There was no question of soup followed by fish, fol-lowed by game, followed by salad, followed by a main course of meat with desserts and then cheese and fruit. Everything came at once. The servants lined up at the far end of the table while their lord and master ladled out slopping portions of anything that caught his eye. He piled it all into a bowl in front of him that must have been able to hold five gallons of liquid or thirty pounds of solid food.
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At that distance it was difficult for them to see what precisely went into the bowl, but the servants eventually made their way to the guests’ end of the table. Lady Rachel only indicated a small portion of steamed fish for herself, with a spoonful of sugar peas. She took only wa-ter to drink.
Ryan had rarely seen a more spectacular array of food. There was steak and great hunks of horsemeat, mari-nated in white port wine, lamb cutlets with a red fruit sauce; pork, overfat, smothered in honey and wild gin-ger; flounders, served with toasted almonds; bowls of shrimps, wallowing in a pepper sauce and crabs, still in their shells; meat that Krysty identified as turkey, pallid and waxen, dripping with melted goat’s cheese and crushed peppercorns; tomatoes and onions in sour cream, sprinkled with mushrooms and little green berries; a thick gray-brown soup that had, unnervingly, dozens of hard-boiled eggs bobbing greasily around in it; potatoes and rutabagas and beans, minced and fried in gravy.
There were also bowls of fruit, cooked and raw, mostly in sweet and sickly sauces that drenched them. There was water to drink, or a thick lilac-colored liqueur that had an unusual taste.
“Like something a gaudy whore would bathe in,” J.B. muttered, struggling to conceal his disgust at the scented flavor, opting for the water instead. He followed Rachel Cawdor’s example and took only a portion of boiled fish and a side helping of vegetables.
Ryan chose a steak, finding it grievously underdone, blood seeping from the meat before he even laid a knife into it. He ladled some fried beans on the side and dis-covered they’d been soaked with grated red chilies that almost took the skin off his tongue.
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Krysty contented herself with a chipped goblet of springwater and some of the potatoes, which had been fried in butter. She also took a couple of slices of the whole wheat bread from the wooden board, which was carried by an elderly man with trembling hands who kept his head bowed and didn’t look at any of the guests. He repeatedly muttered, “Thank you, my lord, thank you, my lady, thank you…” regardless of the sex of the per-son he was serving at the time.
With a shudder, Krysty noticed that the old servant’s hands had been branded several times, and his fingers and knuckles showed the unmistakable signs of having been brutally broken more than once.
“Food good, Brother Thursby?” Harvey Cawdor bel-lowed from the murky distance at the head of the table. His face and beardless chins were beslobbered with run-nels of grease, carrying particles of several different courses of the meal. His piggy little eyes had almost van-ished behind rolls of fat.
“Yeah, Baron Cawdor.”
“Dreck,” whispered Jak Lauren. “Eaten better from a double-poor swampie’s chuck-out pile.”
“What did the whitehead say?” Rachel Cawdor asked, blazing eyes focused on Ryan.
“Good food, my lady,” he replied.
“I have lost the taste for food, Master Thursby. I no longer get any pleasure from the act of eating.”
Her voice was low and uneven, and her hands folded over each other, fingers writhing like ten white snakes.
As they watched, ignoring the grunting and wallowing of Harvey Cawdor, the woman fumbled in her black purse and took out a circular mirror with an ornately sculpted edge where tiny dragons fought amid a tangled forest. It was another of the Cawdor heirlooms. She also
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removed a small sliver of polished steel and a tiny brown vial, which was tightly corked.
“Jolt,” Jak mouthed to Ryan, but the one-eyed man had already recognized what was happening. The woman was probably addicted to the hallucinogenic mix of coke and mescaline. Not everyone who took jolt became quickly addicted. But once you were well hooked, then you were on a steep and icy slope that carried you down faster and faster. All the way to the bottom. If Lady Rachel Cawdor needed to snort some lines of jolt in the middle of a public meal, then the bottom of the slope couldn’t be that far away for her.