Free The A'Rak by Michael Shea Page A

cushions, though the perimeter of the room was all business: larders, storage crocks, the churns and cheesing tables, racked cutlery, wash basins, egg-shelves and flour-sacks, even a pastry oven. The amiable girls insisted we sit—nay, sprawl with feet indolently propped.
    Once we were settled, the sisters set up a great buxom bustle, their breasts jostling like pink shoats in their burdened bodices as they ground ginger for tea, ladled jam on current crumbkins, decanted bumpers of buttermilk—and, through it all, poured forth conversation as abundant as their provender.
    Dulcetty: "Such a slyboots is Auntie in leeching that she'll soon set our poor little fleecies aright! How she can physic 'em, costive and purge, they've got teat-rash you know, our precious wee woolies, and trotter-gall grieves 'em sorely!"
    Sleeky: "No Dulcy! Kooters! It's kooters they have, and Granny's a prime leech for Kooters—and the grunties too, which tortures the dear little bleaters as well!"
    Dulcetty: "Kooters, yes, kooters too, a whole muck of ills they have but we don't want to weary you with 'em, dear nuncials."
    "Not at all," I said. "Our client, Dame Pompilla, mentioned shank-rot as well. What makes your gleets so sick-prone do you think, my dears?"
    "'Twas Daddum did all the pasturing," Sleeky mourned. "All the up-pasture down-pasture, the dipping and shearing . . ."
    "Dadum," smiled Dulcetty sadly, "was right lean and tight o' shape like yourself, Dame Nuncio."
    "Yes, `You female folk for the milking,' he'd say," (Sleeky too was tenderly sad here) " `and me for the stumping and shepherding up-dale and down!' That was our dear Dadum's saying."
    Now we had done some up-hill-and-down-dale-ing, it occurred to them. We'd done some stepping about, they squealed, brightening. Had we been to Kolodria? Lulume? The Great Shallows? What did the Sea of Agon look like in those tempests one heard of? Had we ever viewed the Glacial Maelstroms?
    We were fed and rapturously inquisitioned. Their sheer sociability was irresistible. Even laconic Shinn and Bantril, men as a rule only slightly more communicative than cobblestones, uttered entire half-sentences. But then the door thrust wide, and in burst our truncated, intrepid apparition of animated black gauze. "To work! Night draws near!" our Dame trumpeted.
    The sun was now two spans from its setting, and the smallest barnyard debris cast long bands of shadow. Whatever the two widows had been about—I only noted a vague heap of small implements just inside the barn door—all was haste and clamor now to beat the dark. The sisters, with Shinn and Bantril loping by them like hounds—toiled upslope where the gleets were scattered (and a hungry, scruffy, skittish lot of gleets they looked). The four of them began herding and driving the beasts down towards the barn, though it was really my pullers doing the actual running and rounding up, while the sisters provided helpful shouts of encouragement and the Widow Bozzm, too stout to attempt the climb, helped from down in the barnyard with even more vigorous arm signals, and encouragements and counsel bellowed at earsplitting volume.
    Meanwhile our own widow—looking in her billowing flurry of veils like a small boil of smoke—thrust at Olombo and me mallets and spikes, and set us to work in the barn: "Board the windows and gaps in the barn wall, and the hayloft bays, and find wood to dog the main doors shut on me as you leave!" She was tacking up potshards and trashed scraps of pails and pans in nooks all over the barn's interior, and sprinkling in them a crumbly stuff which she lighted from a taper. Olombo and I planked and hammered in a fever we must have caught from hers, while vile, sweetish, slightly dizzying fumes coiled everywhere off the punk she'd lit.
    We finished just after the sun set. The barn, once the main doors were shut, was tightly sealed. And here came the driven gleets, clattering and bleating into the barn. They looked even more hungry