Magic

MAGIC

by

Mary Ellen Rose

Chapter One

Ariel was loathe to return to the cottage.  Maude would be angry and Jason was gone to town and wouldn’t be there to turn Maude’s attention away.  She had three good sized fish in her net but that wouldn’t matter to Maude.  Howell would have been too active for her and Ariel was supposed to take care of Howell foremost.  But she also needed the fish and Howell wouldn’t hold still for fishing.  The scream startled her and she peered from her hiding place behind the willow copse. 

The horses in the yard said strangers.  She hadn’t wanted to meet them with Maude angry.  The scream stopped suddenly.  Not a good thing usually in her experience of the world.  At eight she had little of that but enough to know a scream suddenly stopped often meant something bad happened to the screamer and it had been Maude not Howell.  Three men came out one fancy and two armed.  They mounted up and rode away and the smoke pouring from the cottage said fire. 

As soon as the cottage hid her from the strangers view she ran to the garden wall and around to the garden gate and into the kitchen at the back of the cottage.  She grabbed the water bucket and went through the arch into the cottage proper.  Maude was on the floor and Howell and there was blood all over and a pile of broken furniture, and cloth and books was afire in the middle of the room.  She carefully threw the water onto the base of the flames and ran back to the cistern for more water.  Two more buckets put it out.  The roof hadn’t caught yet.

Maude and Howell were dead, their throats slashed.  Ariel pulled the books from the mess of the doused fire.  Only two were burned beyond use.  She took the survivors out and laid them in the sun along the top of the garden wall.  She went around to the horse shed.  Jason was there, dead, his chest pierced with a large wound.  They were all gone.  She could not stay, without Jason and Maude to care for her and protect her, someone would kill her or take her in as a drudge and she would be enslaved for life, short as it would be.  She knew from Maude’s scoldings that she would not make a very good servant let alone slave.  She must leave here and soon.  She was not strong enough to bury them, but she rolled them up in a sheet from the bed, and pulled them to one side so she could work.

She would need food, shelter, clothes but only what she could carry on the horse.  The horse had wandered down in the willows by the stream.

She went to the kitchen and found bread and cheese and a wooden plate and bowl and two good knives and two spoons; a small pot with a lid and the tinder box with flint and steel; a bag of oats, a small cone of sugar, a bag of salt, and half a bag of flour.  She bagged up the small packets of dried vegetables she had made already this summer.  In the small lidded crock she placed a spoonful of ‘mother’ and some flour for her yeast and tied it shut.  She packed the two market baskets made to fit on the horse.  She had room to add a flask of oil, some packets of herbs, pocket soup, a heavy pottery mug, a wooden cooking spoon, a small folding candle lantern and the last five candles plus the stubs from the candle holders in the cottage. 

She gathered up her own clothes and added some of Maude’s sturdier dresses.  She would out grow her own soon enough.  She rolled up her bedding, then rolled Howell’s good wool blanket around it and tied the roll to go behind her saddle.  She took Jason’s saddle bags and took out his fancy clothes and rolled up his good leather pants and his woolen socks and repacked them.  She found his riding boots.  She could wear them if she stuffed them with grass and wore two pairs of heavy wool socks.  She took his heavy, oiled black wool cloak as well as her own blue wool cloak.  Looking around the cottage, she took her mothers small lap harp from the wall and placed it in its case; she would tie that on toward the last in a safe place to keep it from being broken.

She took Mother’s pretty set of brushes and mirror from Maude’s chest and what was left of Mother’s jewelry.  She took out the sewing tidy and turned up the hem of the large black cloak sewing the jewelry in as she worked.  She refurbished the kit and added to it and replaced it and the leather care kit into their respective small pockets in the saddle bag.  She had always been fascinated by Jason’s saddle bags they were very fancy and had everything a guardsman would need for a journey, all tucked away in little pockets and bags for easy use.  She added her journal and Jason’s and then her father’s writing kit with its ink sticks, stone, and brass water and ink containers in their special roll.  She packed up the dry books in a blanket, folding the cloth around them to protect them and packing them into an oiled canvas bag.

In the horse shed, Ariel rolled Jason up in the other sheet and rolled the body out of the way.  She harnessed the pony and called the harnessed horse in for a treat.  With some help from a kitchen stool she was able to saddle the horse and attach the saddle bags and fit the market baskets, padded with wool blankets, across the saddle.  She covered her bags with some canvas from the cart and was able to add a few tools to the load.  A hatchet, the axe was too big, a garden trowel and hand rake, her short hoe, a small hand sickle, a sharpening stone and her seed for next year in waterproof packages of oiled deer intestine, twine wound on a stick, a canvas bucket for water and the feed bags for the horses . She tied these bags across the saddle and over the market baskets and topped the load off with two bags of grain and oats for the horses and stuffed a hoof pick and curry brush into the bag of tools.  The harp was tied on top and it all was covered with a piece of oiled canvas Jason had used as a tent when they escaped the invasion, it would protect the bags from rain.

She saddled the pony and added her saddle bags; then tied her blanket roll behind the saddle covered with a piece of oiled canvas.  She put on Jason’s boots and placed her wooden clogs in a net bag and tied it to the saddle on the right side.  She tied his short sword scabbard to the left side, making sure she could draw it easily and tucked her sling and pebble bag into her belt and her quiver over her back, running her small bow through the loops provided on the right side of the saddle, she had to adjust her clogs.  She made sure her hair was tucked up under her coif and pulled on a wool knit cap to cover it, then a straw hat; and rolled her cloak into Jason’s and pulled it through the loop at the back of the saddle.  She was ready to go.

She placed her two best hens in their willow cage and tied it across the back of the pony behind the saddle, protecting the goods underneath with an old rug.  She tied the youngest nanny goat to the horses lead rein, then ran to the well and filled Jason’s leather bottle with fresh cool water and tied it to her saddle, mounted her pony and whistled for her dogs, Talia and Sonja.  She turned the pony out the back way toward the stream, the horse on a lead from its reins.  She let them drink at the stream, and rode up the stream for a while until it was difficult and then up over the hill to a different stream that went down a different valley.  She rode all day at a steady pace that didn’t tire the animals but put distance between her and the cottage.  When she found a good camping place she stopped for the night, making sure that there was a log she could use to resaddle the horse in the morning. 

Only when she was snug in her bedroll with a dog on either side did she allow herself to cry.  Jason and Maude had stayed with her and protected her for nearly three years.  Despite their failings as farmers they had been good people and loyal.  She would even miss Howell, who was after all only a baby of two.  She was completely alone now, in a very dangerous world.  She must find a safe place.

She avoided roads and houses and people and kept to the deep woods.  Eventually after six days of riding she found a place that looked likely for a permanent camp.  There was a stream with a small waterfall into a good sized pool and with a high sand bar beneath two enormous oaks with exposed roots making a sort of cave, well back from the water and high enough that it wouldn’t likely flood.  There was a small meadow behind the oaks and one large oak branch formed a shelter for the horses.  She made a small pen of willows for the hens and put the cage up on an oak root and covered the top and three sides with evergreen boughs.  She worked on her own shelter and fishing traps and snares and got busy preparing for winter. 

She dried fish and meat and roots and berries and gathered nuts; acorns, walnuts, and filberts.  She boiled edible roots and tubers to a mush and dried it and pounded it into flour.  She lined the back of the oak cave with slabs of slate and grouted them with clay rolls, covering the ceiling with matting held in place by springy willow branches wedged into the roots, and used this for a storage room.  She dug a kiln hole to one side of the meadow and lined it with rocks and fired clay pots and small crocks to store food in.  Ariel used all of the skills she had learned from Jason and the local farmer’s kids and some she thought of herself to prepare for the long winter ahead. 

The oak root cave front was walled in with wattle and daub beneath the roots and the outer side was covered with moss to help disguise it.  The floor was covered in slate, with several levels connected by ramps or steps; again reed matting covered the ceiling.  A stone fireplace, mortared with clay, was built where its chimney was concealed in a clay lined hollow tree that leaned slightly out over the pond and away from the living trees and their flammable leaves.  Windows were deep enough under the roots that the stretched oiled rabbit skins weren’t visible from the outside and the storm shutters were fashioned of mossy bark.  Her night/storm door was fashioned of branches and bark held in place by cross bars and the day time door was a blanket hung on a willow rod on the inside of the  wall.

Her bed was fashioned of small tree trunks wedged into a niche between roots and lined with daub, then filled with gravel and then a hands-width of sand well packed and a scant hands width of soft cedar tips covered by one of the canvas pack covers.

She unrolled her blankets over the canvas and filled a bag with her clean under clothes as a pillow.  She wedged a flat slate into a small niche behind the bed where it was supported by roots underneath and laid out her comb and brush and mirror and a little grass basket for her carved wooden hairpins and hair combs.  She lashed willow rod shelves for her folded clothes and the boots and kept her wooden clogs by the door.  There was an escape tunnel hidden in the back near the food storage that came up out in the meadow by the horse barn she was constructing over the living oak branch.  This was made of downed branches and small cut trees and willow branches all woven together, with daub covered walls inside and moss and rocks, bushes, and vines camouflaging the exterior.  The roof extended out over the chicken pen and cage which had become a nest box and there was room for the horse, pony and goats.  The nanny had produced two kids a male and a female and was happily producing milk, part of which Ariel made into cheese. 

Ariel stowed dried cut grass bundles under the barn roof in a half loft only about two feet from the underside of the roof.  It helped insulate the barn as well as store hay for rainy days.  She was building another shed to store hay in for the winter.  She had ‘fenced’ part of the meadow with willows and blackberry vines to discourage the horses from wandering in and had plowed the enclosed area as best she could; and planted oats and wheat.  She had cut the wild grasses with a sickle drying it for hay, and laboriously rolled up the sod to clear the land and worked it with a sharpened broken branch as a plow with the horse harnessed to it in seven different ways before they were through.  It was better than nothing and the grains were coming up

She built up small, irregularly shaped rock and stick beds around the meadow and the edge of the sandbar and filled them with a mixture of dried horse turds, mud and sand.  She used a few of her precious seeds to plant things that would produce before winter froze the plants.  A few small marrows and at some distance down the stream a few gourds; some small root vegetables: beets, and turnips, carrots and radishes, interspersed with lettuces and mustard greens.  She built cages of branched limbs to discourage deer and rabbits from eating the greens and poured urine on the rock around the edges to add another deterrent.

At all times she avoided anything that might look like a straight line or a man made structure, and transplanted bushes and vines to help hide her presence.

The dogs hunted every day as they always had, and almost always brought back a squirrel or two, a groundhog, or occasionally a grouse.  She shared and they adored being praised for their work.  Any extras were dried for winter.  Her fish traps were checked twice a day; after breakfast and before dinner.  Fish were eaten or dried and smoked for winter.  She made hard cheeses and hung them in net bags she made from plant fibers.  Some fibrous vines and nettles were retted weekly in a water filled dip in the rocks above the waterfall.  The sun warmed them each day and the fibers broke free with some judicious pounding to encourage the process.  By the end of the week she could separate out her fibers and dry them and then using the two small screens from her father’s kit she made paper from the leftover pulp.  Each week gave her enough fibers for several yards of twine or three times as much heavy thread, and enough pulp for one or two small pages for her journal.  She found that if she carefully heated the brass water cylinder and rolled it over the slightly damp pages with some pressure she could smooth the surface enough to write on.  She used unsmoothed pages to paint on with horsehair brushes and soot ink for black and colored clays for tan, red and cream.  She ground up well boiled bird bones and pounded them to make a white pigment and dyed it with vegetable matter for yellow, greens, blues and violets all of which faded with time, but she enjoyed the painting.  She kept her journal; writing a little each day.

She set aside time each day to write or paint and to swim in the pool and bathe.  She washed clothes during her swimming time and spent her afternoons finishing pots; or spinning thread to weave bags, straps, and nets; or making baskets of grasses, pine needles, or willows and vines.

Her mornings were for hard, dirty, sweaty work that required cleaning up before entering the house.  Her evenings were for playing the harp before she went to bed.

Chapter Two

Ariel was ready for winter when it came.  She tried to keep track of the days in her journal but didn’t worry to much as long as she wasn’t off too far.  She would check the equinoxes and midsummer and winter solstices to keep on track.  She would turn nine some time soon, January twelfth.  She celebrated Christmas by having a special meat and cheese pie and sharing it with the dogs and some crust for the goats and giving the horses and chickens extra grain.  She played carols on the harp and sang when she could remember the words.  Maude had not liked her to touch the harp but Jason had given her lessons every evening.

She read in the four salvaged books every day during the winter, when there was enough light.  One was poetry, one was mathematics, one was natural history and one was music.  They had been her father’s.  She had a smooth slate and a writing stick made of a dried roll of white clay and did her mathematics regularly.  She wrote poetry and stories on the new pages she made, saving the ‘good’ pages in her journal for her diary.  At the end of the winter when she was too busy for studies she would bind the new pages into a book.  She dated each poem and story.

She made an inkle loom from a piece of old log with several sturdy branches, and wove useful straps and tape to bind the seams of leather clothes. She made a make-shift set of carding combs from teasel pods and carded out the saved curryings from the goats, dogs and horses.  She spun the first two into yarn and the last was braided into cordage if it was long and stuffed into pillows and cushion if it was short..  She made a set of four short wooden needles for knitting socks and mittens from the hoarded ‘wool’.  Next winter she would have enough to knit a new pullover.  She was growing and would need to make over some of her clothes and some of Maude’s next winter.  She would need a cloth loom for weaving but would have to settle for a weighted hanging loom that could only hold a single piece of cloth not a whole roll like a floor loom.

Ariel let the dogs out several times a day and if it was not too cold they would hunt.  On one sunny day in early February, Sonja came back and made a circle around and around, the sign for ‘come with me’.  Ariel put on Jason’s boots and heavy cloak and followed her to where a doe had fallen through the ice and broken her leg.  Ariel cut the terrified deer’s throat to put it out of it’s misery and went back to the barn to get a rope and the horse.  They were able to rope her hind legs and pull her up over a branch so she could hang and bleed out.  Ariel butchered the deer as she had watched Jason do many times, cutting out the inner organs and separating the eatable, heart and liver for her and the kidneys for the dogs; from the usable, stomach, womb, bladder and intestines; from the waste, all the rest of the insides.  She had to lower the deer as she skinned it and then butchered the meat cutting each leg free at the joints and cutting the ribs off the backbone with the hatchet.

She made a sledge from some evergreen branches and wrapping the meat in the skin, had the horse pull the sledge back to the house where Ariel, with the horses help, hung the meat to freeze overnight.  She built a fire and cooked outside, eating as she worked at cutting the meat parcels smaller and then stripping in the cold and washing off by the fire inside and dressing warmly again,  she would have to keep the fire going all night and keep watch to keep predators away.  She had rinsed the bladder and cleared sections of the intestines in the icy stream and took them inside to soak.  By dawn she started carrying the chunks of frozen meat inside to the cold storage loft inside the hollow oak trunk.  It was above the house level and being more exposed it was much colder than the root cave.  She had broken up chunks of ice and stored them in there already and would have to add more to keep the meat.  She would have to slice it thin and dry some every day.  The dogs were ecstatic and full to bulging having eaten their full of ‘waste’.

There was no point in hunting for the rest of the winter.  Her traps would be oriented to furs only from now on.

She did not have a big enough kettle and would have to build a big bowl from clay, dry it slowly and build a fire inside of it to bake it hard.  It would not be as water tight but it was all she could do.  After it was fired she rubbed pine resin on the outside to make it more water tight and hoped the resin would not seep back through to disflavor the cooking soup.  It stopped seeping about the third night and she felt she had to keep it simmering to prevent mold from growing on the pot.  The main problem was cooking off the meat from the neck and backbone. She skimmed off the fat and saved it and then chopped the meat and mixing it with salt, some herbs and some of the reserved fat; stuffed it into the cleaned intestines to make sausages.  After straining out the meat she continued to cook the soup in smaller pots until it was thick enough to congeal when cooled and could be made into pocket soup.  The congealed mass was cut into cubes and freeze dried until it was hard.  Each cube would make a cup of soup.  Every four days she started all over again with a frozen chunk and ended up with three to five sausages to smoke, several packages of jerky, and a dozen or so soup cubes and three meals a day for all of them of course.

By the time the snow melted in late March she had long since finished making the sausages and had eaten a few and as well as a venison roast each week, depleting the supply to the two smallest roasts, that she had saved for last because there would be less meat to go bad if the weather turned warm.  The first thaw lasted two days and then it snowed again.  The horses were almost out of hay and grain.  It would be weeks until the meadow was defrosted enough to sprout new grass.  They would have to make due with the stubble left from