Month 1, Day 12
The trouble started with a clay jug. But the jug came later. Before the jug, the evening was the quietest one we'd had since coming back up.
Since the night we'd climbed out of the ground, the camp had been building a wall around itself. Half of it already stood when we walked in through the gate, Lydia doubled the shifts that same night, and now, three days later, you could sit by the fire and watch the gap between the two ends shrink a little more every day.
The fire pit was ours. It had been for weeks, since long before the descent: the spot where Daisuke, Carmen, Nikita and I landed after our shifts, back when Amina still made five. Since we'd come back, what was left of Squad Seven had folded into it too. Nobody had decided that. It had just happened.
That evening it was three of us, and nobody was talking. Jonas had the bad leg up on his stool and his eyes closed, and for once he wasn't performing being asleep, he was just quiet. Rafi had tried twice to get something going, a story about the ration line, then a question about the wall, and both tries had run out in the middle, right in the spot where Ben would have said something dry and kept it going. After the second one he gave up and fed the fire instead.
I'd come out here because the tent was worse. In the tent I lay on my back and listened, and every small sound in the camp turned into claws on stone before my head could catch it and sort it. At the fire the sounds at least had people attached. Even so, somebody dropped a pot lid two fires over and I was half off the log before the noise had finished. Rafi saw it. Neither of us said anything about it.
Mirae we hadn't seen in two days. She'd shut herself into her hut and was sleeping through the daylight, or trying to, Carmen said. Sleeping until it all felt further away. There were hours where I thought she had the better idea.
The dwarf came up between the tents with his hands empty for once, stopped at the edge of the light, and looked the three of us over.
"Cheerful," he said.
Nobody managed an answer. He came around anyway and took the end of the log that had somehow become his over the last three days.
"Good spot, this," he tried, holding his palms out to the fire. "Better than ours. Ours smokes."
Nothing.
"Wall's ahead of schedule."
Jonas made a sound that meant he'd heard. The dwarf nodded to himself, done trying, and settled in to be quiet with us instead. That, he was good at.
After a while Rafi stirred, mostly just to say something. "Your own squad's that way." He tipped his chin across the tents. "Big fire. More food, probably."
"Aye."
"I'm only saying."
"They've spent two months talking about rations and the weather." The dwarf laced his fingers over his stomach. "I went down that hole with you lot, not with them. I'll sit here."
"That's the nicest thing he's ever said," Jonas told the fire, eyes still shut.
"It won't happen again," the dwarf said.
Carmen came off the water run at dusk, the empty yoke over one shoulder. She read the fire in about one second and didn't try to fix it. She just sat down next to me, said "budge up" to nobody in particular, and let the quiet be quiet. After a while her shoulder came to rest against mine and stayed there, and that did more than talking would have.
Daisuke arrived at full volume while the last light was going.
He came up from the wall with mortar dust to the elbows and a clay jug hugged against his chest, and he stopped dead at the edge of the pit and counted us.
"Okay, what is this. Since when does our fire have..." He counted again. "Five. There are five of you. This is a four person fire. It has been a four person fire since the beginning of time."
"It was five," Carmen said. "Amina."
"Amina defected. Amina has med tent friends now. They talk about inventory and go to bed on time, and she's very happy, and we don't discuss it." He set the jug down on the log with both hands, adjusted it twice, and only then properly registered who the extra people were. "Right. No. Squad Seven counts, Squad Seven's grandfathered in. As you were."
Then he saw Carmen, and something in him visibly changed gears. He straightened, pushed his glasses up, and got one register quieter. "Hi. You're here. Good. I mean, obviously you're... it's your fire too."
"Long shift?" she asked.
"LONG shift." And he was off again.
"Long how?" Rafi asked, and it was the first whole question anyone at our fire had asked in an hour.
"Long as in they gave me the section." Daisuke said it fast, buried in the middle of brushing dust off his sleeves, the way you say a thing you've been carrying around all day and want somebody to pull out of you.
Jonas opened one eye. "They what?"
"Section lead. As of yesterday. The whole east run, forty people, my string, my courses." He couldn't keep it buried after that, the grin got loose. "FORTY people."
"They gave YOU forty people," Rafi said.
"They gave me forty people because my courses come out straight, which is more than..."
"Does Lydia know it's you? Like, by face?"
"Lydia PROMOTED me. Personally. There was a nod and everything."
"A nod."
"A meaningful nod."
And the fire came back to life around the argument. It just did, the way a fire does when someone throws the right wood on. For a while the talk simply ran, the wall, the shifts, which crews were feuding over the good barrow, and the feast, because the whole camp had already decided there'd be one the day the two ends of the wall met, and was planning it without asking anyone's permission. Somewhere in there Jonas sat up properly. Somewhere in there I noticed I'd stopped listening for sounds underneath the voices. Daisuke had done that. He didn't even know he was doing it.
Cealith came out of the dark between one topic and the next and sat down at the edge of the light without a word. Nobody heard him arrive. Nobody ever did.
"Isn't Squad Two still on shift?" Rafi asked.
"Yes," Cealith said, and offered nothing further, and held his hands out to the fire.
"Great talk."
Daisuke clapped his hands once. "Okay. Okay, everyone, eyes here, this is, Jonas, are you asleep? Somebody check."
"I'm awake," Jonas said, without lifting his head off the stool. "I'm conserving myself."
"Conserve later. Tonight we make history." He put a hand flat on the jug. "Three weeks this has been sitting by the forge. Three weeks of turning it every morning before any of you were even up, of guarding it, of believing in it when nobody else..."
"Nobody knew about it," Carmen said.
"...of believing in it ALONE, thank you, and I know what every one of you is thinking right now. You're thinking it'll be terrible. I want you to hold that thought very still for one more moment, so you can watch it be wrong."
"What is it?" Jonas asked.
"History. Were you not..."
"In the jug, Daisuke. What's in the jug."
"The first alcohol brewed in this world by human hands." He drew the words out one at a time. "And I'd like that written down somewhere before anyone makes a face."
"Nobody's making a face."
"Rafi's building one. I know his materials."
He worked the stopper loose. The hiss turned every head in the pit, and foam pushed up out of the neck and kept coming, down over his fingers and off the log.
"Is it supposed to do that?" Rafi asked.
"Yes."
"Is it, though?"
"It's alive," Daisuke said, watching the foam reach the ground. "Fermentation means it's alive, and alive means flavor. This is exactly the amount of alive I planned for."
Rafi volunteered his cup first, which surprised nobody. He toasted the group, said something about courage that nobody repeated later, and took a full swallow. For a moment he stood very still. Then he set the cup down with enormous care, walked a small circle around the fire with one hand flat on his chest, and tried three separate times to say a word. Air came out. He pointed at his own throat, then at Daisuke, then back at his throat.
"Strong," Daisuke said, making a note on his measuring stick with a charcoal nub. "Good body. Noted."
Rafi pointed at his throat again, with emphasis.
"Feedback counts when you can talk. Take your time."
The dwarf drank his pour level and slow, set the cup on the log, and looked into it. "I've had worse," he said. Then, after a real pause: "Once."
"When?" Daisuke leaned in. "Where? What was it called? I need the name, for comparison, this is important..."
The dwarf handed the cup back and said nothing at all, and Daisuke wrote nothing down.
Carmen leaned over her cup and breathed in once, carefully. She slid it back across the log with two fingers. "I'm saving myself for dinner."
"That's fair. That's completely fair," said Daisuke, who had argued with everyone else's feedback.
I drank mine because everyone was watching whoever came next. It burned going down and kept burning long past where it should have stopped, and under the burn sat a taste I placed a second too late: pine resin. Sixteen years old, my first drink of anything, and it was Daisuke's.
"Well?" He had the charcoal ready.
"Pine," I managed.
"Pine is a NOTE. People pay for notes." He wrote it down anyway. "Feedback. Real feedback, this is science."
"Poison," Rafi wheezed, from beside the fire.
"Poison is feedback."
"No. No, listen." Rafi hauled himself up onto the log, voice coming back in pieces. "Listen to me. The feast. When the wall closes, the whole camp comes to one party. The one party we get this year. And if THIS," he pointed at the jug without looking at it, "is the standard Squad Seven brings, we starve at our own party. Surrounded by food. Starving."
"That's dramatic. This is a beverage. Food is a completely separate discipline, you can't just..."
"Can you cook, though?" Rafi let it sit. "Actually cook. Not measure. Cook."
"Can I..." Daisuke put the measuring stick down, which meant it was serious. "I run a crew of forty on that wall. Forty people, fed and standing, and I calculate ratios in my head all day long. Ratios ARE cooking. So yes."
"Ratios are not... that's not even..." He turned to the rest of us for support, got nothing, and turned back. "Fine. Prove it. Tonight. Two fires, two teams, whatever the ration tent gives us. Best dish gets served at the feast."
"Fine."
"And the losers take the winners' trench shift. The new latrine line."
"Fine. Wait." Daisuke's confidence caught up with the terms. "For how long?"
"All week."
"...Fine."
"You hesitated."
"I recalculated. It's fine."
Jonas raised one hand from the stool. "Before anyone drafts me. I'm not cooking."
"You're on my..." Rafi started.
"The knee can't stand at a cook fire. The knee can, however, sit in judgment." He patted the stool. "Medical promotion. Spectator to jury."
"You can't promote yourself."
"My doctor did it. You weren't there."
"Nobody HERE is a... Mirae wrapped your knee once. That's not a doctor."
"You weren't there," Jonas said again, with dignity.
"Teams." Daisuke was already pointing. "Carmen. Aleks. With me."
"You just want Carmen on your roster," Rafi said.
"I want a BALANCED roster. Carmen carries water without complaining about the yoke, that's logistics. And Aleks is..." He looked at me for a moment. "Calm. Aleks brings calm. Every kitchen needs calm."
"Fine. I get the dwarf."
"No," said the dwarf.
"You'd rather dig a trench all week?"
The dwarf thought about it for exactly as long as the question deserved, then stood and came around to Rafi's side of the fire.
"Right." Rafi counted with a finger. Himself. The dwarf. He counted again, in case it improved. "That's two. Two against three."
"You picked first," Daisuke said.
"I picked ONE person first, because you'd already grabbed two before anyone agreed to..."
"Quality over quantity," Jonas offered, from the jury.
"Quality over quantity. Yes. Exactly." Rafi pulled his shoulders back. "Two masters against a committee."
"Say it enough," the dwarf said, "and it might cook."
"Two fires, then," Jonas announced, in his full jury voice now. "One judge. May the trench claim the worthy."
"That's not a saying," Rafi said.
"It is now."
Carmen came back from the ration tent with two matched piles and Amina's sign-off, which had apparently cost her two future favors and a promise nobody planned to keep. Each team got the same: a measure of grain, a string of dried meat, three flatbreads, roots, and a twist of salt. She dropped the piles by the fires and delivered the terms. "Amina says if either team burns down a tent, she's charging it to our ration cards. Both teams. Doesn't matter who did it."
"Both teams?" Rafi called over from his pit. "How is that fair?"
"She said, and I'm quoting her, 'collective incentive.'"
"That's fair," Jonas said.
"You're not even on a team!"
"The jury is an institution. Institutions can be burned down too."
Rafi's team took the next pit over, close enough that both fires shared their light, which meant close enough to watch each other, which was the whole point.
Daisuke brought his entire wall-site method to our fire. He laid the measuring stick across the pot rim, called depths, and narrated.
"Water to the fourth knuckle-mark. Meat goes in at the start, all of it, for maximum integration. Fire high, time short. Efficiency."
"The stick doesn't know this pot," Carmen said.
"The stick knows all pots."
"It's a stick."
"It's CALIBRATED. There's a difference, and it worries me that you can't..."
"Fourth knuckle of whose hand? Yours? Mine? Because those are different soups."
"The knuckle system is standardized," Daisuke said. "I standardized it."
Across the gap, Rafi's fire already stood taller than ours, because his food theory and his argument theory turned out to be the same theory.
"Hotter is better!" he called over, stirring with his blade. "Everything's better hotter! Ask anyone!"
"Heat is a TOOL," Daisuke shouted back, turning fully around. "You don't just add more of it and call that a..."
"Ask ANYONE."
"He's baiting you," Carmen said. "Stir."
Daisuke stirred, checked the stick, and frowned at nothing. Then he looked over at the jug, still sitting on the log between the fires, and his whole face changed, and I knew exactly what was coming.
"No," Carmen said, without turning around.
"You don't even know what I was going to..."
"The jug stays a spectator."
"One splash. For depth. Alcohol plus heat, the burn cooks off and the flavor stays, it's called deglazing, probably, I heard it somewhere and it stuck because it's TRUE..."
"Daisuke."
"Half a splash."
"Daisuke."
He set it down. While he was busy remeasuring the water, I moved the jug around to my far side, where he'd have to climb over me to reach it.
At some point Rafi appeared at the edge of our light, blade still dripping stew. "Where's the good ladle."
"Which ladle?"
"The good one. This camp owns exactly one good ladle, we had it at our fire, and now it's..."
"Possession," Daisuke said, stirring with the good ladle, "is nine tenths of cooking."
"You're ADMITTING it. He's admitting it, everyone heard him admit..."
"Nine. Tenths."
Rafi went back to his fire with the bad ladle and his dignity, in that order.
A while later the dwarf drifted over and stood at the edge of our light with his arms folded, watching our pot in silence. Daisuke narrowed his eyes at him.
"You're downwind."
"Aye."
"You're SMELLING our recipe. That's espionage."
The dwarf held his eyes and took one deliberate step further downwind, and went on standing there.
"Okay." Daisuke turned back to the pot. "Okay. A spy with confidence. I can respect it and hate it at the same time."
It was Rafi who noticed his team had left him. "Where's my TEAM?" He turned a full circle with the bad ladle held out. "I have one teammate. One. Where did he..."
The dwarf had walked out of the firelight without a word to anyone. He came back before Rafi had finished being loud about it, with a fistful of small sharp-smelling leaves and one pale root. The lot went into their pot, and he took the stirring back up mid-motion.
"What is that?" Rafi peered into their pot. "What did you just put in? Is it safe? Do dwarves know plants? Since when do dwarves know..."
"Mountain herbs." The dwarf kept stirring. "Or near enough."
"'Near enough' is not a thing you say about ingredients..."
"It's dinner or it isn't. We'll know."
Our own pot, meanwhile, was dying.
The signs came in order: the smell going from dinner to campfire, then burnt flecks rising off the bottom when Daisuke stirred. His stirring got faster, which was the worst thing he could have done and the only thing he knew to do.
"It's fine," he said, stirring harder. "It's developing. Stirring redistributes the..."
The smell reached me before the sentence ended, and I was up with a cloth around both hands before anyone asked me to be. First the pot came off the flame. Then I tipped it, slow, and let the clean stew run off the top into the bread pan, and the burnt layer stayed stuck to the bottom where it belonged. Fresh water into the pan, a raked bed of embers instead of open flame, and the whole thing set back down low.
"What are you doing, the chart says..."
"Let him," Carmen said.
"He's pouring out our... okay." Daisuke lowered the chart hand. "Okay. He's doing something. Everyone stay calm."
Two years of midnight kitchens, back home, cooking for one while everyone else slept, because an empty kitchen was the only kind I could stand being in. Apparently all of it had come along with me.
I fished the dried meat back out piece by piece and toasted it on a flat stone at the fire's edge until the fat hissed, then dropped it back in. Half a flatbread, crumbled small, to thicken what the water had thinned. Then the salt, at the end instead of the start, a pinch at a time, tasting between pinches. The stew came back around slow, the burn gone, the toasted meat coming through, and by the last pinch it was food.
Around me the fire pit had gone quiet. Daisuke stood with the measuring stick hanging forgotten in one hand.
"Why didn't you scrape the bottom," he said. "There was good material down there. There was DEVELOPMENT."
"The burnt part stays where it is if you leave it alone. Scrape it and it's in every bite."
"But char is a thing. Chefs talk about char, I've heard people talk about char..."
"On meat. On purpose." I tasted and added one more pinch. "Never in a pot by accident."
He got his charcoal out. "Say that again. Slower. Both sentences."
Carmen hadn't said anything for a while. When I looked up she was watching me, the spoon I'd handed her still in her hand. Her face was doing something I didn't have a name for and didn't dare look at twice.
"Since when," she said, "can you cook?"
"Since always, I guess. Nobody ever asked."
"I'm asking now," Daisuke said, still writing. "Officially. Consider yourself permanently asked."
Jonas took the judging further than anyone had agreed to. He had Rafi carry the stool to a neutral position between the fires, arranged a flatbread across his knees, and announced that it was his palate.
"Your what?"
"Palate. It cleanses. Between dishes."
"It's bread."
"It's EQUIPMENT." He straightened on the stool. "Present your dish. With a name."
"It's stew," Rafi said. "It's called stew."
"Presentation matters. Half a point gone."
"There were never points!"
"There have always been points."
"Since WHEN?"
"Since I sat down."
Rafi's team went first. Their stew came up thin and heavy with salt, and the bread they'd toasted alongside had gone past toast and most of the way to charcoal. Everyone could smell both things, and nobody said a word about either. Jonas took a full spoon, held it a moment, swallowed it, and sat very still.
"Talk to me," Rafi said. "Judge. Talk to me."
"I'm deciding which part to survive first."
"It's rustic. It's a rustic..."
"The green bits." Jonas pointed the spoon at their pot. "The green bits are the only part I'd eat again. The green bits are carrying the two of you."
"The green bits were his," Rafi admitted.
"Then he's carrying you, and you're heavy."
"Between dishes," Jonas announced, "the jury requires a palate cleanser."
Rafi handed him the jug. He did it with a completely straight face.
Jonas looked at the jug, looked at Rafi, and set it down at the far end of the log with both hands. "The jury withdraws the request. That's evidence, not a beverage."
Then our pot came up, and I watched people I'd nearly died beside go quiet over a spoonful of stew. Rafi took his taste as opposing captain, chewed once, and looked at me with an expression of honest betrayal.
"Objection," he said, with his mouth full.
"To what?" Jonas asked.
"Pending."
"You can't have a pending objection."
"Then I object to the stew being this good. On principle. He carried the torch for a month, and now he cooks? Nobody gets to just quietly be good at..."
"Overruled. Eat."
"Cross-examination," Jonas said, when the bowls had gone around once. "Everyone tastes everything. Jury's orders."
The dwarf took a spoon of ours, chewed it the same slow way he'd chewed his own team's, and set the spoon down. He turned to Rafi.
"We dig."
"We do NOT dig. We haven't lost. There's no verdict, the jury hasn't even..."
The dwarf was already refilling his bowl from our pot.
"Stop EATING the opposition!"
Cealith materialized beside the stool during the shouting, silent, unannounced. Jonas jerked half off his seat. "DON'T do that."
"Which one wins?" Cealith asked.
"That's my line. Fine, neutral party, break the tie that isn't a tie. Which is better?"
Cealith considered both pots with complete seriousness. "Better for what?"
"...You're off the jury."
Cealith took a bowl of ours anyway and drifted back to the edge of the light with it. Somewhere in there Carmen filled a bowl too, quietly, and carried it off between the tents, toward Mirae's hut. She came back without the bowl and said nothing about it, and nobody asked.
Nikita came in out of the dark between one laugh and the next, spear still over his shoulder from the evening drills. The talk dipped and kept going. Carmen loaded a plate and put it in his hands, and he ate the whole of it standing, unhurried, eyes moving between the two fires while everyone pretended they weren't waiting.
He set the plate on the log.
"Make more."
Then he went back the way he'd come, and Jonas leaned toward Rafi. "You hear that? Highest marks given tonight. Sit down."
The verdict, when Jonas finally rose to deliver it, was given one-legged, with one hand gripping Rafi's shoulder for balance.
"You're leaning on the accused," Rafi said.
"The accused is load-bearing. Quiet." Jonas cleared his throat. "By the power of medical neutrality. The stew of Team Daisuke goes to the feast. The trench goes to Team Rafi."
"Rematch," Rafi said instantly. "At the feast. Real stakes."
"You're digging a latrine all week. That's real."
"AFTER the trench. Rematch after the trench."
"Accepted," Daisuke said, already grinning. "Bring the green bits. You'll need them."
"The green bits are digging with me."
"We dig," the dwarf agreed, from inside his second bowl.
The party thinned out slowly. Rafi and the dwarf argued their way toward the tents about whose salt it had been. Jonas fell asleep sitting upright on his stool until Carmen tipped him awake and pointed him at his bedroll. For a while it was Daisuke and me at the embers, with the second fire dying across the gap.
He had his plumb stone out, turning it over in his fingers. I hadn't seen him take it from his pocket.
"Ben used to check my corners," he said. "First week on the wall, every evening. Thumb on my string, and then 'good,' or 'again.'" He turned the stone over once more. "It was 'again' most nights."
I kept my eyes on the coals and let him have the quiet.
"He'd have liked tonight," Daisuke said. "He'd have hated the drink. He'd have liked tonight." Then he stood, pocketed the stone, and the crew boss came back into his voice on the way up. "Feast menu. Your stew, scaled by forty. I'm making a chart, don't fight me on the chart."
He went off into the dark, and it was Carmen and me and the bowls.
She stacked the last of them, sat down next to me on the log, closer than the log required, and looked at the fire instead of at me.
"So the feast has a cook now," she said. "Daisuke's going to put your name on a chart. You know that, right? There's no escaping the chart."
"I figured."
"Good. And you're going to the feast with me." She kept her eyes on the fire. "I'm telling you now so you've got time to get used to the idea."
It took a moment before I trusted my voice. "Okay."
"Okay," she said, and I could hear that she was smiling without needing to check. Then, quicker, quieter, into the fire: "Also, I've started with the spear line. Mornings, at dawn. Drills."
"Okay."
"That's it? No speech about being careful?"
"You'll be good at it."
She looked at me a moment longer than the answer needed, then nodded and took her stacked bowls off toward the tents. I sat there and let my face do whatever it wanted now that nobody could see it.
The jug still stood on the log where the party had been, stoppered again, upright, with a clear arm's length of empty log on either side of it.
Mirae's hut still had a light in it when I passed on the way to the tents. The flap stood tied half open, and she sat just inside with the plank across her knees, the cloth scraps weighted flat with pebbles, the empty bowl set neatly beside the flap. By the low lamp she was going down the rows with a charcoal stub. On every scrap where the tree stood, the same small mark sat beside it, three cut lines and a hook, all the way down the row.
"It's on every wall I copied," she said, without looking up. "Always next to the tree. I need the real walls, not my memory of them." She set the charcoal down and smoothed the scrap flat with both hands.
"Someone has to go back down there."