Chapter 66 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 66: Harvest and Hibernation 10
Violet held out her cup as well.
The clear wine poured into the silver cup, carrying the chill of late autumn, sweet and satisfying on the tongue.
She took a sip and asked Lucita: "What were you doing today?"
Lucita didn't hedge. She poured herself a cup, set the jug on the table beside her, and gave a half-joking wink: "Put grandly, you might call it ‘an audience with a deity’."
"What for?"
"I made a wish." Lucita sat down beside her. "Wished for a good harvest next year."
Violet said "oh" and thought about it: "Next year? Aren't you going to the continent next year?"
A pointed question.
Lucita touched her nose, her voice going slightly unsteady: "Yes."
“My old home is over there. It was a forest once, but by now it’s probably a human-built city.”
Violet said it in an unreadable tone. Lucita turned to look at her. The elf's gaze reflected in the gently swaying cup, her expression hidden beneath lowered eyes.
This was the most demonstrative Lucita had ever seen Violet.
Ah. This grape wine really is a fine vintage.
Lucita smiled and drained her cup in one go. “Tell me roughly where. I had a look at Dr. Stasia’s complete continental map.”
“Somewhere in the north, I think,” Violet pieced it together slowly, rising to pour herself another cup. “There was a snow mountain close by. The forest lay at the foot of that mountain. When winter came and deep snow sealed the mountain pass, and everyone stayed indoors, the old musician would play the flute by the window, to give people heart through the cold.”
She drank another cup and let out a long breath. "In those days, the young elves had never known what death was."
Lucita clinked her cup against Violet's in a slow, unhurried toast, her gaze going a little unfocused in thought. “Ah, let me think… that would be a city in northern Spring. A place rather isolated from everywhere else. Alberga, the Frost-White City, famous for its snowscapes.”
"Will you go there, when you're on the continent?"
Lucita had been about to shake her head, but glanced down at Violet and changed her answer: "Perhaps."
"Then I want to come with you."
Violet let out a slow breath and tilted her head back to look at the moon through the treetops. "Luci, I miss home a little."
"So do I," Lucita said, almost without thinking, lying back on the grass at the edge of the square with her arms behind her head, her eyes half-closing in something like a pleasant haze. "But it can only ever be a feeling now."
Violet lay back as well. “I’ll tell you… where I come from, the forest was far larger than anything here. The entire range at the foot of the snow mountains was elf territory. The game alone was more than we could ever eat. Before Mirror Lake chose me as the next crown prince, I won the autumn hunt every year…”
She gazed at the moon hanging in the treetops. The forest here was still beautiful, rich, and flourishing, veiled in the hazy mist of the autumn night, like something seen through thin gauze.
But the homeland she thought about day and night, where was it now?
Violet gradually went quiet. At some point Mavis had drifted over, and was sitting cross-legged nearby.
"Tell me more about your home."
The wine had thickened her voice slightly, and a flush had risen in her face. She looked down at Violet with those water-toned eyes, something faintly pleading in their depths.
She said, “So an elf… could have been that happy, couldn’t she?”
Lucita suddenly noticed that Mavis's shoulder, without the nightingale perched there, looked very empty.
Violet shook her head.
In a pleasant mist of wine, their thoughts grew blurred at the edges.
All around, voices continued without pause. Linnea's happy laughter rang out and carried far, as though from the other end of the world.
Autumn toppled into a vat of grape wine, and stopped abruptly.
The temperature after the festival dropped noticeably. Within days, people were putting on light padded coats in the north wind.
The turnips and spinach planted at the beginning of autumn had fully matured.
They brought in the final autumn harvest through the cold morning frost, and life suddenly fell quiet.
The days had grown noticeably shorter. By the time dinner came around, the sky was already completely dark.
Lucita bought two whole boars from the butcher, then knocked on the elves' cottage door and purchased one whole wild roe deer. It would be the household's winter meat reserves.
At the sight of all that meat, Violet's eyes lit up: "Are you going to make cured meat?"
Lucita gave her a slow blink.
At the start of November, even after a small snowfall, the weather had grown gradually drier without becoming too cold yet.
The meat she’d bought had already been dressed by Ada and the elf hunters. She only needed to wash it, pat it dry, and it was ready for curing.
A whole jar of coarse salt, black pepper, and juniper berries ground together, with bay leaves mixed in, became the cure. She rubbed it carefully into every piece of meat.
The bulk of the two boars and the roe deer, most of it cut into neat pieces, was packed into wooden boxes. A wooden board was laid over the meat, and a large stone placed on top to press it down.
Pressing out the moisture thoroughly allowed the meat to soak in its cure-saturated juices, which made it more flavorful and far less likely to spoil.
Meat cured this way, with enough subsequent processing and smoking, could be eaten raw.
The remaining large loins, rubbed all over in coarse salt and spices, were placed directly in large jars, with enough ale poured in to half-submerge them.
These were for the cured pork in the style she remembered.
Compared to Irttat’s traditional smoked-meat method, this was her own recipe, drawn from memory. It wasn’t suitable for eating raw, but required far less time.
Splitting the work across two batches, one quick and one slow, would leave them with more than enough cured and smoked meat to last the whole winter.
Before the curing was finished, the first snow arrived ahead of schedule.
In people's eyes, it wasn't truly the start of winter until the first snow had fallen.
This year's snow came particularly early. Just into November, begonias and late-season chrysanthemums still in bloom had their many still-vivid colors pressed unexpectedly under a thin layer of snow, fading and falling away slowly.
Winter brought shorter days and longer nights, and every household settled into rest.
The school stopped taking classes. Linnea, unable to stay still, ran every day to the carpenter's house to play with her friend Jessica.
The two of them had recently become obsessed with a new game: catching birds.
They scattered birch seeds, nuts, and summer-dried berries in the snow, propped a mesh frame up with a small stick, and any tern or puffin not clever enough to spot the trap was often caught under the frame, chirping away in anxious agitation.
The birds inside the frame went on chirping; the children outside gathered around to whisper and discuss. Only once they'd had their fill of looking did they lift the frame and let the birds go.
When the birds spread their wings and flew free, there was usually a burst of clapping and laughter, startling the foxes in the forest.
Lucita and Violet spent those days making frequent trips into the forest, returning each time with armloads of pine and cypress branches, piling them gradually next to the stove in the storage house.
This was preparation for smoking the meat.
The smoked meat needed to spend a full month pressed in the wooden box, but the cured pork only needed seven days of curing before it could be lifted out and hung to air.
Before hanging, the cured surface had to be rinsed thoroughly clean of the spice mix, to prevent the finished meat from coming out too salty.
During construction, the storage house had been fitted with several rows of wooden poles at Durani's hand. They threaded hooks through the meat, hung a full row from the poles, and began the airing process.
Another seven days passed, and the surface of the meat had dried completely, firm to the touch. That meant it was ready.
Then came the most essential step: smoking.
The smoking material came from whatever they had on hand, primarily pine and cypress branches. Beyond that, Violet cut oak and beech, and had the carpenter Skloot plane some into shavings, equally excellent for smoking.
Lucita lit the stove, pressed some pine and cypress branches onto the small flame, and immediately a great cloud of thick smoke billowed up.
They hung the cured pork in the smoke above the stove, coughing all the while, and pulled the storage house door shut.
Winter was very quiet. Lucita’s daily work consisted of sweeping the yard and preparing food for everyone. Beyond that, she stayed indoors entirely, curled beside the hearth to read.
In winter, the hearth fire almost never went out. All the firewood gathered in autumn was meant for exactly this: one warm winter.
A few potatoes and sweet potatoes could be buried in the coals, then fished out with iron tongs once they were done, roasted hot. Peel the skin and eat them just like that.
Sweet potato skin splitting open, golden syrup running out like honey. Potato soft and tender, popped into the mouth while still scalding, already fragrant and sweet.
If you liked, you could slip off to the kitchen for salt and spices to sprinkle over them, an entirely different pleasure.
Lucita and Violet occupied opposite corners of the sofa; Linnea dragged out her small blanket and spread it on the rug in front of the hearth for her afternoon nap.
In these quiet days, their attention settled on the books in the study.
Violet plunged into The Art of Baking Bread, felt her cooking had improved considerably, and began attempting to bake again in the kitchen. The result was still a loaf of black charcoal.
Every afternoon, without fail, Lucita lit the stove in the storage house and let the pine-scented white smoke fill it for half a day.
A week later, the cured pork was ready.
The finished cured pork was a deep brown, noticeably lighter in weight, the surface firm to the touch, a little golden fat running down the grain of the meat.
Lucita hung it back on the wooden rack by the wall, a tidy row that would keep through the entire winter and could be taken down and eaten whenever they liked.
She put the room in order, picked up one piece of the cured pork and weighed it in her hand with satisfaction, pulled the door shut, and carried it to the kitchen to rinse.
As it happened, the row of garlic shoots on the windowsill had come in nicely. Tonight’s dinner would be stir-fried garlic shoots with cured pork.
Another comfortable day.
By December, the traditional smoked meat was also ready.
Meat soaked in brine for a full month was extremely salty, and needed to be washed thoroughly until the cure was completely gone.
The process that followed was the same: thread and hang to cool, wait until it dried firm and the color deepened, then begin smoking.
The remaining pine and cypress branches were running short. Too lazy to go back into the mountains, they instead picked through the firewood stacked for the hearth: dry oak shavings, cherry wood, juniper. Wood shavings of various kinds could all be used for smoking, and each type gave a different flavor to the finished result.
Smoked meat required considerably longer smoking time than cured pork. Half an afternoon each day, for nearly a fortnight in total, followed by another fortnight of resting to let the fat fully permeate.
By the end of December, just as the cured pork was nearly finished, the smoked meat was complete.
Large quantities of smoked meat hung in several rows in the storage house, more than enough to eat for most of the following year.
Cut a slice and look, the cooled smoked meat showed clear marbling, the cured flesh a pleasing deep tone, a lovely thin red that seemed to concentrate an entire winter’s cold and ease within it.
Layered on a plate, served as a cold dish, tucked into bread, or pan-fried, it was irresistible.
Perhaps Lucita’s blessing ritual at the harvest festival had truly taken effect. The snow this year was unusually frequent.
After several snowfalls throughout December, the largest came at the very end of the month: two full days and one night of snow that sealed everyone's doors.
The golden clusters of paper-bush and pheasant’s eye that bloomed in the forest were now completely buried. Not even the green of the pines and cypresses was visible.
Fortunately, the pot of Christmas roses on the windowsill was inside the house. Its upright stems, snow-white petals, and tender green stamens bloomed on, unaware of the world, looking out through the glass at the heavy snow beyond.
The fire in the hearth crackled and popped.
Lucita, sitting beside it, set down her book and looked out the window.
Over this winter, she had worked her way through every book in the study — from A Guide to Growing Peas to An Analysis of Ritual Magic, from The History of the Bow and Arrow to The Founding of Eaton — and had finally built a complete understanding of this world.
She knelt on the sofa, looking through the window toward the distant mountains.
Between sky and earth there was nothing but white. The snow light reflected back into her pupils, sharp and dazzling.
The sun seemed to have climbed hard for a long time behind the mountains, only to concede defeat at last, letting a faint, exhausted gold show above the ridge, slanting across the black-branched trees below.
Lucita opened a small gap in the window. Cold air and snow particles swirled straight in.
She reached out to the windowsill outside, grabbed a handful of snow, rolled it into a ball, and —thwack — straight down Violet's collar.
…
"Luci!"
Lucita's eyes curved as she laughed.
[Volume 1 End]
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