XXXXVI. Knock-knock! The middle of a beautiful afternoon in some spring month—April? The only calendar was at the church and that place is being run by bandits and unaccountably guarded by a growing gaggle of frowning nuns. Their tents are multiplying, but that’s none of your business. Presumably the Church or God or both sent them for a reason. Anyway, you’re in uncommonly good spirits, so you jump up from the ground to get the door—literally “get” it because it’s just laying against the doorway. You have neither the materials nor tools to make new hinges. You grab the door and shove it to the side. Since the one window in your hovel had to be packed with mud and black grog, you are momentarily blinded by the sunlight. Before you can adjust and move your hand from your face, you are accosted with a wall of sound, ‘JOHN, YOU OLD SO-AND-S0, IT’S YOUR BEST FRIEND PETE. HOW HAVE YOU BEEN, MY GREAT GOOD FRIEND OF FRIENDS?" You recognize that horrible blasting, buzzing contralto voice: It’s Swapping Peter. You decide to keep your hand over your eyes, best not to look directly at him. “Hello, Peter. How can I help you?” Without missing a beat you are again assaulted by what would be described as a scream in any other situation, “JOHN MY GOOD ALLY AND NEIGHBOR, I HAVE TOLD YOU MANY A TIME TO CALL ME ‘PETE.’ ONLY MY FATHER, GOD REST HIS BLEAK BONES, CALLED ME PETER. I WAS WONDERING IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN TRADING WITH ME, BECAUSE I HAVE MANY WARES—MANY MORE THAN LAST TIME IN THE FALL OF A YEAR OR THREE AGO—AND SOME COME FROM THE DISTANT LAND OF THE NEW LORDS. WHAT DO YOU SAY BEST OF ALL FRIENDS?” Good God, that voice. You’ve fully adjusted to the light level but have fully clasped your hand around your eyes. How to banish such a demonic presence?

XXXXVII. Bandits! You are awoken one night to the sound of muted footfalls in the increasingly toxic stuff which was once mud around the front of your house. You spring to action, realizing that the door is just leaning against the frame and the bandits quite likely know this. You grab the nearest large and heavy object, which is a half-empty bottle of that mandrake poison your wife drinks. She forgot to cork it and the stink of the drink nearly has you in a swoon: It smells somewhere in the realm of rotting birch yoke smeared in a combination of filth and pitch. You hear the bandits approaching the door and you manage to compose yourself. “Get you out of here, bandits!” you yell, “I have in my hand what with which to dispatch the lot of you! I kid you not!” There is a moment of silence, followed by renewed messing with the door. Well Hell, time to hit some bandits with this awful bottle. You can hear them on the other side of the door, whispering in your language. Well that’s a tiny relief. They aren’t the demon people who are increasing in number by the decade. “Get all of you back! I am coming!” you howl in the most bestial voice you can manage, hoping to scare them off. No dice. The door starts to come down and you ready the bottle. There are flickers of light around the frame of the useless door and you are momentarily bathed in the sour, orange light of a torch. There are three bandits and they gasp, then yell unintelligibly. Instinctively, you hurl the bottle at the head of the nearest bandit. The bottle shatters, drenching all three of them in the horrid solution. At once, they are all ablaze. Whoa, so she’s been drinking that kind of stuff this whole time? No wonder she’s been so totally off the wall at random intervals. The bandits shriek something sore terrible, running around like deer with their hooves covered in filth and pitch and prodded by shards of pottery. You direct them to the well and invite them to dowse themselves with water, but they’re not listening. Is this going to be manslaughter? You hope the Shire Reeve doesn’t get wind of this, but damn if the reek of their veritable cooking ain’t something wild. Definitely gonna catch on the wind.

XXXXVIII. The Johns—perhaps Sweetpeat and another—have come to see you again about the coming of the gypsies. “They made it to Dribblewick less than a fortnight ago,” says the John whose surname you can’t remember and are too embarrassed to ask at this point because it would be at least five times you’ve asked. “They will be upon us very soon,” John Sweetpeat says, “It is known that they travel quickly and John… John… Shit, John, what is John Johnson who lives near the southern crossroads’s surname?” The other John is looking blankly at the ground, “I think he is called John Roodmeet?” he says. “That sounds close enough,” John Sweetpeat says, “Anyway, right, John Roodmeet spied them only yesterday, I have heard from John… God, not again. John, what is the surname of John whose wife is a terrible scold? So bad that she had to wear the bridle not once but twice? Two times?” Again, the other John is looking blankly, now at his hands, “I think he is called John Scold,” he says. “That sounds close enough,” John Sweetpeat says again, “Right, so anyway, the gypsies are on their way.” You look around instinctively—you seem to recall your father making a number of rather negative remarks concerning the gypsies—your head unnaturally high in the air, mimicking some sort of herbivorous animal. You don’t see anything unusual until you do. “Johns, look yon!” You point to the road, or the path that was once a road, and there is a caravan of broken things rolling and stumbling toward your stead. The Johns look at each other, then at you, their faces white and lips trembling. “Better… get home…” they say almost in unison, fleeing in opposite directions. Looks like they won’t be of much help against the gypsies.  

XXXXVIIII. The gypsies! They are nearing your hovel. You run down the hill where the Johns left you but you misjudge the incline and fall, facefirst, into a large rock that doesn’t seem familiar but whatever. You hit hard enough that there is a loud “cracking” sound, alerting the gypsies to your presence earlier than you would have liked. You can’t get up and when you look for the gypsies ahead of you, you see that they’ve stopped, but only momentarily. They resume whatever the hell they were doing, but in your direction now, veering from the mud lines that were once something traversable. Suddenly, they all look rather queer. Oh, your right eye. You hit your head directly above your right eye and the swelling now blocks your vision, rendering you unable to judge distance. Well, two times in as many weeks is more than just bad luck. You’ll have to see the pries—oh, perhaps the frowning nuns? They’re not very nice, though, and will probably blame you. You see the shapes of the gypsies and their wagon-looking things and wares growing larger, so they’re probably still approaching you. You see that the men are cartwheeling and yammer-howling in some language you really, really don’t understand, but isn’t the click-whistling aural torture that spills from the likes of your son’s war wives. Gypsyspeak. Should you cover your ears? It is certainly pagan. The women are dressed as prostitutes and the dancing motions they’re making as they approach display an appalling lack of undergarments. Jesters and whores! They stop. Oh no, you said that aloud. The men nearest you talk among each other, but still eyeing you, now with a great deal of suspicion. The tallest among them, a man of perhaps five feet in height, shambles up to you cautiously. He comes uncomfortably close, smelling of onions and lye, and whispers, “You. You have trade?” They want to barter. They don’t even deal in money. What primitives! “No, I no have trade,” you say with more than a little disdain in your voice, “Me,” you point to yourself, “Me have money. No barter. Me part of larger economy.” The eyes of the tall gypsy go wide and he looks back at the other men. They cartwheel over to you and each pulls out a long billyclub. Lights out. When you wake, it is night, and your pockets are emptied of what little money you had. You discover that similar events transpired at the hovel. You and your family are now made penniless at the hands of the goddamned fucking cartwheeling savages. 

L. You’re nearly at your wits’ end. You are essentially devoid of any resources. Your hovel has almost gone completely to pieces—literally, pieces of wood and more recently even clods of clay have been taken by God only knows whom and God only knows why or whither—and the harvests have been terrible. Except for the grim barley. Well, you suspect it’s barley, though it looks more like something quite poisonous. You’ve been told to call it “barley.” But you do have quite a bit of that. Apart from the veritable hypertrophy of unmilled grim barley, you have nothing. What’s more: You have no way to grind the “barley”: Your sons have been called away to fight another war somewhere. Your daughters have all gone missing except for the one who has become rather too plump to do much of anything but grow plumper and the one who contracted the Whistling Winds a month ago but you suspect she may be malingering at this point. The war wives are generally useless. And your wife has been disappearing at night and reappearing at dawn to go to sleep. You are left to grind the grim barley alone. But how? You have nearly half a barrel of the corn, enough to feed some of your family for long enough for a miracle, especially now that there is almost no one else to feed apart from yourself. But how to grind? At once, you hear a creaking sound in the wind. The windmill. You must fix the windmill! You grab the remains of your tools—the toolbox is gone, why did whoever stole the box not take the tools? These are the Devil’s questions—and head to the ruined mill. You realize that the damage is not nearly as extensive as you thought and get to work, your spirits revived. Your tools are not of much use as the handles have all got worms, but you are good with your hands. After only three candles of the day, you feel that the windmill is ready to test—and what a day, with a gentle yet steady breeze! You ready the already turning millstones the best you can, remembering what your mother taught you when she wasn’t bedridden with Brain Gout. You step back. It works! You could almost cry. And then, quite suddenly, the millstone stops turning. The whole mill has ground to a halt, as it were. You step outside. The wind has stopped. It is overcast and a storm is approaching at terrific speed from the… North? That’s uncommon. You rush to disassemble your day’s work, that the storm winds not ruin it forever. You manage to do so just as the storm hits. You grab the little bit of ground grim barley—just enough for some grim cakes for you and perhaps your wife when she wakes in the evening—and run into your hovel. You are shocked to see your wife standing by your marital bed. “Wife! I have repaired the windmill! Behold, our first ground corn in so many years!” You hold out your handful of black, ground grim barley. Your wife looks at you, her eyes full of scorn, “Man-thing, you know I can’t eat that,” she says, and storms out of the house, as it were, into the storm.