Two.
After we ate, we
pushed back our bowls and sat a bit. Father continued to talk to
Primus a bit about the upcoming season, but he was not the talkative
sort, so he took down his clay pipe from near the stone fireplace and
chomped down on it, though he rarely lit it. That was the signal that
dinner was over.
The rest of us went
into action. Primus brought the dishes to the kitchen. Mother
followed him to do the washing. Secondus wiped the table. I fetched
tea dregs from the kitchen and scattered the damp, spent leaves to
keep the dust down, while Tertius swept. The Q’s, Quartus and
Quintus, took the scraps to the dog. Both of them got along with the
old mutt well, while it growled at me. Oddly, it only growled at me.
Since my chore was
done the fastest, I returned to our room to prepare for bed first, so
I wouldn’t hold up my older brothers. I poured some water into a
basin from an earthenware pitcher, stripped, and wiped myself while
standing. I wrung out my cloth as well as I could and left it to hang
dry near the fire. Fortunately, the weather had warmed a bit.
Two beds occupied most of the room. They were troughs of wood that contained hay. Three of us slept in each.
My part of the bed was the
furthest for the door. Pegs projected from the each posts for our
clothes. I hung up my shirt, pants, and under linen and swapped
them out for my nightdress. My brothers filed in to complete their
nightly routines.
“You’re a neat
one,” Tertius observed from his bed from the odds side.
“It’s gets itchy
if I don’t do this,” I answered as I finished.
By the time that I
was nestled in my box of straw with my sheet drawn over me.
“Everyone in bed?”
Primus asked.
Secondus gave his
usual grunt, while the rest of us called out.
“Sleep well,
brothers,” Primus concluded.
So we went to bed
like any other night. However, unlike other nights, I awoke soon after I went to sleep. I slowly
made out, Quintus’s lean form next to my bed. Could not see his
expression in the low, ruddy light. However, I could make out the
dull gloss from the thin metal object in his right hand.
No comments:
Post a Comment