“The sun to me is dark,

and silent is the moon…”

-Samson Agonistes, Milton

Howling Beeves, if beeves could howl, heralded the morning light. Young Peter woke from his desk, which remained shadowed in the northwest corner of the hall, where he read by lamplight and there slept, bent forward, face beside his nightly book. The leather and rag paper quieted his rampant mind in sleep, even as the words within disquieted. There was no time for reading by day. Peter slept little. Awakening by the beam of light from the firing port behind his desk, he rose, placed the guest chair at the west head of the table, tucked Newton’s Heavenly Discourse beneath his arm, folded the desk, and took both to his book trunk under the stair, placing it there with its 37 other bedfellows—the great Grim treasury, supposed to educate five sons, left for Peter: Christopher, Brandon, Trenton and William all gone beyond Enlightenment via the pen.

‘All Father’s hopes and Mother’s fears now rest upon these shoulders.’

The boar-hide cloak rose like a savage tent flap and Breed smiled up at him, his big brown eyes showing a keener light than normally they might.

Celia the maid and Housewife Bet stirred under their bison hides before the hearth. After midnight, Celia had been relegated to sleeping before the suspect fire box, Bet taking pride of place before the fireplace. By dawn, positions had been reversed and the Housewife rose refreshed with a smile, the maid stiff with a frown.

“Young Master,” they said, both liking him like a mother and sister. Despite Father having offered one as a bedding tutor and the other as a nightly companion. For Father favored Mother far beyond these two. Yet his son had chosen to preserve his brotherly status, measuring it better for household harmony.

Donning his sword, hat and cloak, and hefting his desk pistol in hand, Young Peter, followed by Breed who would be making for the woodshed under his deer-hide poncho, unbarred the door, recalling he was ten when first his brothers coaxed him to do it himself, missing them now with a deep and yawning pang.

The sky was billowing with cloud, heaving like a heavenly sea, snow flurrying lightly, his breath pluming in the frosty air.

The men were up and rousting under the competing supervisors, all looking about in wonder at the dozen great logs on either side of the court. The cattle which roamed all about along the river, having displaced the Moose, and even into the woods, were all crowded about in the pasture. They were not howling, really, but noising about as cows, steers and bulls do. The bulls seemed to be standing guard, the three of them, horns facing outward towards the forest. The calves were about the stables with the cows for milking, which had been begun by Ben and Juan. The steers, roped in two teams of 20, one north and one south, the north one standing idle for the moment, had been used like oxen to haul the great cedar trunks, skidded across the hard, snowy earth.

To the south, across the creek, Thirteen was driving, with a beefy “howl” escaping his lips, driving the south team across that small stream, bringing another tree, of sixty feet, to the south side.

Peter made his way to the stack of trunks a south ahead of the south crew lead by Ball’s overseer to examine this impossible stack of lumber, the work of a month for four men. The tree had been felled with a misery whip, obviously, used like a hand saw by Thirteen. Each trunk of sixty or ninety feet would make two or three upright beams. The tops and branches, also dragged in bundles, into the court yard, would serve as the catwalk, ladders and turret lumber.

Worried and in a wonder, Young Peter approached Thirteen, who had a felling ax belted to his waist like a hatchet, “You should sleep, Thirteen. There is enough work for the day for these men.”

The giant looked at him from trance-like eyes of black, “Young Master, this one slept for thirty long years in the House of Mahound. This One slept within the Bier of Roland for three months at sea, for which the sailors grudged he as one of demonry.”

“Do you eat, Thirteen?”

“Yes, feasted hungrily.”

“On what, might I inquire?”

“Thirteen nodded for Peter to follow him and he did, past the weirdly entranced team of steers, across Grim Creek trimmed in ice, and up across the gentle slop occupied by cedar stumps and snow-entombed fern.

A hundred paces up the sloop, under the eves of two grand trees Thirteen had declined to fell, was a dead fall, a young cedar, starved of light by his big neighbors, its mossy trunk having many spikes from shed branches. This was a place Peter had come to think last spring, when spring did not come after the failure of Brandon, and Trenton’s body to return. Upon three of these spikes were impaled as many heads, Blackfeet warrior heads, painted black for death, eyes circled red for war, square cut black manes accenting broad-jawed faces.

“They came before dawn, in league with wendigo hell spawn, what may not brave the Cherub’s light.”

“Thirteen, you did not eat their flesh, please—you must not be a man-eater, my tutor as you are?”

“Flesh no, nor blood. Such would be an affront to Christ’s transubstantiation from bread and wine. Heart and Liver, if consecrated with sword prayer, according to the rule of Saint Martial Sanguinarius, are acceptable fare, only upon Crusade, heathen only—for Christians must be consecrated to God and the poison of Mahound must not with Christian blood compound. To wit, it is a rite of their kind, an honor, as they would have done for your tutor, your slave. These were men of great strength and nourish the body towards a purpose.”

“Thirteen,” and he noted that Breed was up behind him, looking eagerly on, an apostle to them both, “let not Mother and the others no. Please, eat with us tonight.”

The eldritch knight looked at the misery whip propped between the heads, which occupied what had been Peter’s muse spot and was now his terrible work bench, fingered his broad dirk, which seemed mundane enough, if the size of a short sword, and nodded ‘yes’ in obedience—not agreement, it was obvious.

“Young Master, one of your small lions, a big male, big as your sire, resides in a mother tree bough, its woody cave, up above upon this mountain crown. I shall fetch him down for supper, before noon and celebrate the day of first wall raising.”

Peter grinned, grown to Peter in his mind, now, “Permission to hunt granted—the claw wounds are infectious. But I see you labor in mail—be careful in any case.”

“Yes, Young Master,” said Thirteen with a haughty air.

This rankled Peter as he responded without thinking, “Master, shall suffice, Thirteen.”

Thirteen then saluted Peter, by closing the visor on his war hat, and said with more than his usual dour gravity, “Master, your humble tutor graduates his Immediate Earthly Lord upon the first test.”

So he went up the mountain and Peter down. Turning, he saw Breed leaning to the middle head, that of a wide-faced chief. Peter scolded, “Breed, to your chores—not a word.”

“Yes Master,” obeyed Breed, sending sickening fright into Peter, who had never heard aught but gibberish from the head-dropped boy his drunken mother had brought to Mother when Peter was just turned ten. This would make Breed, just turned twelve, according to the two fingers his mother had raised to that question.

Peter stopped, turned, and quieted his heart, which was not disturbed by additional words.

“Breed, you will make a stool today, and sit by me for meals. Understand?”

“Yes, Good Master,” saluted Breed, to his shock of unruly hair.

“And no sassing Mum [Housekeeper Bet] now that you are growing a brain!”

“Ya’ah’az, Smart Master,” smiled the frighteningly alive eyes of Saint Roland’s anachronistic bedfellow.

Peter turned, belting his pistol, having forgotten it in his hand, and returned to the bustling grounds of Grim Hall as the men declared the soft mud trench in the frozen earth a miracle bestowed by their “Dark Angel,” and went to their wall raising with a gusto that only men with the promise of freedom demonstrate at work.