After that fiasco of a jaunt, I assumed that Taila would forget about her reward – but oh no, she had a longer memory than that. Never underestimate the tenacity of a four-year-old who’s been promised dessert.
As soon as the cats herded her back into Honeysuckle Croft’s yard, rubbed against her legs, and trotted off, and even before they were out of sight, she reached into her pocket again. This time, I let her wrap her fingers around my shell and pull me out. Although I was expecting teary eyes and a blubbery expression, that was not what I saw.
On the girl’s plain features, indignation warred with outrage. “Mr. Turtle! You PROMISED!”
Had Cassia Quarta also remembered all my promises? I’d made some pretty extravagant ones back in the day – paving the slums with gold, roofing the houses with jade, throwing her a birthday party where we invited every single child in the empire, forbidding the study of Serican grammar, issuing an edict banning the existence of older brothers…. If the princess had remembered my promises, she hadn’t held me to them.
Or maybe she’d tried to but couldn’t find me, and her nannies and governesses had prevailed upon her to give up. I wasn’t an easy person to track down when I didn’t want to be found, and making myself available to Cassius’ children wasn’t a top priority.
Hadn’t been a top priority.
“You SAID, Mr. Turtle! You SAID I could have a red-bean sticky rice dumpling!”
I cursed whoever invented the things. Their soul had better be rotting away inside a tapeworm.
“I want my red-bean sticky rice dumpling!”
I sighed, craned my neck over her shoulder, and made sure that the cats were out of earshot before I soothed, It looks like they’re out of season. Be a good girl and wait for the Dragon Boat Festival, all right? You’ll get it then. Now put me down and go see if your mother needs assistance. We’re done with classes for the day.
I thought that would be the end of that, but –
“Noooo! I want my red-bean sticky rice dumpling!!!”
Her screaming brought her mother pelting around the corner. The woman’s eyes were wild, her hands and apron caked with mud, and her hair sticking out in all directions. “Taila! Taila! Where’ve you been! We’ve been searchin’ everywhere!”
Among humans, panic is contagious. Which is sometimes a useful fact.
Just not right now.
Because Taila’s reaction to to her mother’s fear was to burst into tears and wail incoherently about red-bean sticky rice dumplings and cats while her mother berated her for vanishing and “scarin’ the living’ daylights outta us!”
Under cover of all the screaming and crying, I tried to slip away – but no such luck. Spotting me at the edge of the yard, Mistress Jek threw herself to the ground and prostrated herself.
“Emissary! Thank you so so so much for bringing Taila back safely! Where did this bad girl go?”
Oh, curses. I wasn’t going to get to soak in Caltrop Pond any time soon, and I was exhausted. I should probably have ordered Taila to let her mother know where we were going, shouldn’t I? It might have saved me a lot of hassle.
Still, maybe I could tell Mistress Jek about the dessert – or lack thereof – and let her deal with it. Since Taila behaved so well in class, I promised her a reward. We went into town to procure it.
“A reward?” Mistress Jek looked shocked, which puzzled me until she clarified, “Y’mean, like on them Wanted posters?”
“Those Wanted posters,” not “them,” I corrected automatically. And yes. In a manner of speaking. I told her she could have a red-bean sticky rice dumpling, since she appears to have a sweet tooth.
Mistress Jek responded the exact same way the sweet potato vendor had. “A WHAT?! But it’s nowhere close to the Dragon Boat Festival!”
Yes. So I had gathered. As I was unaware that these desserts are not available year-round, I would like to enlist your aid in finding an acceptable substitute.
She gawked.
With another sigh, I translated. What can we give Taila instead?
“Oh…. Lemme – let me think about it.”
I would appreciate that.
Giving her a regal nod, I escaped at last. I was going to swim around in Caltrop Pond until it was time for the Dragon King’s party, and then I was going to dance all the way through the night and past dawn.
That was the reward that I’d earned for my hard day’s work.
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“Mr. Turtle!”
The next morning, Taila pounced as soon as she spotted me.
Briefly, I considered correcting her and telling her to address me as “Rosie” or “Rosette” or “Great One,” or even “Emissary,” but it was too much effort. Last night, the Dragon King of Caltrop Pond had been in a mood for some sort of newfangled dance that involved finding a partner, forming into two lines, and prancing in repeating patterns up and down the lines. Since Bobo had grabbed Stripey and my usual Dawn Dance rice paddy snake partner hadn’t attended the party, I’d gotten stuck with a random frog who tromped all over my feet. He’d even kicked me in the shell!
In short, I didn’t have the energy to care what one single human called me. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be “Piri” anyway.
Running all the words into one, Taila demanded, “Ma-and-Pa-say-I-can-have-an-egg-but-only-if-you-say-it’s-okay-so-can-I-have-an-egg!”
An egg? As in, a chicken egg? She got that excited over a regular old chicken egg? Didn’t they have hens laying eggs in their bedding every morning? Well, whatever. As long as it made her stop whining.
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Only if you repeat that more slowly and more properly, I told her. It’s “Mother” and “Father,” not “Ma” and “Pa.” And it’s “may,” not “can.”
“Mother and Father say I may have an egg, but only if you say it’s okay, so may I have an egg?” she parroted at a marginally less breakneck pace.
Good enough. Yes. You may.
“Yay!” She ran towards the cottage, skidded to a halt, turned back, cried “Thank you!” and vanished through the doorway.
What was the big deal about an egg?
Moving at my turtle’s pace, I followed her into the cottage, where Mistress Jek was stirring a pot of porridge over the hearth. As soon as she saw me, she dropped the ladle and knelt.
“Mornin’ – I mean, good morning, Emissary.”
Good morning to you too. Taila tells me that you proposed an egg as her reward for studying hard?
Mistress Jek might have trouble producing proper speech on her own, but she understood it just fine. She nodded, her frizzy bun bouncing. “Yes, yes. It’s no festival food, but it’s the best we could come up with.”
That will be acceptable. While she got a basket and started picking through the straw in the hens’ corner, I asked, Don’t you have fresh eggs every day? Why is Taila so excited about getting to eat an egg?
She flinched, as if she expected me to punish her for malnourishing the girl. “Emissary…the eggs are for sellin’, not eatin’. We can’t…we can’t eat them.”
I was stunned. The Jeks grew eggs – I meant, raised chickens that laid eggs – but didn’t get to eat any themselves? How could this be?
You mean, you never eat eggs? Taila’s never tasted an egg before?!
“Oh, yes, she has,” Mistress Jek assured me as she picked up the brown eggs, gave each a quick inspection, and arranged them in the basket. “Every year on her birthday, she gets to have one. She chooses how to have it too. She likes pocketbook eggs.”
Pocketbook eggs?
Mistress Jek was unsurprised that I hadn’t heard of them. She’d long since painted a mental image of me living a pampered life in Heaven with no idea of what peasant lives on Earth were like. (Which was half true.) So she didn’t hesitate before explaining, “You fry an egg until the white is crispy and the yolk is just about done, and then you fold it in half. So the yolk looks like a coin inside a pocketbook.”
In short, it was the sort of crude, simple dish that anyone could make. Eh, not everyone had the talent to work as a palace chef, I supposed.
It was oddly soothing to watch her hunt through the straw and collect eggs one by one in a smooth rhythm. Long, long ago, when I’d first moved down from the mountains as a young fox spirit, the farmers in the plains of northwestern Serica had kept chickens too. I’d loved chicken eggs.
Actually, I’d loved chickens even more, but those were harder to catch, and if I ate too many, there wouldn’t be any more chickens or eggs. Plus the farmers would go to their local lord for help, and he’d hunt me with his pack of foxhounds.
I hated foxhounds. Almost as much as I hated raccoon dogs. The one was a threat to my literal existence, the other an affront to my sense of aesthetics.
But that reminded me of something: According to Taila, raccoon dogs didn’t live around here, but were there foxes that might steal eggs and kill chickens? I hadn’t seen any so far, but that didn’t mean much. Foxes were good at hiding, and fox spirits had no reason to reveal themselves to a turtle. Maybe fear of fox predation was why the Jeks kept their chickens under the same roof as themselves.
But when I asked, Mistress Jek just gave me a blank look. “Where do you keep chickens in Heaven, Emissary?”
Well, for starters, I was fairly certain that you didn’t. In chicken coops, of course.
“Chicken coops?”
You know, a hen house? A small building where the chickens lay eggs and sleep at night so they’re safe from predators?
“A hen house, a hen house…,” she mused. After a couple repetitions, her eyes lit up. “What does a hen house look like, Emissary?”
And that was how I ended up designing my first-ever chicken coop.
In the winter, farmers had free time for building, so Master Jek, Ailus, Cailus, and Nailus cobbled one together following the schematics that I sketched in the ground. Their coop wound up looking a little wonky since they weren’t carpenters and couldn’t afford to hire Master Gravitas, but I figured it would be fine as long as it didn’t collapse and crush the hens. My main goal was to get the poultry out of the bedding anyway.
After that, I – or rather, the male Jeks – tackled the pigsty. By the time the pig was out of the cottage, Honeysuckle Croft looked a lot more presentable.
All right, making progress here! Next up: beds!
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Meanwhile, in town, Khun Josy was chatting with Master Gravitas, as she did every day when she had sweet potatoes to roast and his shop was open.
Or, rather, she was chatting at him while he made the occasional “Mmm” and “Mmmhmm” in response.
It didn’t bother her. Master Gravitas had never been the vocal sort, whereas Josy, well, Josy could talk the ears off a parrot, according to that no-good sister-in-law whom her brother had insisted on marrying.
“Dontcha think Vanny’s been acting weird lately?” she asked the cat spirit as she fed more branches to the fire in the bottom of her clay oven.
“Mmmm,” said Master Gravitas, who was carving a ladle while Pepper sat on his work bench and chewed his tools.
With the fire tended, Josy started picking up sweet potatoes from a basket and ramming a hanger into each one. She was proud of her hangers, which she’d designed herself and ordered from the blacksmith, Master Shay. They had a hook on each end, bent in opposite directions, so she could stab the bottom hook into a sweet potato and then use the top hook to suspend it from the hanger in the previous sweet potato. When she’d built up a long string of them, she removed the pot that she used as an oven lid and checked the sweet potatoes that were already roasting. They were done, so Josy pulled them out and dumped them into the pot. Then she lowered the string of raw sweet potatoes into the oven, hooking the top hanger onto a hoop that ran around the inside edge. Back over the oven went the pot, to keep both the heat in and also the cooked sweet potatoes warm.
“I mean,” she continued as she worked, “have you heard her talkin’ lately? It’s all ‘thou art’ and ‘he hath’ and ‘I pray thee’ this or that. Come on, who talks like that?!”
Clio, the pub serving maid who was Josy’s sister’s husband’s cousin’s daughter, ducked across the street to grab a bite to eat and overheard Josy’s rant. As she plonked down a copper, she added, “The boys too! Have you seen how Cailus and Nailus walk these days? They throw out their chests and push back their shoulders and just – just – swagger! Like nobles in a play! What in the name of Heaven are they doin’?”
Josy passed her a sweet potato, still steaming hot, and Clio took a big bite without waiting for it to cool. “I don’t know what they’re doin’, but I tell you what – that sister-in-law o’ mine has always been crazy. The Loms have always thought they’re better than the rest o’ us, even when they’re dirt poor. There’s a streak of madness in that family. It’s comin’ out in Jek Lom Vanny now, you mark my words. She probably thinks she’s some hoity-toity fancy lady livin’ in the Empire! I told my brother when he started courtin’ her, I told him, ‘Nothin’ good comes from hangin’ with the Loms.’ And I was right! See? Ten children born, only five still alive, and she lets ‘em run wild! Did you see Taila th’other day? She’s four! And her ma lets her run around on her own! No wonder Maila, may her soul have a better next life, got eaten by the catfish demon!”
The blacksmith’s wife, Mistress Shay, was passing by on her way to bring him lunch. She also stopped to chat and, since she was there, bought a sweet potato to munch on. “I hear from Bobo that the Jeks have been buildin’ fancy contraptions. A chicken coop? A pigsty? What’s wrong with keeping their chickens and pig inside their house, like the rest o’ us? Do they think they’re too good to sleep with the animals?!”
At that, Master Gravitas actually spoke up. “A chicken coop and a pigsty?”
Mistress Shay nodded several times, making her messy grey bun bounce. “Yes! Very shoddy ones too.” She clicked her tongue. “You should take a look, Master Gravitas. Mebe give ‘em some tips.”
“Mmmm,” he replied.
“You do that, Master Gravitas,” Josy ordered. “At this rate, those buildings are going to fall down and crush the animals, and then those poor children will starve to death before spring.”
“I’ll look into it,” he promised.
Then he turned back to his carving and, no matter how soundly Josy, Clio, and Mistress Shay roasted Jek Lom Vanny, the cat spirit said no more.