The Ferryman - Book 1

Chapter 47:

Bumblefoot

After working two more days in the mud, Moth was unwilling to spend another hour heaving buckets out of the greenhouse – she finally gave up and asked Agate to arrange for guiles to help.

Agate looked at Moth with concern. “You’ve been scraping out that pool by yourself for three days? Milady, your body is now like ours – that must have taken a toll on you.”

Moth didn’t want to concede how much her back hurt.

“I’ll give the instructions to the guiles, I don’t want you to do another minute of work in that pool,” fussed Agate, shooing Moth from the greenhouse. “You’ve been bathing at the gatehouse as well, haven’t you? In those shoddy tubs you can’t even stretch our your back in the water.”

There was no deterring Agate from her path, despite Moth’s weak protests. A bath was drawn for her, and she was commanded by Agate to soak for at least an hour and dismissed from the greenhouse while the guiles finished the meagre work she had started.

The bath in question was up the stairs at the back of the mansion. Moth had to enter a stone tower, and go up a second flight of stairs, to enter the bathing room.

A tile tub was set into the floor. Windows overlooked the forest. Steaming hot water, perfumed with lavender and rose oil, filled the tub, wafting out clouds that gently fogged and beaded on the windows.

The tub was large enough that if Moth laid flat on the bottom she’d still have room to stretch out.

Stripping off her work clothes, Moth sunk into the perfect water and groaned as every knot in her back began to relax and melt away. She didn’t want to admit Agate was right but followed her instructions and soaked for the full hour until every hint of mud washed out of her pores. She felt she would fall asleep there. Her ears submerged she listened to the sound of the wind, distorted and melodic through the water.

“Milady?”

Moth’s eyes popped open. She looked up into the faces of two young women.

Floundering into a corner of the tub, she demanded shrilly, “Who-what-”

Disinterested in letting her finish the sentence, the two bored-looking women helped her from the tub and covered her with a bathrobe. “Agate sent us to perform the toilette.”

“The–” Moth began, as she was set at a dressing table and one began massaging oil into her skin, while the other knelt at her feet and cleaned and trimmed her toenails. Moth imagined this was supposed to be a much gentler regime, but the two women, forcefully and diligently, approached it like a military reach for victory.

The two girls chatted nonstop in monotones to each other. Their accent was reminiscent of Magden, with the familiar crackling starch of their language much like Tully or Amanda.

When she had been oiled, perfumed, and manicured, they set onto her hair.

“Preference?” they asked, the only time they bothered for Moth’s opinion.

“Out of the way?” Moth asked hopefully. They barely showed they had heard her but began.

It was astounding how fast their hands moved. They detangled and oiled and combed. After her hair, they revealed a set of clothes – not work clothes – that Agate had fetched for her.

She was primped, braided, and dressed – the two girls gave her disinterested nods and clacked sharply down the hall and off to the guile mansion before Moth could even ask them their names.

Wobbling outside the bathing room, Moth was aimless. She doubted Agate would let her back in the greenhouse – at least not until the mud was cleared – so she decided to go for a walk.

She had explored so little of the property grounds, and the idea of nosing around the overgrown hedge maze was appealing.

Moth stepped out of the mansion and onto the ivy-eaten front stairway, trying to ignore the sounds of activity coming from the greenhouse that made her itch with curiosity to see the progress.

Deciding to peek, Moth inched around the edge of the greenhouse to see a trail of guiles passing buckets of mud from the greenhouse to the ditch behind the gazebo, Lander amongst them happily shouting at Vincent to work faster.

Footsteps pounded behind her. Moth guiltily jerked around, worried she would see Agate descending on her, but was relieved to find Oliver hurrying over.

He was out of breath. He waved at her, and she waved back – but he kept insistently waving her over and pointing.

Moth hastened towards him, and he pointed down towards the stables. Moth followed him – he was half running – and she asked, “What is it?” and he looked at her, thinking hard on how to communicate with gestures she’d understand, when she asked in delight, “Is it the horse?”

He made a gesture that suggested she was almost right.

When they reached the stable, they had a clear rolling view down to the fence, and he pointed.

There was something small moving around. Its color was golden-ochre and black.

While Moth squinted at it, Oliver ducked into the stables and emerged with a pencil and journal. He quickly scrawled down something and showed it to Moth.

That day with the welkworm, when the horse was lost, several other guiles lost animals in the forest – some chickens.

Moth eagerly searched the forest behind the small speck of chicken. “Do you think the horse could still be alright?”

He nodded.

“Would you like help getting the chicken?” she asked, and he looked relieved and nodded. He couldn’t go past the tin-mixed gate and fence.

Moth, wielding a heavy blanket, went through the gate of the gatehouse and rounded to the area of fence where the chicken was.

The chicken was rooting around in some undergrowth, searching for bugs with only its tail sticking out, clucking softly. Moth tiptoed, avoiding the rustling ivy, and stepping on the soft loam of the forest floor – she flung the blanket over the chicken and wrapped it tightly before it could fight back. It struggled vainly beneath the blanket.

Moth felt unsafe outside the fence and hurried back in – latching the gate behind her – and heading with Oliver towards the stables.

He directed her to a cage, and she struggled with the blanket to unwrap it just enough so the chicken could flap angrily inside.

They both stared.

The hen angrily thrashed in the corner to escape, but her movements were hindered by her feet; they were covered in hardened bumps and violently swollen. She had grown several more toes, but the back ones had fallen off.

Moth and Oliver gawked at the poor hen in bewildered silence. They looked at each other, confused, and then Oliver picked up his journal, while Moth said, “It looks like bumblefoot, almost. The hardened lumps at least. But the swelling and extra toes I don’t…”

Oliver wrote and showed Moth. I’ll give her something to fall asleep so I can look at it closer.

“Can I stay to help?”

Oliver was unused to company – he hesitated but nodded. He went to the corner of the stables, where a wall of cabinets hung over a table. The table was burdened with several braziers that had copper pots simmering with concoctions, the fumes venting out from an open window. Oliver opened a cabinet, full to bursting with decanters and vials, and plucked out a bottle that he brought to the hen.

After a brief struggle, Oliver grappled the chicken from the cage, held her head up, and dropped a fleck of the concoction into her squawking beak. He stroked her gently – when she began to droop in his arms he brought her to the table, pulled back a curtain to get more light, and gestured Moth over.

Moth had seen bumblefoot before. The family chickens would occasionally get it when they had a cut foot that became infected. And while this poor hen had aspects of it that looked like bumblefoot, Moth could not understand how terribly swollen and fleshy the feet had become, or why she had extra toes.

Oliver gathered supplies and tools he needed, and Moth watched in fascination as he lanced the abscesses on the feet. Even asleep, the hen twitched and moved. Moth held the horrible legs down in place while Oliver burst the lumps – some were pus, but others were filled with a clear, blue-tinted liquid.

Moth had been drenched in that same strange liquid when she fought the welkworm. She looked up in alarm at Oliver, but he – unconcerned – methodically

went through and drained each one, disinfected, and wrapped the legs in a bandage soaked with another potion he had brewing.

“What was that liquid that came out of the boils?” Moth asked.

Oliver shrugged and shook his head.

“It looked like the welkworm’s blood.”

Oliver scrunched his face, as bewildered as she was. He wrote in the journal; I’ll ask Lord Correb when he returns tomorrow.

They put the hen back in the cage and knelt over it, watching her sleep.

“Oliver?” Moth said, and Oliver looked up. “Can I come see how the hen’s doing tomorrow?”

Oliver nodded.

“And, if you ever want another hand with the animals, or there’s more behind the fence, I would love to help,” said Moth, and added hastily, “I know more about plants than animals, on the farm where I grew up my job was to help my grandpa and he taught me gardening – mostly flowers not crops – but I did help with his hens, and I loved learning about every creature that lives in Hiren, from snakeflies to mooses, and…” she trailed of, realizing she was rambling. “And I would like to help with the animals if you have something simple I could do, though I’ll only be here for another month.”

Oliver listened, trying to follow her conversation, then wrote down after a thoughtful pause: If you want to.

Feeling like she overstayed her welcome, Moth bowed and hastily left Oliver to his corner of home-made ointments, and the sleeping hen.

She wandered outside, head full of the strange disease, wondering how the blood of the welkworm – if it was blood – had gotten in the chicken. She doubted if she could wait for Oliver’s answer, she felt she’d ask the ferryman the moment she saw him,

Around the corner of the mansion, Lander emerged, her clothes plastered with dried mud. She spotted Moth and waved excitedly, “I’ve been looking for you! We finished the pool, come see.”

Moth and her cousin went to the greenhouse, where several guiles – with Agate – were cleaning up the road of mud that was tracked on the tiles.

Moth approached the pool and peered in, amazed. Not only had the mud been scraped out, but also sponged and washed – the centuries of mold and grime was meticulously cleaned from the grooves of the tiles. The whole pool looked as though it had been built yesterday.

“Lander, this would’ve taken me a year to do.”

“Well, glad we could help, Milady,” said Lander, grinning.

“Did you…find anything in the mud?” asked Moth.

“Oh, yes! I was going to mention it. Fifty or so fake teeth. We didn’t notice it until it was dumped out in the ditch, but the magpies were thrilled to dig through and find it.” Lander tried to wipe mud from her brow but only wiping more onto herself. Her wrist and shoulder were bent out of joint.

Moth gently prodded Lander’s arm and asked worriedly, “Lander, don’t you need to eat and bathe? You’re getting all disjointed again.”

Lander stared in annoyance at her wrist, and then called to Agate, “My body’s going out, Agate, I’m going to bathe.”

“You should’ve done that an hour ago,” Agate shouted back.

“She loves me, I knew it.” Lander said goodbye to Moth and went off to bathe.

Moth sat on the edge of the pool and admired the beautiful clean tilework. There were decorated tiles of ammonites near the bottom, and tiles depicting fishfaces – both images were known to Moth to symbolize souls, something often woven into clothes or carved on wells.

The longer she was in the House of the Dead, the more she understood why those symbols meant that, why they had sat so long in the history of icons in Hiren, in Korraban, in Coewylle. She wondered who had painted those fishfaces on the tilework those centuries ago, what their name was – she wondered whose face they had used as reference.

The ferryman would know.

He was coming home tomorrow – she hoped she remembered to ask him, but much more pressing on her mind was the hen.