do
that,” she assented, “where are Xavier and Ruth?”

“Out in the
root garden I think,” she answered, “you asked Xavier to dig out
enough for tea.”

“So I did,”
Anne replied and, when her second daughter returned, helped lay out
the pillows and blankets. “Thank the Lai our kitchen is a large one
otherwise this visit would be more than a little
uncomfortable.”

“When do they
arrive?”

“Before dusk I
expect. They’ll be hungry too so we’d better have the meal ready.
Your father will be returning from the narrow field he is
ploughing, he said he wanted to be here to greet them.”

“I wonder what
Tana and Beth are like,” mused Annette as she watched her mother
rearrange one of the beds to her satisfaction and plump up the
feather eiderdown. “Jessica didn’t say much when she wrote.”

“They’ll be
much like your sister,” Anne replied, “anxious to enjoy their
leave-time and experience family life again after all those months
in the barracks.”

“Will Jess have
changed much?”

“Shouldn’t
think so,” said her mother and Annette had to be content with
that.

Of their
guests, Tana was looking forward to exploring the countryside
around the Crawford farm. Tavei had even indicated that they might
cross the river into the rtathlains of the Lind themselves, time
permitting.

Beth was
looking forward to the more simple pleasure of experiencing what
she had been told was a ‘normal’ family life here in Vadath. Jess
explained that they would all have jobs to do, a busy farm like the
Crawford one had no room for passengers, welcome guests or not.

Jess just
wanted to see her family again.

The girls’
excitement infected their Lind and it was with bouncy springing
steps that they topped the rise that overlooked the Crawford farm
and surveyed the scene below.

As was usual in
this area of the continent, the farmhouse and outbuildings were
made of wood. The former was a long, low-gabled building with a
sloping roof and dormer windows peeking out through the ivy. The
house, Jess had informed them, was an old one, having been built
not long after the Battle of Trumpet Keep.

“Has your
family lived here since then?” asked Tana.

“No. My
great-grandmother purchased the farm.”

“Where did your
family live before?”

“Northern
Argyll I believe, but I don’t know much about it. If you’re
interested, ask my grandmother. She’s fond of old stories.”

“Does she live
with you?”

“Yes, she’s
getting on a bit and can’t get upstairs. She has her own room on
the ground floor at the back looking out over the vegetable garden.
Nothing wrong with her mind though, she’s as sharp as a tack.”

Tana was
looking at the ordered fields before her and Jess, seeing her gaze,
pre-empted her next question.

“Root crops and
maize. It’s a mixed farm so we’ve also got a large herd of kura and
another larger one of zarova. Father is one of the Vada’s main
suppliers.”

“I hope he has
kept some good meaty ones for us,” said Mlei, licking his lips.

Jess laughed,
“he promised me he would. He remembers how hungry you always are
and how appreciative.”

Mlei ‘sent’ a
fleeting feeling of pleasurable anticipation to Jess and both Tavei
and Xei picked this up if their brightening expressions were
anything to go by. The Lind all enjoyed a hunt but were certainly
not averse to munching on well-fed domestic beasts when they were
available.

“I can see
Mother,” cried an excited Jess. “She’s waiting at the door. Can you
see?”