The Kiln’s Throat

The lime-kiln at Saint Bartholomew-by-the-Fen had taken neither coal nor honest hardwood since the harvest mass, and three weeks of river-fog had worked through the turf roof, the wattled walls, and the clay-packed throat until the whole shed seemed less a place built for fire than some cold burrow abandoned by a sick beast.

Eadric spat into the pit. The spittle struck the chalk-dust and darkened it without a whisper.

That told him enough.

The kiln was wet through, the flue choked, and the day already shortening toward Vespers, though the fog hid the sun so thoroughly that a man might have believed God had misplaced it. His left foot dragged as he crossed the shed, the two missing toes pulling his step awry whenever the ground softened beneath him. Eight winters had passed since the Danish axe at the Mercian border, yet damp weather still found the old hurt before he did, lodging first in the scar and then climbing his shin like a creditor who knew the way to the door.

Cynric had his head and shoulders thrust into the flue, his tunic hitched above his breech-clout and his broad back glistening where sweat had cut channels through the soot. He worked by touch, which was just as well, for the horn lantern gave no more light than a dying rush.

“If the lime does not burn before Vespers, the reeve will flay your back and stretch it over his privy-seat, Cynric,” Eadric said, testing the tallow-pot with a charcoal-blackened thumb. “The ealdorman’s man has thirty loads of river-stone coming down the Ouse, and the mass-priest is already at the hall with his tithe-stick beneath his arm. I have no wish to hear either of them explain how honest men work.”

The priest’s presence troubled him more than he intended Cynric to know. A reeve might be cursed, bribed, delayed, or answered with the fault of some lesser man. A priest kept count differently. Father Godwine would note the stone, the lime, the tithe, the missing hours, and perhaps also the sins spoken carelessly within hearing of the churchyard wall.

Cynric’s arms shifted inside the flue. His breath came back in grey plumes smelling of small-beer and salted leek.

“The reeve may scrape his due from my arse with the bishop’s wedding spoon,” he answered, feeling blindly through the blockage. “This throat is packed with a dead crow, hazel-rot, and enough wet ash to stuff every corpse from here to Ely. By Christ’s bitten heel, the womb-drunk creature who built it must have been conceived beneath a sow while his father held the tail and his mother asked which end was which.”

Eadric drew the willow-faggots nearer with his sound foot. They were poor stuff, thin and damp, gathered from the fen margin where everything grew bent from wind and bad soil.

“The man who built it was your mother’s milk-brother,” Eadric said, drawing a bundle of willow-faggots nearer with his sound foot. “That may account for the workmanship.”

Cynric backed out on his hands and knees, leaving a black smear across his leather apron. He was younger by twenty years and had the neck and shoulders of a bull kept too long from the knife. The burn on his right arm shone pale and hairless from wrist to elbow, the skin tightened by the lime-water that had overturned during the building of the burh wall. Eadric remembered the screaming, though Cynric never spoke of that part.

“My mother’s foster-brother took Mercian iron through the ribs at the ford,” Cynric said as he rubbed feeling back into his scarred wrist. “He died with blood in his beard and three men beneath him. You will die coughing chalk into your own lap while Father Godwine wonders whether there is enough of your soul left to bury.”

Eadric looked at him and felt the old answer rise as readily as bile.

“Father Godwine will find more soul in my smallest toe than he would dredging your whole carcass from a baptismal pond.”

For twelve years they had laboured under the same lord, ground at the same mill, stood beneath the same rain at the hall-moot, and watched one another with the care men ordinarily reserved for dishonest weights. Three winters before, Cynric’s swine had broken Eadric’s rye-strip. Eadric had sworn to it before the reeve’s deputy; Cynric, in return, had named the untaxed fleeces beneath Eadric’s hay.

Both accusations had been true.

That was the injury neither had forgiven.

“Give me the iron hook,” Cynric said, holding out a hand crusted with slurry.

Eadric looked at the hand, then toward the wattled side of the shed, where the hook lay half-buried beneath damp sedge. Cynric had left it there himself, being more concerned with who passed the well than with the order of his tools. A man who misplaced iron deserved the labour of finding it.

“Fetch it yourself. You left it by the wattles while watching Wigburg draw water.”

Cynric wiped soot beneath one eye, spreading the blackness rather than removing it. “Wigburg has one eye fixed upon Rome and the other searching for whichever beast fathered her. Her knees are broad enough to lay out a dead abbot between them. Had I a hound with such a face, I would sew its lips to a badger’s arse and bury them beneath the church door so every Christian heel might improve them.”

“You own neither hound nor badger,” Eadric replied as he cut a crust of salt pork with his thumbnail. “You spent your last silver penny buying a share in Wulfric’s eel-traps.”

“Wulfric is honest enough.”

“Wulfric was put in the stocks at Ely for selling salted dog as pike. The collar was still around its neck, and he swore it had grown there in deep water.”

Cynric grinned despite himself. “A pike may dress finely.”

“Wulfric would sell the scabs from his own groin as Saint Cuthbert’s beard if he found a priest drunk enough to bless the sack.”

There were men who lied because hunger pressed them, men who lied to escape a beating, and men such as Wulfric, who seemed to regard truth as land belonging to someone else and therefore fit to be trespassed upon. Cynric trusted him because Cynric mistook shamelessness for courage whenever it amused him.

He returned from the hedge dragging the iron hook, a crooked bar with a split prong beaten into its head by Oswin the smith after the old point had snapped. Oswin’s left eye clouded white, and the hook bore witness to it. Cynric thrust the prong into the flue and drove it against the packed ash until sparks leapt from a buried flint and died at once in the wet.

“Hold the lantern higher,” he said, leaning his weight upon the shaft. “Unless you mean to watch me spear my foot and then carry the chalk alone with your two missing toes and that leg the devil chewed before deciding it was too sour.”

Eadric lifted the horn lantern. Tallow shifted hot within its shallow cup, and the smoked panes cast a narrow yellow stain over the seam where fieldstone met packed clay. He could see where the mortar had washed thin and where the damp had opened a hairline crack beneath the arch. If the throat failed there, it would not be Cynric alone beneath it.

Beyond the shed, hidden by fog, the Ouse moved under its own silence. Thirty loads of river-stone would come with the ealdorman’s man whether the kiln drew or not. If the fire failed before sunset, the willow would smoulder to waste, the chalk would slump, and two days’ hauling from the upland pit would be lost. The reeve would pay them in old salt-herring and call it mercy.

“Higher,” Cynric said, sweat cutting pale tracks through the soot on his brow. “An owl keeps more light beneath its tail.”

“If I lift it farther, the tallow runs across my hand. This kirtle belonged to my father when he served in King Alfred’s fyrd.”

Cynric drove the hook deeper. “Your father was a swineherd who happened to be handed a spear, and every man in the hundred knows it. He stood behind the cook-pots at Edington stealing marrow from the hounds while better men held the shield-wall. By the time he found a Dane to kill, the poor bastard was wounded, half-blind, and crawling toward a priest.”

The scar beneath Eadric’s shoulder tightened as though the old wound had heard him.

Eadric kept the lantern raised, though the old scar beneath his shoulder had begun to burn and the hot tallow threatened his knuckles. Cynric knew where to set the point. He always did. That was one of the inconveniences of hating a competent man.

“My father returned with the king’s silver and two dead men’s arm-rings. Yours returned with a stolen hen beneath his cloak and pox nesting in his breeches. I would be careful where I planted that family pride. The root has already produced one diseased growth.”

Cynric looked back through the soot, his teeth white in his blackened face. “There speaks the dutiful son who polished every lie his father left him until it shone like a saint’s bone. When the worms opened his belly, they likely found a shield-wall inside and King Alfred himself sitting upon the liver.”

The words struck deeper than Eadric meant them to. His father’s arm-rings had gone first to settle the burial ale, then the silver to pay a fine for pasture taken beyond the boundary stones. What remained were the kirtle, three stories, and the obligation to believe them.

“Speak of him again,” Eadric said, lowering the lantern close to Cynric’s hand, “and I will pull your tongue through your arse, nail both ends to the same oak, and invite your children to guess which mouth taught them their prayers.”

Cynric’s grin widened. “There you are. I feared age had left you fit only to curse weather and sniff widows’ stools.”

He braced both hands upon the hook and heaved. Something yielded within the flue with a wet, inward thud, followed by the slumping rush of ash and hidden weight. Greasy soot burst from the opening and struck Cynric across the face. He staggered backward, coughing until his chest rattled.

“Christ’s rotting cods,” he gasped, wiping black tears from his cheeks. “There is a sheep in there.”

Eadric lowered the lantern. Beneath the soot lay a strip of grey-red hide and the blunt joint of a leg.

“It is the reeve’s red calf. The one that vanished before harvest-hay.”

The smell reached them then, sweet and heavy, not merely foul but clinging, as though corruption had weight and could settle upon the tongue.

“By the Virgin’s curdled milk,” Cynric said, retreating a step, “it smells as though the devil carried it beneath his foreskin through all forty days of Lent.”

“It smells like five shillings of ruined stone if we leave it there.” Eadric pulled a coil of rawhide from the roof-pole and threw one end at him. “Crawl back in and bind the legs.”

“You would send me beneath that carcass?”

“I would send you into the bishop’s privy if a penny lay at the bottom.”

Cynric looped the rope around his waist. “There are things in a bishop’s privy conceived before the Flood, fed upon choirboys’ tears, and given Christian names after dark.”

“Then you should find cousins there.”

“If the clay falls and buries me, tell Hild I died killing Danes.”

“I shall tell her you crawled after carrion because the smell reminded you of your wedding bed.”

Cynric ducked beneath the arch, shoulders scraping clay. “Give me the light, you mouldered arse-bone, and keep that hook from my face. By Adam’s first pizzle, if you put out my eye, I shall crawl through your belly and wear your entrails as winter garters.”

Eadric pushed the lantern after him. “Take the calf by the hocks. If the hide tears, catch the bone.”

“I know how to hold a bone. I was skinning cattle while you begged whey at the hall-door.”

“You were chewing your mother’s sleeve when I killed my first boar.”

“Your boar was a priest’s pig, and it died of shame after seeing you naked.”

Scraping followed, then Cynric’s harsher breathing as he worked the line beneath the carcass.

“I have the legs,” he called at last. “Pull when I tell you, and do not stop if the hide comes loose. I have no wish to spend my last breath beneath a calf’s arse while you compose a heroic lie about it.”

Eadric wound the rawhide around his wrist and planted his sound foot against an ash-root.

“Now,” Cynric shouted.

They hauled. The carcass tore free with a sucking rip and slid from the flue in grey hide, broken ribs, grease, and yellow fat, spilling across Cynric’s chest and knocking him into the chalk-dust.

For several breaths neither spoke.

Cold river-air whistled across the iron grate.

“The draw is clear,” Eadric said.

Cynric lay beneath the roof-poles, fouled from throat to knee. “God be praised, though He chose a road that smells of damnation.”

“We will take the silver,” Eadric said, reaching for the tallow-pot, “and spend three copper trins on mead before walking home.”

Cynric closed his eyes. “Make it four. I must either forget this smell or become the sort of man who enjoys it.”