Boxes Of Hot Six

“Mm. Spe-cial. Pay.”

Dong-hui leaned on every syllable as she said it, and the last of the worry on Delma’s face melted away like snow.

I suppose people really do shrink to nothing when there is money in front of them.

“Yes! I understand!”

Delma answered with real force in her voice. The very thought of the special pay seemed to have put fresh strength into her already.

“Delma’s coming too, isn’t she?”
“But of course! I shall be sure to go!”

Delma answered with a beaming smile and went out.

“Special pay, no less!”

Delma came out of the lord’s room with her heart fluttering and called the castle’s household staff together. She had taken on the head maid’s duties as well by now, and the servants assembled at her summons in no time at all. To them she was both their superior at work and one of the very few grown-ups in the castle they could lean on.

They gathered in the hall the servants used for their communal meals and their own occasional parties, some fifty of them, drifting in by twos and threes with uneasy faces. Only the maids who had done the sewing and been paid special pay for it looked anything like hopeful.

“What have we been called together for?”
“We’re not getting sacked, are we?”
“They can’t. I’ve nowhere else to go but here.”
“Nor have I. This is the only place that pays anything at all, even a pittance of a wage. If I’m thrown out of here my little brothers and sisters will starve to death.”

Ever since Grace Castle’s finances had gone bad, the only reason Delma ever gathered the staff in one place was to hand them bad news: that the number employed was being cut, or that their wages could not be paid. The lord might have changed of late, but the servants had worked out well enough on their own that until very recently the castle’s finances had been hurtling toward ruin, and every last one of them stood there with an anxious face. Some of the younger maids were already brimming with tears at the thought of being turned out.

The hall could hold a hundred servants at once with room to spare, so with fewer than fifty standing in it, it looked utterly empty. Delma climbed a few steps so the murmuring crowd could see her properly, looked down over them, and raised her voice.

“You all know that what you ate a little while ago was Dural, don’t you?”

The servants nodded without a word. It had been so long since any of them had eaten enough to be full that their bellies were still round with it.

“There’s a broad plain near the Black Forest where Dural can be harvested. Her ladyship brought back the Dural we ate from there. Dural are so big that every one of us here ate our fill off fewer than twenty of them. You remember?”

They went on nodding, and the unease on their faces only deepened. Every one of them was afraid of being told to hand over money for it.

What Delma said next blew those worries away in an instant.

“Tomorrow we’re going out near the Black Forest to harvest Dural, and we need workers.”

They had eaten it and enjoyed it, true, but the vague dread of the Black Forest had not left them, nor the worry about harvesting Dural with their own hands. The murmuring swelled.

Delma waited for the noise to die down a little and then pressed boldly on, both hands planted on her hips, her bearing something close to commanding.

“Her ladyship says she will give special pay to anyone who lends a hand with tomorrow’s Dural harvest. Pay that isn’t part of your wages, of course.”
“Me! I’ll go!”

Five arms shot up around the hall, every one of them belonging to a maid who had done the sewing last time and taken special pay for it. The rest hung back, watching them, hesitating. The fear of the Black Forest still ran too deep.

Delma read the hesitation, shrugged, and added one thing more.

“The daily wage is three bron.”

Every other arm in the hall went up as one.

“Me too! I’ll go as well!”
“I’ll go too!”

Beginning with Anna, the hall filled with the voices of people volunteering from every side.

A little later Delma brought word back to Dong-hui. There were more than enough hands for tomorrow’s trip out to the Dural field, and since they had all been falling over one another to go, they had settled on going out in turns; however good the special pay was, they could hardly throw the work of Grace Castle aside and walk out of it altogether. The servants, Delma said, were beside themselves at the thought of special pay on top of their wages.

Lying back on the soft bed, turning over what Delma had told her, Dong-hui felt a contented smile spreading across her face. Nothing about it resembled the frozen, airless stillness she had stood inside just a little while before.

“Am I starting to be comfortable here?”

Even now the thought would come at her out of nowhere that she might be dreaming, and she would pinch her cheek to check. The status window, appearing from thin air like something she had dreamed up, only made the whole situation feel more unreal. And yet the people she met, the food she ate, the wind brushing her cheek and the cold air were all far too vivid to be anything but real.

Was it all right to go on like this? Dong-hui wondered for a moment, and then the tiredness came pouring over her, and she blinked slowly and was asleep before she knew it.

That night Dong-hui dreamed of a handsome silver-haired man gazing steadily at her. He seemed to have said a great many things, but when she opened her eyes in the morning, all she remembered was his long hair, beautiful as silver thread.

“A ghost dream?”

Goosebumps had come up on her arms out of nowhere. Dong-hui rubbed at them and went off to the bathroom to wash.

A little later.

In the empty bedroom, a status window flickered up into the air, glowing blue.

The letters graven on the status window went soft and wobbly, as though the thing were laughing.

The silver-haired man was simply there, with no sign of how he had come. He glowered at the status window in irritation, then turned the glare on the firmly shut bathroom door.

“It rather seems I have brought a fool along.”

Every soul he had brought here before her had held on to at least half of any ten things he told them. The woman called Dong-hui seemed to have kept not half but nothing at all. Not even his face.

Nothing else could explain a face as handsome as his being likened to a ghost.

“Be quiet. I decide that.”

The man watched the needling status window with the same irritation, let out a heavy sigh, and swept his arm once through the air. The Inventory Dong-hui had worked so hard to upgrade appeared in front of him.

A few things she had not yet taken out were still inside it: cup ramyeon, juice packs, gum. The man looked them over with distaste and thrust his arm in.

The status window blinked noisily, as though scolding him.

Then the man’s eyes went round at the small juice pack gripped in his hand. The paper carton sat neatly in his palm, cold as ice.

It had never happened before.

The status window flashed harder than before, cluttering up the man’s field of vision. He stood blankly for a moment, then peeled the straw off the pack and jabbed it down through the lid.

The man gave the urging status window one more look, then brought the straw slowly to his mouth.

— Ssssip.

Cool apple juice came into his mouth, and a sweet, bright taste burst across it.

Thrilled, the status window threw the word up in enormous letters, and the man reached for another of the foods. In that instant the hourglass spinning round and round above the back of his hand blinked and vanished. Before his hand could so much as reach the Inventory, he was gone.

The hand being sucked back into the status window still clutched, pitifully, a crushed juice pack.

“Right, shall we set off, then? Delma. Are the workers ready?”
“Yes, they have been waiting for some time already.”

Delma’s voice came out a little stiff, nerves perhaps.

Dressed as comfortably as she could manage for the second day running, Dong-hui was dying to call in a tailor and have a pair of trousers made as soon as possible.

Back when she wore nothing but jeans and work clothes every day, she had wanted a pretty, floaty dress. A few days in dresses that dragged along the floor and she wanted a tracksuit and trousers so badly it hurt. Left to herself she would have put on the jeans and the jacket back at the studio. And if she did, Delma would carry on as though the world were ending and tear the things off her where she stood. Of that much there was no doubt at all.

Kind as Delma was, she had an unexpectedly violent streak.

“And the carts?”

Dong-hui shook off the picture of her own T-shirt going to rags in Delma’s hands, and asked.

“I have ten ready.”

Delma counted the long row of carts over once more before she answered. Scrooge was working his way up and down between them, checking closely for anything broken and making sure the horses and oxen that would draw them were in good condition.

“Hmm… that’s not enough. Could we not get hold of more?”

The Dural field spread so wide there was no end in sight, and ten carts were absurdly few against it.

“Ten carts is all there is in the whole estate.”

Only ten usable carts in a castle this size.
Poor they most certainly are — unbelievably poor.

She had better ask Builder whether more carts could be made, she thought. There was some hope in it, too: a man with the skill to build houses could surely turn out something like a cart as well as anyone.

Before going on to the Dural field they stopped at the Black Forest first. She had thought they were setting out early, and yet the logging was already well under way.

Here and there a laborer stole a frightened glance at the Black Forest, but if anything the fear only drove the work along faster.

“Right! Let’s push on a bit faster!”

Builder’s voice boomed out across the whole worksite. There was more force in it than on the first day, and hearing it somehow put Dong-hui in better spirits.

“Builder.”
“Oh! My lady!”

She had walked over and said his name; Builder gave a start and came hurrying up with his back bent low.

“Hard going, isn’t it?”
“Not at all! Just being able to work like this, we are truly grateful for it! And what’s more, these trees are all going to be used in our own village, are they not? Strength comes welling up out of nowhere. And not only me… everyone gathered here will feel the same as I do.”

Builder seemed quite overcome, breaking off again and again as something rose in his throat, then picking the sentence back up.

“That’s good to hear. Hand these out to the laborers.”

As Dong-hui spoke, two servants held several large boxes out to Builder.

“What are these?”

Builder asked, looking at the long, narrow things packed into the boxes. They caught the sunlight and glinted, and at a glance they might have been little pillars of metal; across the outside ran strange letters he had never seen before.

Builder was a commoner, but the work of building houses had taught him his letters, and here was writing he had never in his life laid eyes on. His eyes went round.

“Hot Six.”¹