Gloves Too Fine To Dirty

Dong-hui left Farmer to the meal he had waited so long for, an awed look still on his face, then hurried back to her room and stepped straight through the front door into her studio apartment. There was no time even to change her clothes; she slipped out of the studio and made for the convenience store at once.

“Now where is that?”

Her eyes went darting about in search of it. She scurried up and down the store for a good while before she found what she was after and started loading it into her Inventory. Space for four hundred items, and every slot went to the same thing. They were not new, true enough, but she was sure the workers would find them a great help.

“Aaargh! I’m honestly way too good a lord, aren’t I?”

Dong-hui squared her shoulders as she said it, and the status window popped up out of nowhere.

That’s mocking me, isn’t it?

Dong-hui’s eyes went wide and hard, and the status window scrawled out a quick ‘Oops!’ once again and vanished.

A makeshift shelter had been put up near the wasteland, where the dust blew about in clouds. There was nowhere nearby to get out of the wind, and the workers needed somewhere to rest and eat.

“To have even a thing like this made ready for us — our lord is a truly kind-hearted person.”
“No mistake. With a bellyful of breakfast in me the strength comes of its own accord.”
“I really do think coming here was the right thing to do.”

Henry and Ned had already become ardent followers of the Grace lord. A few were still uneasy, but most of them, like Henry and Ned, warmed to the lord more with every day that passed.

The two of them had come expecting to be turned away empty-handed, without so much as a day’s work, and the extraordinary treatment they were getting now was like a dream. There was nothing the pair of them would not do, so long as her ladyship was the one who set them to it.

While the workers murmured among themselves, a cart piled high with something drew up in front of them. A sour, musty smell came wafting off the blackish heap. It looked like withered grass, or like a mound of useless weeds raked together.

“Fertilizer, is it?”
“Hoo. What difference is spreading fertilizer on land like this going to make? However hard the rain comes down, that ground is bone dry inside half a day.”
“True enough.”
“What does it matter one way or the other? We do the work and we take the money, and that is the end of it.”

The Grace lord had given these men a place to sleep and food enough to fill their bellies, and a good many of them felt sorry for her, clinging to a hopeless task as she was.

“Attention!”

The workers had gathered in twos and threes, muttering over the heap of grass none of them could name, when the knight commander they had seen on the open ground the day before shouted out in a great voice. Beside him stood a man in clothes as worn as any of the workers’, holding himself neatly upright. His curly hair stood up on end like a head of broccoli, and he was so taken up with running those great eyes over the assembled workers that he noticed nothing else.

“This man is Farmer, the foreman who will take charge of the reclamation work and see it through. From this day you are to address him as Foreman!”

Every eye in the crowd swung around to Farmer, who blinked his great eyes back at them.

“Hic!”

Farmer, suddenly the object of so many people’s attention, grew so nervous that the hiccups came on. The sight of him was ridiculous enough that a small burst of laughter went up among the workers, who had been standing stiff with nerves themselves.

Red Bear narrowed his eyes in displeasure at Farmer’s want of dignity.

Strung as tight as he was, Farmer noticed none of it, neither the knight commander’s disapproving stare nor the workers laughing at hiccups that had come from nowhere. There was room in his head for one thought only, and that was to do this job well. He cleared his throat with a couple of coughs.

“From this point we shall divide into two teams and, hic! carry the work forward. From here, five rows are to dig out the rough stones in the ground. Hic! These two rows here will help me make the fertilizer. Hic! And the rest of you have only to carry the stones you have, hic! picked out, hic! away outside.”

For all Red Bear’s hard looks, Farmer’s hiccups showed no sign of stopping. Laughter broke out here and there among the men. Then came the murderous look in Red Bear’s eyes, and the humor went out of their faces in an instant. Once they were listening in earnest, Farmer’s hiccups gradually died away as well.

After all his trials Farmer got safely to the end of his work orders and let out a long breath. The hiccups had broken in here and there, but he had said everything he had prepared without mishap, and his face was a good deal easier for it.

Farmer’s explanation over, Red Bear took it up.

“What is being handed out now are gloves her ladyship has bestowed especially for the safety of the workers. Take them, and engrave upon your hearts the depth of her ladyship’s regard for the estate residents!”

While Red Bear boomed all this out, the knights who had come with him began handing each worker a rolled-up pair of cotton work gloves. Dong-hui had hurried into the convenience store and brought back the gloves they used to use there.

Farmer, who had been given his pair ahead of the rest before they set out, felt his eyes go damp all over again.

The workers had never in all their lives owned such a thing as a glove, and they gazed in awe at the creamy-white cotton being laid neatly onto their hands. Henry was no different.

“Are we truly being given these?”

Henry could not even put them on, and asked again and again with the pair lying just as they were on an open palm.

“Every one of you is to work wearing the gloves her ladyship has bestowed!”
“I beg your pardon?”

The voices that leapt up here and there were twice as loud as when the gloves had been handed over. To be told to use gloves as precious as these not for going out but for working. And the work in front of them now was the kind that meant getting dirt on their hands.

“But if we work with the gloves on, they will get dirty, will they not?”

Henry was plainly not the only one worried. From the back an elderly worker raised a hand and asked the same thing in a voice full of concern. They were afraid, it seemed, of being punished for soiling something her ladyship had bestowed.

“They are gloves you wear so that your hands are not hurt.”

The bewilderment on their faces only grew the deeper. To them, hurting your hands while you worked was no different a thing from moving your legs in order to walk.

Red Bear told them several times over to put the gloves on and work, but most of them, instead of wearing them, stowed the pair away carefully inside their clothes.

“I’ll have to give these gloves to the missus. She’ll be over the moon, won’t she?”
“I’m giving mine to my daughter. Imagine how she’ll stare when I tell her the Grace lord gave them to me.”

These were people who had worn nothing but coarse cloth all their lives, who picked up what others had worn out and thrown away and mended it to wear again. In their eyes the cotton gloves were softer, more yielding and finer than any cloth they knew, and they would not hear of getting dirt on a gift like that.

Red Bear, having told them again and again to put the gloves on, gave it up in the end and could only watch the workers labor bare-handed. Perhaps because they now had a present to carry home with them, the smiles never left their faces.

Tension showed plainly on the faces of the mercenaries, the knights and the carpenters who had set out for the Black Forest. The sun was up bright and it was broad daylight, but the forest stood so thick with trees that it was as dark as the dead of night. A bleak, uneasy air hung so heavy in the wood that a monster springing out at them, from in front or behind, would have been no surprise at all.

No sunlight reached in, and the air against the skin was far colder for it. White steam leaked from mouths and noses as they walked, heads turning this way and that.

Urun, leading the logging team in Red Bear’s place, moved slowly forward with sword drawn. One hand held a longsword so great that no ordinary person could ever have lifted it, and Urun showed not the least sign of strain for it. Those thick arms were as broad as another person’s thighs.

Not even birdsong reached that wood; there was nothing but the rough breathing of the mercenaries and the workers. To get to the Komo grove they had to press on from the edge, deeper into the forest.

“By the Daltteurak flowers in bloom here, it seems the Komo grove is close.”

Dirk, who was guiding them, had spotted the flowers and called out in a glad voice. An outstanding sense of direction, and a wide knowledge of plants besides, made Dirk one of the people the knights could absolutely not do without.

That was when it happened.

“Shh!”

Urun hushed them urgently, but a soft rustling of monsters on the move had already started up all around. Dirk, who in that gladness had cried out without meaning to, gripped their sword, at a loss what to do.

“Logging team, down!”

At Urun’s shout the carpenters dropped flat where they stood, and the mercenaries and the knights filtered in evenly among them. They had drilled the formation again and again before ever entering the Black Forest, against just such an emergency, and for all their tension they moved fast. Standing among the flattened logging team, the mercenaries and knights drew their swords and watched every quarter.

— Flap-flap-flap-flaaaap!

— Screeeeeeech!

The forest stirred, ominous, and the birds that had been silent as the dead cried out fretfully and went up into the sky. The sky, black and dark enough already, went a shade darker under their shadow.

— Shwoooooosh!

“East!”

The beat of wings came in from somewhere as fast as an arrow. Urun shouted, and the knights swung their swords in nimble arcs.

— Kyaaaaagh!

“Aaaaaagh!”
“Eep!”

What had come flying savagely in at the logging team was a monster shaped like a great bat: a Kyulen. Wings spread wide, it was about the size of a grown man, a big blood-drinker that lived by sucking the blood of animals and of people. Even in the darkness its fangs glinted sharp.

“Aaaagh! Help!”
“Aaaaaah!”

The terrified workers buried their heads between their legs and screamed.

“Protect the carpenters!”
“Hold the formation!”

The knights and the mercenaries were shaking with terror themselves at the monsters that had burst in on them, and fighting for their lives all the same to protect the workers. The sight of it went straight to the workers’ hearts.

— Slish! Slish!

One after another the Kyulen went down under the swords the knights and the mercenaries swung, and under their arrows.

— Flump!

— Flu-flump!

Every time a Kyulen dropped to the ground with its head and wings hacked off, the workers started and sprang up like springs.

But a few brave ones among them swung the axes in their hands with all their might at the Kyulen swooping in.