He nodded. “I tried it out. The latrines are made for something with a wider behind than a human, but it still isn’t a bad fit. I have to warn you, though, it’s startling cold to sit on, and it’s going to get worse the colder the winter gets.”
“And here I thought we’d have to be digging our own! It would have been even colder out there in the valley, sitting in a canvas-sided box on a couple of boards or something.” She kissed him, then shooed him out. He left, chuckling. He knew very well how to deal with a deep-pit latrine like this one; collect the ashes from the fires, and toss them down as often as you collected them. Even if there wasn’t a bit of runoff to clean things up periodically, it would all compost nicely, and probably provide for cave insects.
He was organizing the kitchen area a little better when Amily came out, all smiles. “I even had a good wash. Now, if you find some sort of
hertasi
bathtub, I will be in sheer heaven.”
“For all I know, they made something of the sort. I’ll see what I can find,” he began, when Lita appeared from her own cavelet.
Unlike Amily and Lena, she was wearing breeches. The other two had opted for divided skirts, like very wide trews, on this journey. Mags had a notion he wasn’t going to see any of them in skirts or gowns or even Bardic robes at all, which didn’t bother him in the least. One less thing for them to worry about; he just hoped that the locals were not going to get their knickers in a knot over it.
“Found the
hertasi
jakes, did you?” Lita said cheerfully. “One less thing that I have to look for then. Point me in the direction?”
Amily did, then helped Mags set up for a more substantial breakfast than he’d made for the Guard before they left.
A lot of things had been left when the bandits had been cleared out that weren’t worth the looting. Mags had found three slabs of stone that set up to make a very passable sort of oven when set against the rock wall. He raked all of the coals back there while he built up the fire again, and he got out all the three-legged pots and pans that you used over an open fire when you didn’t have a way to suspend them, arranging them on and in their cupboard. He didn’t remember if there was a tripod to hang pots from in the supplies, but there certainly hadn’t been one in the pot box that was slung under the caravan. He started a pot of water heating and got the frying pan on the fire. They still had bread, they had eggs, and they had plenty of bacon. That would suffice for toad-in-the-hole, which to his mind, was about the best breakfast there was. The smell of bacon brought out Lena and Bear, and eventually Jakyr, who took over after he’d visited Mags’ discovery.
“Mags,” Lita said, around a bite of hot egg and bread, “do you want to go hunting for the
hertasi
bathing room, or shall I? There will be one; the
hertasi
are as fussy about cleanliness as their masters are. I can tell you what to look for, and you’re probably handier at crawling around caves than I am.”
“What am I looking for?” Mags asked, not at all averse to trying.
“Mostly, a small spring. If there is one around here in these caves, they’ll have built the bathing area around it. There’ll be a bigger basin cut into the rock, bigger than the bathtubs that we’re used to, but at the moment, the spring will just run through it.” It was Jakyr who answered, not Lita. Mags looked at him curiously, and he shrugged. “Remember, I’ve been to a working Vale, as opposed to reading about them.”
Evidently Lita was in good enough humor not to rise to his baiting. She just shrugged and had another bite of yolk-soaked bread.
Jakyr looked faintly disappointed at her indifference but continued. “It’ll be a variation on how they make their big hot-spring soaking pools for the Hawkbrothers. There would be several of these bathing-basins, but I doubt we’ll find more than one still working, and the bandits probably used it—if they used it at all—for watering their horses and livestock. They probably had no idea it was for taking a bath. Though I could be wrong; for all I know, they were hedonists who lolled about in baths all day.” A quirk of his mouth and a lifted eyebrow invited Mags to chuckle, which he did. “So. Spring, which will be running into a big basin, which will be filled and overflowing into some sort of escape drain into a lower cave.”
“Think I’ll find it here?” Mags asked.
Jakyr shook his head. “If there were a good place to put it here, we’d have heard the spring the minute we got inside the caves. It probably won’t be near this one, because the well for drinking water is here. They are fastidious about keeping dirty water away from clean, and they won’t have taken the chance of contaminating the well.”
Mags nodded.
“Anyway, the basin just overflows straight into a drain, but if you look at the inlet end, you’ll see a diversion channel for the spring,” Jakyr continued. “They’d probably use dams of clay, and we can too. You divert the water away from the basin, have your bath, let the clean water in to flush out the dirty, and there you go.” He sighed. “If there were Hawkbrothers here, they’d have some way of heating the water, and it would be flowing in hot. But I expect we can use hot stones to get it bearable anyway.”
Mags sighed as well. That would have been nice. Still, it was far better than no way to get a bath.
“Or we can use the canvas tub we already have with us,” Lita pointed out, and nodded to what looked like a thick door or thin cabinet propped against the wall.
“Oh, well, be logical, then!” Jakyr retorted. “Personally, I’d rather tote around
one
kettle of hot stones than twenty of hot water, not to mention emptying it after!”
“Suit yourself.” Lita finished her meal and scrubbed the plate and fork clean with sand from the bucket Mags had provided for that purpose. She got up, and stretched. “I’ll see to the vanners. Are we here for the day?”
“It will take us at least that long to properly set up,” Jakyr replied. “I don’t want us scrambling to get things done and end up with everything only half done. The Guard left us a lot of supplies and other things that need to be stored right the first time.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Lita said laconically. Mags was afraid she was going to salute, which might very well have been enough to set Jakyr off, but she didn’t. “Suit you if I set up the stables?”
“Suits me fine,” Jakyr replied, brusquely. “Mags, you and I went over the inventory and where it’s all stored, so you and I will be doing most of the moving.”
“I’ll help,” offered Lena. “Amily and Bear can set things up here if you tell them where you want things.”
The actual moving of things out of storage and into the main cave took most of the morning. There were a lot of heavy objects, at least when it came to the kitchen area—Mags had seen the inventory, but he hadn’t quite believed what he’d read. Yet, there all those things were . . . they were going to have a kitchen that many housewives in cottages would envy.
Jakyr made them all lunch, then they
all
worked on set-up. By the time night fell . . . well, you would not have been able to tell the main cave area from the interior of a very comfortable cottage.
Mags discovered that his construction of the stone oven was entirely unnecessary. There was an iron stove that somehow had come packed in pieces that fitted together with sturdy metal pins, and a load of firebricks to stack around it and act as a heat-mass the way the chimneys in the stable did. The kitchen was moved to one side, though still situated where the chimney crack would take the smoke from the stove, and the firepit they had used to cook in was turned into a communal fireplace with heavy rugs and cushions stuffed with hay around it. Everyone now had more blankets, more pillows, waxed canvas to put on the ground under the hay in their beds, and feather comforters. There were cleaning supplies tucked away in their own area, a canvas sink for actually washing dishes in, and the aforementioned canvas bathtub waiting to be set up next to the fire when someone wanted it.
At the entrance of each of the sleeping caves, Amily had found sockets carved into the rock to hold poles. Bear went out with the measurements for each of the cavelets in use, and cut poles to fit from the piles of wood that the Guard had left for them. Now there were canvas curtains hung up across the opening of their sleeping caves, for privacy.
The Guard hadn’t just left fodder for the horses and the Companions. In the piles of supplies there were storage chests that could be sealed against vermin thanks to gaskets of tarred rope around the lids, and each of these chests was already laden with foodstuffs like dried fruits and vegetables and dried meat.
There were chests of candles and lamp oil, chests of lanterns, the chests they had already robbed of their blankets and ground canvas, an entire chest of soap. . . . In short, everything you could possibly want to turn a cave into a home was here.
“Why would a Guardpost have all this stuff?” Mags wondered aloud, as they put the finishing touches on the central space.
“Because the highborn have been known to want to come on a campaign,” Jakyr grunted, “And the comfort of the highborn must be seen to. All of the extra stuff—the rugs, the folding furniture, that sort of thing—is kept in storage in a Guardpost in case it’s needed. Milles tells me that, packed away, it doesn’t take up much room, so no one really objects to keeping it around.”
“Can’t object much when we’re gettin’ to use it,” Mags pointed out.
With a reluctant smile, Jakyr agreed.
At that moment Amily discovered, with a cry of joy, that there was a little chest of books among the candles, and Mags found himself grinning.
A proper stew had been simmering all afternoon once they got the stove set up, and the aroma was enough to drive a person half mad. Jakyr was still puttering with his kitchen, Amily had settled with a book, Lena and Lita with their instruments, and Bear with his herbs. Mags decided to go look for that bathing area before the stew scent drove him to eat something he shouldn’t—like the last of the bread. He took a lantern and went out into the valley.
The Companions and the horses were cropping contentedly enough at the tall, withered grasses, which were roughly knee high in most places. The sun was somewhere on the other side of the hills and sinking fast. Not much time to look.
But then, he realized he didn’t have to
look.
:Dallen. Have we got a running spring in one of them caves?:
Dallen’s head came up.
:I’ll ask Jermayan to help me search. Shouldn’t take long.:
The two Companions split up and checked the entrance to each cave in turn, using their superior senses of hearing and smell. They would hear the spring or smell the water long before Mags could.
Mags took the opportunity to explore the little valley while they hunted.
He thought he could see signs of where the enormous trees that the Hawkbrothers were said to live in had once stood, but there was no trace of them now. There didn’t seem to have been too many of them, either, and that made him wonder if they had also lived in the caves, as their
hertasi
did. The valley had definitely been cleared of anything like a tree at or around the time the bandits took it over, but it had been long enough for trees to have reseeded themselves in several places, making compact little groves here and there.
He was sure he found the place where the legendary bathing pools had once been. On the one part of the valley wall that wasn’t sheer rock, there was a sloping hill, with six basins built into it. He could see where water would have started at the top, cascaded down to the next two, and then into the last four. But if there had been a spring that fed these basins, it had dried up a long time ago. The basins themselves were more like depressions, partly filled in with soil, and covered with turf and weeds.
This would be a nice place in summer though, and was not bad now.
He also inspected the huge pile of wood that had been left for them by the Guard. The bigger logs had been chopped up and split and piled in several pyramids off to the right of the entrance of the cave they were using. Branches had mostly been cut into fire-sized pieces, but there was a pile of uncut ones as well; this was what Bear had used for their curtain poles, and Mags expected there would be other uses for them. It looked like an impossible amount of wood, but he knew from experience that keeping fires stoked used a lot of fuel. His best guess, though, was that there would be enough here to keep them through spring. It looked as if the Guard had dragged every dead tree within easy reach of the entrance inside, and chopped it all up here. There was a substantial pile of wood chips that would make good kindling.
It didn’t take long at all for the Companions to find the
hertasi
bathing room. The cave in question was along the same wall as their living cave but deeper into the valley, located behind one of those little groves of trees, but Jermayan found it quite quickly. Mags went in to inspect it as the shadows deepened and the light began to fade from the sky.
He was glad he had the lantern; it was dark, and although you could hear the spring faintly from the entrance, it was around several draft-killing twists and turns in the tunnel. It was a tunnel and not a natural cave this time; he spotted the telltale signs that someone had been working the rock.
When he emerged into a small room, he knew immediately that the place was going to take some work before it was usable.
There had been some rockfall along the wall, which made the footing a little treacherous there and diverted part of the water. But more importantly, the basin—which was rather like a huge bulge in the middle of a small stream—had a thick layer of fine mud on the bottom. Certainly no one had cleared it since the bandits called this place home. And the water was just one step above ice. He hurried back to report to the others.
“I think maybe they was using it for a lotta things,” he said, after describing what he’d found. “I think washing clothes and maybe watering horses. Diggin’ the mud out ain’t gonna be nice, cold as that water is.” He sat down on one of the wool rugs with his back to a hay-stuffed cushion the size of a horse’s torso. The hay smelled nice; he suspected Bear had packed some herbs in there as well. The cushion rustled a little as he settled himself.