Morning saw Mazelton leading Bastard the Cheve and the hitherto unnamed “other cheve” to the farrier. The fairer, conveniently, had a shed near the entrance to the town, as livestock were not generally permitted in. It was a sticklike woman, all lean tendons and strong fingers, ready for all the shenanigans her customers, and their owners, could bring her.

“They need shoes, or so I am told.” Mazelton said.

She looked briefly at their hooves, tsk’ed, then walked over towards Bastard the Cheve. It was a sort of interesting operation, one Mazelton had seen done before many times but never paid much attention to. The farrier approached the cheve from the front, then working with the cheve’s joint structure, curled the hoof and the whole leg up and back. Ultimately, the hoof rested on the farrier’s thigh, upside down to it’s normal orientation.

“Well. I’ve seen worse. You haven’t been doing a very good job keeping it clean, and what’s worse, the nail hasn’t been trimmed in months. See how it’s starting to split? Not good. Could be worse, but not good.”

“Sorry, the nail is splitting?”

“What do ya think a hoof is? It’s basically a giant toenail. And it’s splitting. You want to put shoes on them? Good idea. I’ll trim up their nails, put on some shoes to help reform the hoof and keep it protected.

“Huh. Thank you. Say, how do tribes on the plains deal with this? I can’t imagine there are a lot of iron shoes out there?”

“More than you might think, they are a popular trade good.” She started picking shoes off a railing and matching their size up to the cheves’ hoofs. “Feel like lending a hand?”

“I can’t do much heavy lifting, my ribs are busted. But otherwise, sure.”

“Think you can stoke up the fire? Charcoal is already in there?”

“Charcoal? You aren’t using a heat stone?”

“I am. You’ll see.”

Mazelton went over to the little furnace the farrier waived him to. It was a smallish box, perhaps three feet long, by maybe a foot and a half wide. Some kind of brick, Mazelton thought. Firebrick? Some kind of clay with an insanely high melting point? But where was the heat stone… oh, that’s sort of clever.

“You have a heat stone on the floor of the furnace, keeping it warm all the time. When you really need it hot, you load in the charcoal. Warms it up faster, and I bet you save fuel that way too.”

”Yep. Iron’s fussy. Got to heat it up just the right amount. Too hot, it shatters. To cold, it tears. Or it’s just too hard to work with. Most heat stones don’t get near hot enough. But plenty of charcoal and some work on the bellows gets the job done fine.”

She put the first shoe in the fire and waived Mazelton towards a foot bellows to get the heat up. It took a couple of minutes, but soon the shoe was a bright red. While he was doing that, she was trimming the hoofs with a huge pair of clippers, long wooden handles giving the leverage.

The farrier fished the shoe out with a pair of tongs, tossing the next shoe in as she went. She slapped the hot shoe on the cheve’s hoof, and once she knew exactly how she wanted it to fit, hammered it into shape on an anvil, bringing the pre-made shoe down to size.

“Sorry, too hot it shatters, but you need to get it hot to bash it out? What am I missing?”

The farrier grunted. The shoe was the right size. Now the had to put it on the cheve. That meant curling the hoof up again, trapping it between her legs, holding the shoe in place with the tongs, then driving the nail in. And if that sounds like she needed one more hand than she had… yes, it did. She made it work. Mazelton offered to hold the shoe in place with the tongs, and got a filthy look in reply.

“Once the iron cools, how it acts depends on how hot it got before. Don’t heat it enough, its too soft. Heat it too much, its too brittle. Mix in the right extras and you have all different kinds of steel. Don’t ask me what or how, I don’t know. Just know that it is.”

Mazelton nodded. Steel was basically iron and carbon, he knew that. Damned if he remembered the ratios though.

The next shoe was hot enough when she was done with the first. The cycle repeated, with Mazelton stoking up the fire and working the bellows as needed. It smelled. Not awful, but “toasted hoof” was definitely a unique nostril experience, and not one he was eager to experience again. Still, there was something fascinating about watching someone work who was really good at their job.

The cheve each got a crabby little apple from a bucket, as a reward for being good. They looked indecently pleased about this.

“Last of the stored apples?”

“First of this year’s. Harvest’s just starting. These were no good. Bugs got into ‘em.”

Danae said he would come in with the harvest. Time to get a move on.

He walked out of the farrier’s, looking across the river at the next mountains he would have to cross. Father Sun forgive his weakness, but they looked impossibly huge. He knew that they wouldn’t be climbing them, of course. Someone had stood atop those snowy peaks, but it wasn’t going to be him. Trekking along another narrow river cut valley between the mountains, that’s what he would be doing.

Knowing that was one thing. Feeling it was another. His breath came a little shorter, his shoulders hunched some. The weight of the mountain was pressing down on him. Another brief life, so flickering fast the mountain didn’t even register it.

Bastard the Cheve decided they could smell a punk, so took that opportunity to savagely jerk their head up and away. Mazelton felt like his arm was going to rip out of its socket, so naturally, he contracted all his muscles- hard. His ribs did not appreciate this decision, and respectfully communicated their disagreement in the medium of pain. At this point, the other cheve was unamused by having its head jerked around, so it yanked its head back too.

Mazelton didn’t get back to the trading post. He marched the ungovernable little shits back to the wagon train and shoved them into the care of a teamster who looked underemployed. When the teamster protested, they got a glare. And an apple. Turns out the farrier had a couple of good ones she was willing to share.

They were in the middle of fording the wide, rushing Mattapan when Mazelton remembered the bean spread. It was so delicious, and he was sure that it would be perfect for putting on weight. That was the big reason he had to go back to the training post, he needed the roasted seeds for the bean spread. But now he couldn’t. And it was all the Cheves’ fault. Bastard the Cheve was no longer alone in being an enemy of the people. They were accompanied by a co-conspirator, Wretch the Cheve. May their names be an obscenity.

If Danae rejected him for being too skinny, he knew two cheve that would not live to see sunset, yes he did.

Alternately thinking murderous thought and worrying about how to fatten up in a short amount of time ate up most of his attention for an hour. By the time he was taking better notice of the world around them, they were buried in the green.

Short, skinny little pines, at least compared to the trees outside the Disputed territory. Tall enough to screen the mountains. It was very odd. Mazelton knew that he was surrounded by towering peaks, but he could barely see them. Not because they were so high, but because they were set back just enough from the road that the trees blocked his line of sight.

Mazelton remembered the feeling the mountains gave him back in the canton, looming, weighty, implacable. And now… they were invisible. The weight became greater, more inescapable, because now the mountains weren’t confined to their ancient roots. They were omnipresent. Wherever you looked, they were right behind you, pressing down.

He tried to shake it off. Turns out that mountains are not so easily shaken off. He turned his thoughts towards more productive things, like designing his new house. He was firm on the one room (maybe a little screened corner for a washing area. Maybe.) He was firm on the big south facing window. That was just a necessity. Maybe another big window looking out over the river. But that would be it for windows. That was already a lot, in fact.

He would need some very heavy duty shutters for the winter, and some way to keep it all insulated and warm. Maybe… some kind of fiber? Like a huge wad of cotton. Or… and he didn’t really like the thought of it but… sheep. Wool. You could pack up loads and loads of sheep’s wool and use that as insulation. It wasn’t eating the animal, of course, but… it never really felt right to him.

His boots were felt. He tried not to think about it, but it was about as good as he could get. Were there other, better insulation options? Surely someone in town would have some good ideas. Maybe he could stick Lettie on the problem. Eh. Maybe not.

But then what? He tried to imagine growing a living roof. How do you keep dirt from falling down? Or the roof from rotting out, for that matter? There must be a way, they are doing it already. But how? And assuming that there was a way, did he really want to do it? He had no green thumb to speak of. Keeping his own little garden alive would be a challenge, especially if the soil was as radioactive as Danae seemed to think it was.

Wrestling with the problem kept him cheerfully occupied until lunch. Down by the river, he saw a couple of birds. They weren’t ducks, but he chose to take them as a good omen anyway.

The duck carving was coming along nicely too. Definitely a good omen. He caught a glimpse of Bastard and Wretch out of the corner of his eye, and swiftly drew a circle in the dirt, then an X through the circle. It was a feeble ward, but he dared not let the curse of their existence pass unchallenged.

The weather was not too hot, but very still down in the valley. Surprisingly muggy. It was that annoying sort of day where it was too sunny to go uncovered, to muggy to stay covered, and too nice a day to complain about the weather. And he had the creeping sensation that the mountains were just waiting for him to weaken his guard.

Ok, leaving aside the roof and the windows, how about the walls? Thick, of course. Long, cold winters up here. Brick would be impossible this year, no time to make them. Actually, could he even build a one room shack before the snow fell? One that was weatherproof and not a claustrophobic, dark, smelly nightmare of a cell?

He sat up with a jerk. It was not possible. He would arrive with the harvest, so… late summer, early autumn. He knew that a log cabin, the most simple and basic sort of dwelling that would be functional around here, took anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months to build, depending on how handy he was and how much help he could get.

Mazelton knew that he wasn’t particularly handy, but it was a Dusty village. Lots of help, probably. But a log cabin. Log cabins sucked. They just, plain, sucked. They were transitional, temporary homes until you could make something much, much better.

No light, because carving windows in was an above average chore. Insulation? Get fucked, all the insulation you got was what the wood provided. Actually, you didn’t even get that, because logs are logs and therefore not perfectly symmetrical. Big gaps between each layer of logs, gaps that had to be filled up with mud, gravel, twigs and manure, then coated in a smooth layer of clay to try and keep the damp out. And the chinking rotted out all the time.

You want to talk roofs? How about thatch? Oh, you don’t have several hundred pounds of reeds handy? Bark shingles are an option. Of course, they do exactly nothing for your insulation, and they too have a tendency to rot. And leak. Better hope that insects weren’t living in the bark, or they may start dropping on you in the middle of the night.

Log cabins sucked. But he really didn’t think he could build something better before the snow fell. That meant that he would have to spend the first year living in the same house as Danae. Sharing a bed, perhaps. He didn’t know the customs here. His parents kept separate beds, but so did a lot of people. Would he be expected to share his bed? Well, her bed, he supposed. Their bed. Sharing a bed for a night or two was no problem, quite nice in fact, but every night? For an entire winter?

The thought was strangely terrifying. Such a forced intimacy. But he was lonely, and a warm body next to him in bed sounded very nice. Not to mention that he was beyond randy.

It had been a long, long, long dry spell. He had been very good, and kept to the vows of monogamy he hadn’t made yet to the person he had never met. It was excruciating for a while, but he adjusted. Now, though, with the prospect of sex tantalizingly close…

Fifteen miles a day was too damn slow. But no matter how much Mazelton dreamed of dragging Danae into bed, there was no hurrying the aurochs. One step after another. One more turn of the wheel.

How strange he was. Mazelton laughed at himself as his thoughts circled for a twentieth or thirtieth time. A lonely man afraid of intimacy. But he was. Sex was fun. He liked sex. It was a game, a sport, and it could be wonderfully intimate, or not. It could be as coldly impersonal as a ledger book with its deposits and withdrawals.

Perhaps he should try and think like his parent’s lovers. Or maybe not? He didn’t have any good models for this. If their marriages had been going well, they wouldn’t have been spending so much time in his parent’s beds. Or vice versa. Mazelton racked his brain for examples of happy marriages, and the best he could come up with was the Bissette’s. There surely were others. Weren’t there?

He turned to Duane to ask about his parents, then immediately turned away again. No help there. And Polyclitus had been married many times. All short contracts. No help there either. Maybe Lettie? She had only been married for a hot minute, but maybe her parents were happily married.

He wanted to swear. Somebody, somewhere, knew how to maintain healthy intimacy with a spouse. Surely it couldn’t be that hard, the species would have died out epochs ago otherwise! Mazelton’s laugh was a little deranged. He didn’t notice Duane giving him a worried look, or the way their wagon magically got a little more room in the line.