He looked up to meet Mouche’s smile, suddenly radiant.
“Oh, Simon,” he said, “It’s not easy, but you’re right. And even the pain lights a road for you, doesn’t it? It beckons you to fix it! Like if you know something’s hurt, you can try to mend it.”
Simon, surprised into near silence, agreed it could.
He later mentioned the matter to Madame, when they were alone and very private, for she had asked him, as a favor, to come warm her bed that night and he had, as much from affection as duty, done so.
“‘Mouche is right,” murmured Madame, sitting naked on the side of the bed, her hair loose about her shoulders, while Simon knelt behind her, kneading her neck between strong hands. “They beg for murder, both of them.”
“Have you no pity for them, Madame?”
“Of course I pity them, Simon. I pity the mad dog that bites the child, the bull that gores the herdsman, the boar pig that tears the swineherds leg to shreds with his tusks. If they were wild creatures, we would say, with Haraldson, that they have the right to be as they are and the fault is ours for straying into their territory. The fact is, they are not wild creatures, they are protected and doctored and fed by mankind, and are thus kept according to mankind’s rules. So it is with Bane and Dyre.”
He went on kneading. “An odd thing happened when I was talking with Mouche. I was talking about discovering oneself, the lecture you often give … “
“ … so our Consorts can help their patronesses discover their joys … “
“And their own. Yes. And he got this expression on his face. I’ve never seen such ecstasy on a face!”
She said softly, “Mouche is a good one, isn’t he Simon? Quite out of the ordinary. Something about him … “
Simon moved his hands to the other side. Yes, he thought to himself. There was something about Mouche.
25—The Long Nights
At midwinter the people on Newholme took a long holiday which coincided, Mouche found, with the disappearance of the Timmys. When the Timmys went away, everything shut down, and in winter it stayed shut down for seven or eight days.
The holiday was called the Long Nights, or The Tipping of the Year, an occasion for family gatherings. Then kinfolk sat around the fire to tell over the names of ancestors, to honor those who had achieved g’ status or Haghood among them, to relax standards of neatness and laundering (in the absence of whomever or whatever might have been, at other times, responsible for neatening and laundering), and to give amusing gifts and consume traditional foods prepared by their own hands while telling old stories around the tile stoves.
Though Consorts would never be, strictly speaking, “family,” they needed to know how these occasions were managed, and House Genevois paid local families a generous stipend for hosting two or three youngsters in their homes during the Long Nights.
Mouche might have balked had the courtyard still been tenanted. His nightly forays had become an addiction, despite the feelings that flooded him at each watching. Initially, there was a kind of ecstasy in the watching, but gradually it turned to pain as if some huge thing was dying and unwilling to do so. The feeling exhausted him, and he had a sense the Timmys felt as he did, that they, too, were exhausted by the grief and weariness that came out of nowhere.
But the courtyard was empty, and he felt better for the respite. It was good, for a time, to have a simple skin-deep life, to be amused and think of nothing but singing or cooking or playing with children. He and Fentrys and Tyle always went to the weaving house of Hanna and Kurm g’Onduvai; their grown son, who supervised the looms, and his dowered-in wife as well as the eldest daughter, who had been dowered-in by a neighboring family, but who was visiting for a few days. There were also numerous merry and lively grandchildren.
Mouche and his friends enjoyed the annual give and take of the holidays. They played games with the children, taking them sledding on the nearby hill and ice-sliding on the frozen brook. In the evenings, they entertained by singing and playing on their instruments a number of songs everyone knew: “The Wind in the Chimney Corner,” and “Six Black Cows,” and the wordless melody of the “Lullaby for the Summer Snake.” Even the chatter was interesting, and it was from Hanna’s chatter, in fact, that Mouche first learned something on a subject he had been on the lookout for, the history of Dyre and Bane.